“Mikro Dentro” (Little Tree) is a self-organized community-based pedagogical endeavour that operates with the values of libertarian education and experiential learning. It started its operation in January 2014 in the area of Thessaloniki. It is inspired by an education that at the first level starts with respect for the individuality of each child, his/her personal pace, needs and desires. On a second level, it continues with the experience of a direct-democratic community, with tools of co-education, mutual aid and participation in collective life. An integral part of the pedagogical process is the struggle to give visibility to existing schools and to open a public dialogue on the possibility of creating educational projects inspired by self-organization in a direct democratic community.
The processes used for the operation of the school are assemblies, reflection, self-education processes and pedagogical framework. A proposal for organizing a school community with the characteristics of anti-hierarchy, freedom and participation. Mikrο Dentro operates with procedures that the participants themselves have decided on, starting from their personal needs and desires for the existence of a community school. The assemblies are used as a tool to create a network of communication between all the groups: children, parents, pedagogical team. The aim is to «address the social contradictions that we experience together with the children and not to isolate them in a fishbowl». Currently, 20 children from 2 to 4.5 years old and 3 companions participate in the community. For the operation of the morning routine, the methodology is not an end in itself nor a solid solution, as freedom is not something that is taught through a fixed recipe, but is a starting point for a process that does not aim at a definitive conclusion with predetermined parameters. Besides, this would lose the dynamic of the imagination of the organisation concerned. The existence of contradictions and the confrontation of dominant normative stereotypes, as well as the attempt to eliminate exclusions (ethnic, gender, age and class) within the relationships of the group members, are the starting point and the path, recalling the constant need for self-education and collective learning. Acting subjects collectively rationalise their knowledge and imaginations from theory to practice, with little or no institutional and state guidance, which is why this school, among other, faces the risks of the corresponding repressive responses from the market and the state and, on the other hand, the risk of its dissolution through its incorporation into state control.