I have worked as an outreach worker since graduating, and am in the process of retraining as a counsellor/psychotherapist. I'm just doing night classes at the moment. It's a long process but i'll get there eventually. There are times when I really get an urge to teach but once I think it through and remember what it's like in practice, I decide against it. I've just moved across the country so i'm thinking of looking to volunteering opportunities.
My ideal school would be democratic. There are two democratic schools in the UK, Sands and Summerhill. They are democratic in the sense that all school decisions are made by having a school meeting and voting on it. There are many across Europe and the U.S.A though - they are often called Sudbury Valley schools out there though, as they're based on the original one which went by that name.
The lessons are often very similar to those in normal schools, but the main difference is that the children don't have to go if they don't want to. They can avoid lessons all year, and relax in the playground all day if they wish. You might be concerned that children would go nuts and never go to lessons at all, but actually they found that often the kids really do want to learn - if they are not forced to do so. The founders of both schools have said that the difficulty of getting a child to adapt to the level of responsibility involved in these schools is about proportionate to the amount of time they have spend in a traditional school. Summerhill don't even accept kids over the age of 12 because by that time they just can't handle the freedom and flip out in the same way that you might expect them to. The interesting thing is that if you get them early enough, the vast majority of kids seem to adapt to it just fine.
Educator John Holt put it best:
“It is absurd to think that an institution that commands and judges every part of a child’s life can make him more responsible. It can only make him less so.”
The idea is that in these schools, the kids get used from an early age to making genuinely meaningful decisions and living out the consequences of those decisions. In normal schools on the other hand, the only regular decision a child gets to make is whether or not to obey the teacher, which is hardly the kind of uncertain, ambiguous decisions which adulthood is so laden with. The argument follows that the kids in normal schools then are made irresponsible by the schools, or at least by the lack of responsibility involved in going to these schools.