Deschool Yourself: Sustainable Education

Another by Jerry Mintz (the original article can be found here) who has been a leading voice in the alternative school movement for over 30 years. In addition to his seventeen years as a public school teacher and a public and independent alternative school principal, he has also founded several alternative schools and organizations and has lectured and consulted around the world, and has written the book No Homework and Recess All Day: How to Have Freedom and Democracy in Education

What is NOT sustainable is the national craze of high stakes testing. It is from the last vestiges of a failed education system. Its paradigm was “We are the teachers. We have all the information you will need to have a productive life. Just listen to us, learn what we think you should learn, and you’ll be set for life.”

Well, if that paradigm was EVER useful, it certainly doesn’t work in today’s world. What people need today (and children ARE people!) is confidence in themselves as learners, tools so they can find the answers to their questions themselves, preparation for life-long learning, and in general, a learner-centered approach rather than one which is curriculum driven.

And most important, memorizing facts is NOT important (and this is the most typical aspect of high stakes testing). When Albert Einstein was once asked the speed of sound he said, “I don’t bother memorizing what I can easily look up!”

We’ve been though this before. The Eight Year Study of progressive schools in the 1930′s came up with a very definitive result: Progressive and learner-centered schools were more effective for students than traditional school!

This was true during high school, during college and after college for the progressive students. As of 1940 people expected a dramatic shift in how schools were run. But then came the Second World War, followed immediately by the creation of teacher’s unions. Since there were no unions for the students, the teacher’s voice has held sway since then, freezing the system in place in a form which continues today, almost unchanged, and increasingly anachronistic.

Did you even wonder which forces created an authoritarian public school system in a society which prides itself on being the world home of democracy? That’s a long story. You can read some theories about it in John Gatto’s book, Underground History of American Education. Suffice it to say that this system is not the proper preparation needed for students to ultimately participate in a democracy. Is it any wonder that fewer and fewer people vote in local and national elections?

Nevertheless, there is an education revolution going on, and it is long overdue. It is moving in the diametrically opposite direction of the “testing” push. The latter comes from the bureaucrats from within that dying system, who do know there is something wrong. But since they can’t think “out of the box,” the only remedy they can come up with is longer hours, more homework, and “teaching to the test,” in other words, more of the same.

The education revolution is coming from people who have created alternative schools and programs, thousands of them, and from others who have checked “none of the above” and have decided to home educate. There are now nearly two million people home educating. The first charter school was started in 1991. Now there are 2500 of them! And there are over 7500 additional alternatives in our database and many thousands more we have yet to discover.

All of these fall in the general category of “learner-centered” approaches. We list many of them in our book, The Almanac of Education Choices. These people are steadfastly OPPOSED to the governmental thrust for more “standardization” and testing.So a battle is looming. The testers will ultimately lose. It has happened before, most recently in the 80′s with the “Back to Basics” movement. The question is only how long it will take, and how much destructiveness will happen in the interim.

The new education revolution was sparked by the publication of the book Summerhill, by A.S. Neill, about the Summerhill School, which he founded in 1921. When that book was published in the United States in 1961 it led immediately to the free school movement, with the creation of thousands of democratic, learner-centered schools. They lasted an average of 18 months. But many of them survived, even to this day, such as Sudbury Valley School in Framingham, Massachusetts, recently featured on CBS’s 60 Minutes. Now, dozens of schools based on Sudbury Valley are starting around the country.

Meanwhile, the free school movement led to the public school’s alternative school movement, and thousands exist today. Some, called “choice” public alternatives are open to any student who wants a more learner centered approach. Others, called “public at-risk,” are for children who have not been successful.

These phenomena gave rise to the charter school movement, where a group of parents and teachers can start a school free of the usual red tape and regulations, but as long as it meets certain goals and is non-discriminatory, it gets reimbursed on a per pupil basis with public school funds.

John Holt, who wrote a series of books critical of the public schools, including How Children Fail, finally gave up on the system and wrote one called Teach Your Own, which was a catalyst for the home education movement.

Read the rest at Education Revolution

Book by Jerry Mintz -