Outrageous alternatives

What is the most outrageous alternative education scenario you could imagine? Children not attending school, but instead learning from home? Done it. Got the t-shirt. Distance education in the outback of Australia and other large area countries has been there for years, and so has home schooling in all its hues and colours. OK. What about no school at all then? Children going straight to work as soon as they are able to walk? Well, the sweat shops in the Far East can easily lay claim to that one. And of course, in Europe in the last century but one, it was prevalent for all but the very well off. It may be radical, but anyone who advocates it deserves a size 12 boot up their backside.

OK, what about children taking control of the curriculum, controlling discipline, and deciding what the teachers should teach them? Nope, completely passe. T'was done by Summerhill School and a number of other progressive, humanist schools in the 1960s in England and elsewhere. How about something a little less radical then? Teachers stepping back out of the way, so that the child takes centre stage and learning is focused on their personal development? No again - Montessori schools have been taking the approach for years. How about a more balanced curriculum then, where academic topics are equally weighted with artistic, aesthetic and social skills? Close, but no cigar - the Rudolf Steiner school movement has cornered 'head, hearts and hands' education for some time. Are we running out of alternatives? Is there any radical approach that has not been tried and tested? Are we doomed to continue with a rusty, creaking, increasingly outmoded national curriculum which every day becomes more and more irrelevant to the needs of the modern, fast changing, digitally-rich world of the information society? Are we?

Well, there is 'deschooling' of course. Deschooling in the sense that Ivan Illich proposed in the early 70s. No need to panic. It's not doing away with schools, as most people think when they hear the phrase 'deschooling'. No, it's more a philosophy premised on the assumption that universal education is simply not possible, nor is it desirable. We don't all need to know the same stuff, therefore why should we all sit together in the same room, at great public expense, for so many thousand hours of our young lives, to be forced to learn it all? Illich was also concerned that we should do away with 'funnels' - he talked about 'learning webs' that enabled every child (and indeed every adult) to learn what they personally needed to survive, thrive, care and share in the society they found themselves in. His idea of 'peer matching' was radical:

The operation of a peer-matching network would be simple. The user would identify himself by name and address and describe the activity for which he sought a peer. A computer would send him back the names and addresses of all those who had inserted the same description. It is amazing that such a simple utility has never been used on a broad scale for publicly valued activity. (Illich, 1971)

Hmmm. Impossible? Under the current funding regimes of mass public education, and in the present ethos of rigid curricula and control freakery of Western governments, trying to formalise something like this is difficult. But when we consider that 80 per cent of what we learn is achieved primarily outside the school gates, I am sure we might agree there are some potential loopholes to exploit. So let's see - how radical can we get with education? What if every child had their own device to connect to the world of knowledge and what if it was actually fun. What if they could search for any topic they wanted to know about and find complete resources on it in seconds, on a screen right in front of them? What if children could match their interests and knowledge needs with others who they could link with around the globe? What if children could learn from each other in this way using social networks and massively online role playing games? What if each child could create his own personal learning environment using tools that were free, scalable and open for all to use without any concerns about personal safety? What if this kind of learning was formally accreditable in such a way that employers would recognise it? What if the learning webs that Illich dreamed of were actually a reality, brought to us through easy to use personal devices, connected anytime, any place, and totally free to use?

So why aren't we doing it?

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Outrageous alternatives by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.