In the last three decades, there has been a growing movement to reinvent the way citizens learn and how young people enter society. Homeschooling, charter schools, cyber schools, deschooling, lifelong learning, Waldorf schools, and Sudbury schools are just a few elements of this movement. The movement has grown exponentially every decade since 1980. It has become a challenge to the traditional school/teaching/education system. Lifelong learning has been promoted by management guru Peter Drucker in “Post Capitalist Society” at one end of the spectrum and Elise Boulding in “Building Global Civic Culture” at the other end, and by many scholars in between.
The bottom line of this movement is to provide the freedom, opportunity, and resources for self-learners of all ages, with their families and in community, to have the right, freedom, resources, and opportunity to choose to learn what they want. , when they want and how they want: self-learning.
Recognition
Despite the rapid growth of this movement, it has attracted little positive attention from governments. Professional educators and their unions have raised concerns that the proliferation of homeschooling will draw funding from the public school system. Some public school systems have risen to the challenge and have established special programs to provide aspiring homeschoolers and other self-taught students with more autonomy within the public school system. Some have established parent-teacher programs that rely on parent involvement and give parents more autonomy in the learning process. But, as parents are increasingly recognizing that personal freedom and private protection from majority rule control apply to their children’s learning, none of the existing systems have fully incorporated that concept. Nor do they fully meet the needs of our information society, which requires a system of lifelong learning to provide for the continuous learning processes of each individual, as detailed in the work of writers and thinkers since John Holt and Alfie Kohn to Daniel Pink and Howard Gardner, among many others.
Foundations, likewise, have been slow to rise to the challenge and opportunity that is unfolding. Millions of dollars for public schools, coming from all levels of government, are followed by millions more coming from private foundations. But little, if any, of this private funding is available for the many non-public school experiments taking place. A search of philanthropy databases for words like “homeschooling” turns up no program at any foundation. Whereas a search on “schools” or “education” returns many thousands. Individual appeals to hundreds of foundations by “homeschool support groups,” “learning cooperatives,” and other forms of non-school learning communities are regularly returned with the words “this proposal does not fit our agenda.” of current support.
Motivation
The motivations to move towards self-study and the abandonment of traditional public schooling are many. Perhaps the most common is parental concern about losing control of young children’s learning. Many families want to take direct responsibility for their curriculum, approach to learning, and the principles and values on which they are based. Some parents believe that the public education system instills values that run counter to those of their family. Some are explicitly guided by their religious beliefs in directing their children’s education. Others have had disturbing experiences with schoolyard bullies, insensitive teachers, or misdirected bureaucracies. Some argue that government support is inherently controlling and that their tax dollars are tying families to a failed system.
Autodidacts are also influenced by critics of education, philosophers, and religious leaders. Some, like Ivan Illich, believe that our current life, including school, is based on the principle of working now for future rewards. They urge that education and life be pleasant and vernacular. That is to say, that learning and work must be carried out in joyful collaboration with family, friends and neighbors. And that it must be integrated into the local culture, ecology and friendships.
With Paulo Friere, some see schools as perpetuating the rich/poor socioeconomic status quo and impeding the natural social evolution that would occur if future citizens were more free to learn for themselves in their own families, communities, and nature.
Following John Holt and others, many believe that each brain, that is, each student, is unique and that no two are prepared to learn the same thing at the same time and in the same way. They believe that schooling is not an efficient way of learning, nor of introducing future citizens to society.
Most of the great philosophical traditions, including those embodied in Gandhi, Tagore, Aurobindo, and Krishnamurti, recognize a spiritual component to learning, teaching that knowledge is more than a way to get a job or score well on a standardized test; which is the purpose of living, it is to be human. Rabindrnath Tagore founded his learning community, Santiniketan, to transform the human mindset from self-interest, competition, and materialism to mutual aid, cooperation, and love of learning. Stemming from a variety of personal, philosophical, educational, or religious motivations, the lifelong self-study movement continues to expand.
Efficacy tests
It is impossible to measure the success of self-study with tests, grades and scores. Perhaps the most interesting successes are found among those students who do not thrive in a traditional setting with standard measures of success. These people are free to flourish in their own way and they do – anecdotal evidence abounds about happy and successful students who have traveled a non-traditional path to their own personal success.
The autodidacts are equally honored among our greatest leaders. Thomas Edison, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Abigail Adams, Benjamin Franklin, the Wright brothers, Helen Keller, Albert Einstein, and Margaret Mead are just a few who have learned without going to school. Newspapers are full of lesser-known success stories. Ryan Abradi, from Maine, showed an interest in numbers at a young age, so his parents allowed him to stay home and teach himself; at age 10 he was working on sophomore college calculus. Caitlin Stern of Haines, Alaska, did not attend school and became a recognized expert studying bald eagles in the wild. Jedediah Purdy, an autodidact from West Virginia, graduated summa cum laude from Harvard University; in 1996 he was selected as a Truman Scholar and as a West Virginia candidate for the Rhodes Scholarship. He then went to Yale Law School and in the meantime wrote a best-selling book.
The rate of growth of self-study is a partial measure of its success. From a few scattered homeschoolers in 1980, perhaps 20,000, the number has grown, according to Newsweek Magazine, to more than 200,000 in 1990, and into a vast integrated network of approximately 2,000,000 today.
Extensive research has shown that students learn much more easily when they teach themselves. As far back as 1930, the “8 Year Study” of 30 special schools showed that: “The most effective schools used a different approach to learning. Instead of organizing learning by subject, they organized it around topics of importance to their students.” students”. There seemed to be an inverse relationship between success in college and formal education as opposed to student-selected learning.
A recent study from Cornell University confirmed this and showed that children who go to school become “dependent on their peers”, while those who learned from their parents have more self-confidence, optimism and courage to explore. A Moore Foundation study of children of parents who had been arrested for truancy found that their homeschooled children scored 30 percent higher on standardized tests than the average child in the classroom.
A UCLA project, which provides a possible understanding of the reasons behind these successes, showed that the average school student receives 7 minutes of personal attention per day, but the self-taught receives 100 to 300 minutes of attention per day. Following this, a Smithsonian report on genius concluded that high achievement was the result of time with responsive parents, little time with peers, and considerable time for free exploration. Standardized tests also reflect the success of self-study. Time magazine reported that “the average homeschool student SAT score is 1100, 80 points higher than the average score for the general population.”
Dr. Lawrence M. Rudner conducted a study in 1998 that included 20,760 students in 11,930 families. He found that in every subject and at every grade level (K-12), homeschool students scored significantly higher than their public and private school counterparts. About 25 percent of all homeschool students at the time were enrolled at or above the grade level indicated for their age. According to the study, the average homeschooled eighth-grader was performing four grades above the national average. The average ACT score was 21 out of a possible 36 for public school children. He averaged 23 for the self-taught. This qualifies the average college bound self-taught for the most prestigious universities.
Vision
This movement not only addresses why, how, when and what all citizens learn, but it is also rebuilding the foundations of the society in which we all live. How we learn determines the kind of society we build. Authoritarian, hierarchical and anti-democratic schools prepare future citizens for an authoritarian, hierarchical and anti-democratic society. A lifelong learning system based on family, community, society and nature could be the basis for new democracies of freedom, equity and justice.
The movement continues to promote the concepts of lifelong self-study, in all its complexities, to a wider audience, to address criticism on issues of accountability and credibility, and to raise funds to help those working to realize their goals. ideals. .
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