Deschooling Reader notes

Everywhere All the Time: A New Deschooling Reader, ed. by Matt Hern. 2008.

-- **Instead of Education, John Holt.

• ... we are very unlikely to learn anything good from experiences ... not connected ... or interesting or important to us. Curiosity is never idle; it grows out of real concerns and real needs. We are even less likely to learn anything good from coerced experiences, things that others have bribed, threatened, bullied, wheedled, or tricked us into doing. From such we learn mostly anger, resentment, and above all self-contempt for having allowed ourselves to be pushed around or used by others, for not having been smart enough or strong enough to resist and refuse. 
• We learn to do something by doing.

--**Public School Nightmare, John T. Gatto.

• [our public schools has its origins in the Prussian model.] (Prussian schools purpose was not) intellectual development by socialization in obedience and subordination. 
• Prussian trained/schooled "lesser men" could not lead or revolt because they could not manage sustained or comprehensive thought. Well-schooled children cannot think critically, cannot argue effectively. 
• Control of conduct is what schools are about. 

--Learning? Yes, of course. Education? No, thanks. Aaron Fabel.

• (re: John Holt and Instead of Education) -- Education means that some A is doing something to somebody else B.
• There is no division in my life between learning, work, play, etc. All things are one. In place of "education," maybe put "living."
• Learning is like breathing. But our social environment is thoroughly polluted by education -- a designed process in which one group tries to make another group learn something, usually without their consent, because they (the educators) think it will be good for them.
• In other words, education is forced, seduced or coerced learning -- except that you can't make another person learn, which is why education doesn't work and has never worked. 

Challenging the Popular Wisdom..., Geraldine and Gus Lyn-Piluso.

• (Difference between deschooling and homeschooling -- both expose the inability of the present school system to actually "educate."
• But the deschoolers reject the present schooling system because of its inherently authoritarian nature; this staunchly anti-authoritarian critique is where deschooling parts ways with the "homeschooling" movement. Many homeschooling families reject the school system, yet maintain authoritarian family structures and in fact implement authoritarian pedagogical techniques within the home.
• Deschooling does not simply move the school to home -- it rejects the school and its authoritarian nature completely. 
• Deschooling, then is a conscious effort to de-professionalize learning by acknowledging it as a lifelong, cooperative project of questioning and discovery, thinking and rethinking. Parenting, in the deschooling family, becomes a revolutionary activity. 
• Educate -- from Latin educare, to nourish, to cause to grow. Education is the act of living and growing. Recalls John Dewey's notion of learning by doing, except in deschooling, the child -- not the teacher -- directs the process. 

From Pedagogy for Liberation to Liberation from Pedagogy, G. Esteve, M. Prakash, D. Stuchul.

• Education is the economization of learning, transforming it into the consumption of a commodity called knowledge ... 
• Since the noun "education" imposes a completely passive dependence on the system which provides education, people are substituting this noun with the verbs "to learn" and "to study." ... to reestablish the autonomous capacity to build creative relationships with others and nature, which generates knowledge, wisdom. 
• Inspired by: Gandhi, Subcomandante Marcos, Wendell Berry. 
• Paul Goodman: "Start living that way now! Whatever you would do then, do it now. When you run up against obstacles...begin to think about how to get over or around or under that obstacle, or how to push it out of the way, and your politics will be concrete and practical."

Getting Busy, Matt Hern.

• Deschooling -- not talking about doing away with schools per se, but extinguishing monopoly state schooling and compulsory education. 
• Most kids need a place to go during the day: we need to be talking about counter-institutions. 
• Create those "counter-institutions" -- commonly-held and democratically-controlled by everyday people. We can't be waiting for politicians, etc, we need to be building everyday alternatives right now, right where we live. 
• These writings represent a radical reimagining of our society. We have to take common responsibility for making alternatives to compulsory schooling commonly available -- to everyone, otherwise deschooling just becomes another brick in the wall of white privilege. 
• The basic aspects of everyday school life have emerged and continue to evolve not as a response to the needs of students, but as driven by institutional needs. Why do we demand that children fit into schools and not the other way around?
• Kids need places to gather and places to meet interested and interesting adults who care about them and their lives. 
• Start asking questions and then get working. 

Summerhill School, Zoe Readhead (daughter of A.S. Neill)

• Two elements that were essential to the founding of Summerhill: the self-government meeting and the importance of a child's emotional well-being over academic development. 
• One aim: to create a happier childhood by removing fear and coercion by adults. 
• Giving children time to develop means letting them play and play and play for as long as they want to. Only through free, imaginative play can a child develop the skills needed for adulthood. 
• Neill constantly stressed the innate goodness of children and urged us to have patience and trust that they would learn these things for themselves. 

History of Albany Free School and Community, Chris Mercoglinao (Making it Up as We Go Along, etc)

• Free School's basic operating strategy: Do it first, ask permission later. 
• Lesson learned from Jon Kozol -- importance of freeing the school from becoming tuition-dependent, by developing some sort of business. 

No Destination (auto-bio of Satish Kumar)

Democratic Education in Israel, C. Balme and D. Bennis

• Institute's visioning process -- consider where they have been, where they are now (mapping of strengths, weaknesses and growth areas) and where they want to be. 
• Honech -- adult advisor for each student. 
• Three approaches to learning: 1. classes offered by staff, attendance optional; 2. Learning centers - classes taught by students; 3. Self-directed learning. 
• "Pluralistic learning" -- educational approach that recognizes the equal right of every individual to express his uniqueness regarding goals and ways of learning. -- core of democratic learning. 
• School parliament. 
• New democratic schools should: respect the human rights of the child and include democratic processes in the school; be different from every other democratic school that already exists. 

School for Today, Mimsy Sadofsky (Starting a Sudbury School, Pursuit of Happiness)

• Play is the most serious pursuit at Subbury Valley. 
• Even the six-year-olds know that they, only they, are responsible for their education. 
• Simple freedom for their children to develop according to their own timetables and their own desires. 

Windsor House (Vancouver), M. Hughes, J. Carrico

• "Non-coercive" education. -- it is based on trust, and the conviction that people of all ages have a right to self-determination. 

"Waldorf Education" ? 

Purple Thistle Center, D. Mckellar

• Learning is like breathing when we care. 
• Traditional schooling fails us because mandatory curriculum is counterintuitive. It's easier than adults think to be a resource rather than a tyrant in the classroom, but it takes heart. 

Rebuilding Learning Communities in Mail, C. Toure.

• Paulo Freire and his theory of Popular Education (not just for elites). People should be in charge of their liberation. 
• Popular education demands that learning content be relevant to the learner, then it becomes meaningful and fun. 
• General assumption of education is that the students are simply recipients, who come to school to take knowledge from a person who knows more or better. Popular education is about problem posing with students. 

Doing Something Very Different, S. Sheffer

• kids' enthusiasm, their interest in learning. 
• (in school) that's what I always used to feel like, like we were in there as punishment.
• Teach Your Own, Freedom and Beyond, John Holt.
• Deschooled scociety, a society in which learning is not separated from but joined to, part of the rest of life. 
• Homeschoolers understand the value of teachers, but they are less likely to understand why it's necessary to learn from people who are only teachers and/or to learn only from those teachers who are assigned to them. 
• These families demonstrate what it means to create a useful structure rather than to labor under an externally imposed one. 
• Teachers, help, schedules, organization --  these are not school things in themselves. They are school things when someone assigns the teachers, tells the teachers what to teach, gives the students no say in the matter, makes the help compulsory, imposes the schedule according to institutional rather than individual needs. 
• Holt's future tour guide wouldn't understand the need for grades and other external motivators. In a world where everyone learns all the time, people are learning on their own steam, for their own reasons, and they don't need the promise or threat of grades to make them learn or to tell them how they did. 
• Young people are capable of deciding what is important or necessary, and once they have decided, they are capable of working much harder than we imagine. 
• John Holt: "The trick is to find ways to put your strongest ideals into practice in daily life."

Play, Practice, and the Deschooling of Music, Mark Douglas.

• How do you deschool music? Stop thinking about music as a thing to learn and start thinking about as a thing to do. 
• Play the instrument as much as possible. 
• Encourage playing and making as opposed to practicing and working on. If you practice you aren't really doing it. You are always in preparation for whey you're really going to do it. 
• Resistance to practice sets in. 
• The child will surely find ways to regain control of the experience and most of these ways produce anxiety for the parents.
• A child should never, under any circumstances, be forced to play -- even if it seems like a waste of money. 
• Like language, a child will learn to talk. She will learn to play. Same faith in musical language, given an unjudging environment. 
• The best way to learn music is to play it, play it, and make it with your family and friends. 

Homeschooling as a Single Parent, H. Knox.

• All one issue -- support. 
• Wouldn't it be easier for me to use the free baby-sitting service the public schools have provided for me?

The Root of Education, P. Farenga.

• One can view the history of education as an ongoing struggle between those who feel education is something to be done for someone and those who feel it is something people do for themselves. 
• We school our children in a most undemocratic manner. 
• That is why we need to deschool society -- to do away with the attitude that children and adults can not be trusted to discover and discipline their minds and bodies in their own ways. 
• As Ivar Berg noted in Education and Jobs: The Great Training Robbery: The need for education feeds upon itself. This conceptual shift moves the primary responsibility for learning away from children and their parents and places it in the hands of external authorities. 

Lunch at the Westin, R. Westheimer

• But she has the opportunity now to experience and revel in other ways of knowing, I cannot teach her these 'other ways' because they aren't my own. But I can, we can grant her the privilege of living them herself.