Lefty Parent » AERO

Day 4 – The AERO Education Conference in Portland

Cooper Zale — Wed, 10 Aug 2011 04:40:45 +0000

The last day of the conference, with just a short morning session. I did not attend any of the workshops but was there for the final keynote by Linda Stout and her closing call out to the youth at the conference to have their moment to speak.

Linda told her story of being the daughter of poor white agricultural workers in North Carolina, and how she managed somehow to get an education and go on to become a grassroots organizer. An organizer who built and led an organization that brought people together across racial, gender and class lines to help over 40,000 people overcome the obstacles of racist Jim Crow laws and vote for the first time.

Linda is a Baby Boomer like me, representing a generation that fought the battles for civil rights, women’s rights, and for peace instead of war. From that experience, her wisdom is that a movement for educational change needs a full spectrum of efforts on at least four fronts. First, activism for profound structural change in the U.S. education system. Second, “reform” efforts by people working within that system to try to hold the line and support individuals as much as possible until structural change can happen. Third, providing educational alternatives to conventional public schools to demonstrate new models that public schools can adopt. Fourth, setting in motion a shift in consciousness and intention, some would say the spiritual aspect of change.

I find it interesting that AERO in general is about a community of alternative, mainly democratic type schools that encourage, support and share best practices with each other. That certainly seems consistent with AERO founder Jerry Mintz, who with his very casual tee-shirts, sort of rumpled look and twinkle in his eye, looks the part of some former Grateful Dead roadie. He is all about promoting, supporting and consulting with democratic schools.

That said, Jerry’s main staffer, Isaac Graves, is a different sort of character. He is a young prodigy of an organizer, having put together and run this yearly conference for the past eight years, the first when he was still a youth. Now as a young adult around our son Eric’s age, he stage managed this conference seemingly effortlessly, never once appearing frustrated or even stressed, always relaxed, happy and even joyful. Isaac’s staff are mostly young adults like himself, mostly interns I imagine.

Unlike Jerry I think, Isaac is all about building a movement for educational transformation. The keynoters he recruited for the conference reflected that, starting with his fellow Millennial Melia Dicker, a young activist who spoke about using the emerging social media of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to catalyze that movement. Then Riane Eisler, the elder states-person of the conference headliners, a Jew growing up in prewar Austria whose family experienced antisemitism and barely escaped the Nazi holocaust, later to live in Batista’s Cuba before coming to the United States. That experience as a young person informed her vision of cultural transformation from hierarchical ranking and control to an egalitarian circle of equals. Next Khalif Williams, a Gen-Xer who is now the director of an alternative school in Maine, but has worked many years as an advocate for humane education. And culminating with the synthesis provided by Linda Stout.

Though most of the keynoters were all about structural transformation, the range of conference workshops reflected that broader spectrum that includes inside-the-box reform, consciousness raising and hatching alternatives. Of the workshops I attended or heard about from others, I’d say the quality of the presentations and the time management and audio-visual skills of the presenters varied. But what was cool about that is that none of the people doing workshops were intimidated by their lack of these skills. If they had something to share they went for it, and attendees to their offering were generally accepting and supportive, despite any lack of polish. I don’t think there was any workshop I attended, even those where I did not get much from the content, where I did not encounter at least one very interesting person worth meeting and exploring some interesting common ground with.

The gestalt of the event was that of a ritual gathering of a community, not the endless boring business meetings that our hotel venue probably more routinely hosted. In fact, Melia, in the opening of her keynote, noted that she felt more like she was seeing the familiar faces at a family wedding than an organizational conference. Certainly the initial greetings between people who were seeing each other again after one or more years were more likely hugs than handshakes, and at the conclusion, hugs for newly met friends and comrades.

I suspect that Sally and I are now both hooked, and will be hard pressed not to attend next year’s conference, plus the related International Democratic Education Conference (IDEC, which attracts a lot of the same people), either next year in Puerto Rico or 2013 in Boulder CO. And after attending now three of these affairs, I am pretty determined to offer some sort of workshop of my own next time, though I’m not sure yet exactly what.

Day 3 – The AERO Education Conference in Portland

Cooper Zale — Sun, 07 Aug 2011 06:09:34 +0000

Another jam-packed day at the conference, and probably no more than an hour and 15 minutes of usable brain power to write before I can do no more than stare out the window or at the TV.

The first workshop I attended was on assessment. I was hoping the presenter Ido Roll would talk about the state of the art or best practices in holistic school assessment (rather than relying on student standardized test scores), but the focus was on individual student assessments, which seemed to be what the majority of the workshop attendees were most interested in.

Still it was interesting! I learned that in technical academic terms there are two types of assessments, “formative” and “summative”. A formative assessment is intended to give the student and their teacher input on how they are doing, so that they can focus on areas where they may be weak or otherwise still need to do more work. A summative assessment, on the other hand, is generally high-stakes and is how a student is graded or ranked at the conclusion of some formal learning process. Presumably the two assessment types could be applied to schools as well.

From Ido’s point of view, assessments are weak that simply test what a student has been taught. A more accurate and holistic assessment tests what a student has synthesized from what they have been taught. Though he did not address this, I immediately jumped to thinking about the typical standardized multiple-choice tests that students take. How can they really test what the student has synthesized? They can only test what the student was taught.

At the end of the workshop I was able to talk to Ido and his partner Ofira. I told them of my interest in finding out more about any emerging best practice in more holistic assessments of schools. Ido pointed me at work being done by Johns Bransford at the University of Washington, and also the book, Knowing What Students Know. He also said that the whole issue of school assessment was impacted by politics. Apparently the National Science Foundation is now recommending more holistic school assessments that involve subjective qualitative data from people, but the Department of Education continues to insist that all school assessments need to be completely quantitative with no subjectivity.

The next workshop focused on the history and impact of the whole standardization and high-stakes testing movement. The presenter, Angela Engel, gave a quick history of the milestones in standards and testing, starting with Nation at Risk during the Reagan administration, followed by Goals 2000 during the Clinton administration, which lead to every state adopting curriculum standards that students would be tested on on a regular basis. Finally No Child Left Behind during the Bush administration, which added punishments for schools that did not meet those state goals.

Angela indicated that her take was that the Nation at Risk analysis was flawed, and it led to much too simplistic assessments to give an accurate picture of the state of U.S. education. What it has also led to is billions of dollars being spent on testing programs and reworking state curricula, billions of dollars were not otherwise available to pay teachers and improve the resources available to students in schools. Corporations in the education-industrial complex have been enriched, while the quality of our education system, as reflected by the quality of our teachers and school facilities, has been attenuated.

In an afternoon workshop presented by three young instructors at Washington State University’s education school – Paul Menke, Mary Crowell and Francene Watson – they gave what to me seemed a pretty gloomy assessment of their program to train new K-12 teachers. The classes they taught were focused on alternative teaching methodologies including Critical Pedagogy. A key part of their classes was highlighting issues of privilege involved with race, gender, class and sexual orientation. But they bemoaned the fact that at their university it was mainly white staff teaching this to other mainly white students. The three teacher trainers seemed to be pretty stressed out with having to level with their students about how grueling the teaching profession has become.

Topping off the gloom and doom was an attendee, Richard Elmore, a key education professor at Harvard, who said that due to the trend in alternative teacher credentialing, he saw most of the traditional education school being put out of business in the next few years. He said that training teachers has been a “cash cow” up to now for universities, but with more and more states adopting other means of credentialing teachers, these university programs were likely to disappear.

I have to admit to not enough knowledge of the whole area of teacher training. But from my somewhat unknowing vantage, it did seem like the whole education establishment was going through some sort of cataclysm and tipping point. It is certainly an area I will have to explore more at some point soon.

Finally, after dinner I attended a more impromptu workshop titled “What is a Free School”, where staff from various learner-directed schools around the country discussed the common features of their schools’ programs and also their shared problems. All the schools let students set their own curriculum and were “non-coercive”, which means that though some of them offered classes to students, attendance in those classes was never mandatory. Also, all the schools had the students playing a key role in running the school, along with the adult staff, through decisions made by various forms of the democratic process, from voting and majority rule, to informal or even formal consensus process. In some of the schools, that student role even included hiring and firing the adult staff.

That’s just a brief intro to democratic-free schools, and I intend to write more about this educational model soon. And with the late hour it is time to conclude today’s report.

Day 2 – The AERO Education Conference in Portland

Cooper Zale — Sat, 06 Aug 2011 05:31:12 +0000

Once again experimenting with this thing of blogging each day from an event. Not terribly satisfied with yesterday’s quickly written piece… but on with the experiment!

As I said yesterday, this my third AERO conference, my strategy has evolved to focusing on connecting with people, not so much in attending workshops for the content of those sessions. Today I continued to reconnect with (and introduce Sally to) people I had previously met, while also meeting and connecting with some new folks.

Sally and I attended a workshop on alternative education in Japan, led by Pat Montgomery who I had originally met at the AERO conference in 2008. Pat is the founder and continues to be the director of the Clonlara free school in my hometown of Ann Arbor MI, which I believe has been in existence since the 1960s. We briefly enrolled our son Eric in the online version of Pat’s school after we pulled him out of his public school and started homeschooling.

Pat over the years got connected with leaders of the free school movement in Japan, who have repeatedly invited her to come to their country to speak about this alternative school model. She talked about how the very rigid conventional school model in that country led to the start of a free school movement. Conventional schools run morning to mid afternoon, like in our country, but Monday through Friday and Saturday. After they are done with their regular school day most kids then go to “cram schools” during after school hours. Finally, when they get back home they do three to five hours of additional homework.

As Pat told it, until recently, if parents kept their kids out of school or kids refused to go, the family would be subject to a great deal of community shame, and the kids would be forced to attend special schools where they would be “rehabilitated” so they could be then sent back to the regular school. School is so stressful that an alarming number of young children (not even teenagers) commit suicide. That stress led to the beginnings of a “free” school movement in the 1940s which has fought for legitimacy for decades, finally achieving some in the 1990s, but still fighting for full equality with conventional schools today.

After lunch I attended a workshop looking at how to develop more meaningful educational assessments. My interest in attending was finding out if there were any emerging “best practices” on doing a more holistic assessment of schools, rather than the student multiple-choice high-stakes tests featured by No Child Left Behind, leading to so much teaching to the test. Teaching to the test is doable in a conventional instructional school (though real learning suffers) where you generally follow a completely scripted curriculum that addresses all the items that might be tested.

But in an alternative holistic or democratic-free school, where the educational process is all or at least somewhat learner driven, kids are in real danger of learning things other than what might appear on those tests. Given that, these models tend to do poorly as say public charter schools, because their students tend not to do so well on those standardized tests. If those tests somehow tested students’ interest in learning and grasp of real world skills like presentation, collaboration and creativity, then these alternative schools would probably excel.

I found the workshop a bit disappointing, because the leader, Ido Roll, focused on individual student assessment techniques, rather than the area of school assessment of interest to me. But I hung in there and listened, figuring that he was a smart enough person and seemed to know the whole area of assessment well enough, that maybe we could have a quick discussion of my topic after his workshop.

So after the workshop I actually had a chance to talk to his partner Ofira, and I shared with her my interest in more holistic school assessment. She said that was the area of greatest interest to her. Finally Ido joined in our conversation and, as I had hoped, addressed the issue of emerging best practices in more holistic school assessment. He told me to Google John Bransford at the University of Washington and read the book Knowing What Students Know. He also shared his take on the politics of assessment in the federal government, that the Department of Education is not interested in any qualitative assessments of schools by human beings and only test scores. This while the National Science Foundation is saying that peer review, outcome studies, parent satisfaction studies and other more holistic assessments would paint a much better picture of school effectiveness.

Finally, I had a great discussion after dinner with David Marshak, who I had worked with several years back as part of a small group that attempted (unsuccessfully) to set up an organization to advocate for a range of education alternatives. David shared with me his thoughts on the developmental transitions that the United States and the world were going through right now. He was looking at how human development has become so accelerated in the age of the Internet and information technology, and how we have now reached “peak oil”, and the current petroleum-fueled economy will begin to unravel. All this he posits will take us to a more decentralized economy, which we need to begin to prepare for.

Even though there were more evening events at the conference, I realized that I was done for the day, my mind reeling for thoughts in so many directions. I returned to my room and sat down at my computer to write and report on my day.

Day 1 – The AERO Education Conference in Portland

Cooper Zale — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 06:06:18 +0000

I have never tried this thing of blogging each day from an event. My typical blog piece requires about four to twelve hours of work writing or at least staring at the computer thinking what to write. Tonight I figure I have about an hour to pound this out.

This my third AERO conference, my strategy has evolved to focusing on connecting with people, not so much in attending workshops for the content of those sessions. Reconnecting with people I already know, plus making new connections with a few people that I don’t already know that I can include in my circle. Also with Sally in attendance as well, I really wanted to introduce her to a handful of people that I have either met at previous conferences or interacted with through the phone or the Internet on various projects or discussions.

So I feel I was pretty successful in that regard, since today Sally and I were able to connect with several people who were involved with democratic-free schools patterned on the Sudbury Vally model. Sally, who has now read a lot about the original Sudbury Valley school, was excited to have time to talk with people actually in the trenches with this egalitarian model where youth students completely direct their own learning and adult staff jointly run the school.

And I was also able to reconnect with, and introduce Sally to…

* Dana Benis, who was the prime mover behind founding the Institute for Democratic Education in America (IDEA), which is now up and running as an organization with a very talented staff and Board. I was involved with Dana and others in some of the earlies conversations on forming the organization. I eventually fell by the wayside when I decided to focus my available time on my blogging instead, I guess feeling that the writing was more important to me developmentally at this point. When Dana saw me he gave me a hug, which felt so good, because it indicated he still felt a connection with me.

* Helen Hughes, who founded the Windsor House school, a publicly funded democratic-free school in Vancouver BC. Sally, who is exploring what it might take to set up a democratic-free school in Los Angeles, was very interested in Helen’s take on her “flavor” of a such a school. Another person who remembered me from three years ago at the last AERO conference I attended, and thrilled me with a hug.

* Krenie Stowe, a pediatrician and fellow unschooling parent in Houston Texas, who had her own critical take on the Sudbury Valley schools, particularly the “Justice Committee”, and gave Sally a different perspective to consider.

* David Marshak, who has written extensively comparing and contrasting various types of school alternatives, including holistic and democratic-free schools.

* Isaac Graves, the talented and tireless young adult who has organized and run all eight or nine yearly AERO conferences, the first one, I believe, when he was like 17 years old.

As to workshops, the one I attended today was led by Melia Decker, the Communications Director for IDEA, who I had met previously on the phone in early conversations with Dana Benis and others hatching the organization. Melia did a workshop on using social networking tools, like Facebook and Twitter, to build community. I found it interesting that though Facebook is all about building and maintaining relationships and networks, Twitter is is really best at connecting people in the moment who have a common goal. The best example was the Middle East, where it has become the tool for coordinating a popular revolution.

Sally and my day ended as audience for two keynote speeches. The first was by Justo Mendez Aramburu, who started the Nuestra Escuela democratic-free school in Puerto Rico, based on the principles of “love, respect and participation”. He said it was the first speech he had ever given in English, and it was a powerful narrative of his own experience as a youth and later a parent, and how the death of his daughter in a car accident inspired him to start the school.

The final keynote of the evening was given by Riane Eisler, who’s book The Chalice and the Blade, as I have spoken of frequently in my pieces, transformed my own life and launched me on the path that now includes my writing.

Well… hours up! Hopefully another report tomorrow night!

Day 0 – On the Train to the AERO Education Conference

Cooper Zale — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 05:56:39 +0000

When it was announced that this year’s Alternative Education Resource Organization (AERO) conference was going to be in Portland OR, I decided I would go, and rather than fly to Portland, I would take the train up the coast. I had journeyed back east to previous AERO conferences in 2007 and 2008 in Albany NY, but had not been able to attend the past two years. And this go round, Sally decided she would come too.

So our train was three hours late arriving in Van Nuys where we boarded, but once we were on the train and soon headed up the central California coast, it was “all good” as they say. So we spent the night in our cozy little sleeping compartment overnight and are now in northern California approaching Mount Shasta. As a means of transportation, the train is not about just getting from point A to point B, but enjoying the journey.

So to do a “community building” exercise for the conference, a couple of the organizers suggested that we answer seven questions. Their email said…

Dear Attendees: We can’t wait to welcome you to Portland next week! In preparation for our time together, we wanted to offer a few questions to ponder. We invite you to take 20-30 minutes to explore your answers to these questions, individually and/or with your fellow conference attendees. Our hope is that they will be useful in preparing you to make the most of your time at AERO.   

Okay, I’m game. Here goes…

1. What are three burning questions in your life right now?   

One: How can I transition from doing my full-time “day job” to being able to focus most of my time on my writing and my “life’s work” promoting and facilitating our human transformation from hierarchy to a circle of equals?

Two: Towards that life’s work, how can we empower our young people to be more involved in the direction of their own lives, the larger community they are growing up in, towards being more fully-functional adult citizens in a democratic society?

Three: What are the pragmatic steps forward, given all the prevailing conventional wisdom and challenging circumstances, for transforming our U.S. public education system into something truly appropriate for 21st century life that fully facilitates our continuing human development?

2. What are you most passionate about the field of alternative education?   

Educational models that empower young people to play the key role in directing their own development.

3. What is one thing, if it were to happen, would make this conference an unequivocal success for you? What is your biggest hope or strongest intention in attending AERO?   

To connect with someone that would give me a new venue to expand the audience for my writing.

4. What is one relationship you are seeking in your life/work right now to support you in growing and thriving further?   

Expanding on my previous answer, finding someone who is connected with an online community or some sort of magazine or other publication who would be interested in me and my writing as a contributor to their efforts.

5. What is one skill you’d love to develop more concretely in your life/work?   

I’d like to improve my ability to do research and write pieces that were more scholarly and research oriented.

6. Take a look at the AERO program. Circle three sessions that are the juiciest for you, based on your passions, dreams and questions.   

“Assessments That Matter” – The program says…

The purpose of this workshop is threefold. First, we will attempt to define the goals for assessments and accountability in the context of our educational communities. Second, we will examine the concept of testing and its relevance to our needs. Last, we will try to conceptualize assessments that align well with our educational goals.

I think that coming up with more holistic ways to assess the effectiveness of educational venues (beyond multiple-choice testing of a standard state or even national set of facts) is critical to bringing educational alternatives (beyond conventional instructional schools) into the mainstream of public education options.

Two: “Common Ground: A Spirited Debate” – Program says…

A spirited debate about private, charter, and public schools; the qualities that distinguish and the values that unite. Finding ways that we as educators, parents, and students can expand learning and promote opportunities that empower, excite, and equip today’s young people.

It seems to me that promoting charter schools and allowing them much more latitude to be really different from conventional public schools is currently the only game in town in the pragmatic path forward to transforming our education system.

Three: “How to Build an Online Community Through Social Media” – Program says…

This practical, interactive workshop is for people who have a basic understanding of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and blogs and want to use them to build a strong online community in authentic ways. Together, we’ll look at several online communities and discuss what makes them successful or not. We’ll talk about the kind of online presence that develops a community, and ways to continue engaging that community once it’s strong. Bring your laptop, if you have one.

Not only is the workshop content related to my blogging and Facebook networking, but the workshop is being led by one of the organizers of the new Institute of Democratic Education in America (IDEA). I was briefly involved in some of the group’s original organizing meetings, but I ended up focusing on my writing instead. Besides the intriguing workshop content, I’m interested in having the opportunity to reconnect with some of the group’s organizers, and maybe find a venue or wider audience for my own writing.

7. Take a look at the AERO program. What is one session that you know nothing or very little about? What kind of connection might you want to make around that issue or with that person?   

Not a session that I know little or nothing about, but I do want to have the opportunity to meet Riane Eisler, whose book, The Chalice and the Blade, has been the most influential in my life and particularly in defining my life’s work.

Anyway… a glimpse into my own thinking in anticipation of the conference.

This is the first of what I hope to be daily blog posts from conference, something that one of current co-workers (who reads my blog) suggested to me. Since I’m all about broadening my writing skills right now, I took her great suggestion. So more hopefully tomorrow!

The Internet and My Tale of Two Crises

Cooper Zale — Sun, 12 Jun 2011 00:57:08 +0000

The Internet is our most dynamic new societal institution, developing quickly over the past 25 years from “Web 1.0” (providing static web pages with existing content) to “Web 2.0” (providing interactive environments for building connections between people, facilitating other societal institutions, and the “marketplace of ideas”). I think this is a good example, a good metaphor, for the direction we are moving (and should continue to move) in our entire society and its institutions, from top-down dissemination and control, to a more egalitarian exchange between a circle of equals.

Trying to look back thoughtfully on the last 25 years of my own life (my years coincidentally as a parent) it is clear that my own direction, my own development, has been caught up in the development of the Internet, including my own transition from being generally a spectator of change (beyond parenting my own kids) to more of an agent of change (at least in a small way). I would say that I owe a debt of thanks to the Web, and I want to briefly tell that story.

Setting the Stage

In January 1986 our son Eric was born. I was starting the final year of classes towards my second college degree in Computer Science (having previously gotten a degree in Speech in 1978). My partner Sally was the family breadwinner, three years into her job working in operations for the UCLA fund raising campaign. After a couple months maternity leave, she had returned to work, and I (at that point not working outside the home) had the blessing of being Eric’s primary caretaker during the day (except for the hours I was in class). Three years later our daughter Emma was born, completing our nuclear family as it is today.

Sally and I had met each other and had a history of activism together in the early 1980s working for the National Organization for Women on the campaign for the Equal Rights Amendment and other efforts towards women’s equality. As such, we were comfortable being agents of change, but in 1986 that work was behind us and we were looking at our path forward together as parents with regular jobs to make enough money to pay our mortgage and support raising two kids. Both Sally and I had grown up attending regular public schools followed by public universities and we had no sense that our kids paths would be any different. We had at most a cursory knowledge of education alternatives beyond conventional public and private schools and not even an inkling that this area would become a major focus of our lives.

We were aware enough of child development issues, that when we were looking for a preschool for our kids, we avoided all those focusing on “pre-academic” prep in favor of one we found in the Yellow Pages (of all places) that advertised “developmentally appropriate curriculum”. So we met and liked the schools owner and director and decided to enroll our kids in her program. Eric and Emma seemed to thrive in her school, and since she also offered the early elementary grades and we had the money to continue to pay the fairly reasonable tuition, we kept them there for their early elementary years, transitioning Eric to public school in fourth grade and Emma in third.

It was in public schools where our kids began to run into problems, particularly our son Eric, who (to make a long story short) was a smart kid who participated actively in class but pretty much refused to do homework on his own time after school, preferring to focus on his own interests exclusively. Knowing little of the full spectrum of education alternatives (including homeschooling) and the concept of an “auto-didact” (a self-learner like Eric), we sent him to an educational specialist and went through the IEP (individualized education plan) at his middle school. The wisdom of these experts was to use rewards and punishments and practice “tough love” to encourage, cajole, reward and if necessary coerce Eric to do his homework and go with the program.

Nothing worked, and by eighth grade we had a very unhappy kid that I left crying on the curb most every morning in front of his middle school as I drove away, and I could feel the trust between us that was the centerpiece of our relationship beginning to slip away. I felt like I was becoming his truant officer disguised as his parent.

All this narrative to set a context for a growing sense of hopelessness on what to do with our son Eric, who had even gone so far as to write “Fuck Math” (as his only answer) on the State of California standardized eighth grade math test. None of the resources we had available to us, through our son’s school, family and friends, Sally’s connections with fellow therapists had any wisdom beyond rewards and punishments, tough love or very expensive private schools (that we could not afford).

Except for one resource that maybe saved our son Eric, and our relationship with him, from a complete train wreak… the Internet.

Our Web 1.0 Experience – Helping Our Son Eric

Both Sally and I, being very computer savvy, were early subscribers to Prodigy in the late 1980s, with its proprietary network, and its access to the “World Wide Web” (as it was mainly called back then). We soon discovered various online discussion groups, and Sally in particular, having a penchant for and experience doing research, quickly learned how to surf the web for the wisdom and other resources that might be found. Among other things, she found the Alternative Education Resource Organization (AERO), joined, and participated in an online “listserv” (forum) where people from all over discussed issues related to educational alternatives.

Through AERO and other Internet research, Sally began discovering work by a number of outside the box educational thinkers like Alfie Kohn and John Holt. Holt in particular made a very good case for homeschooling, something we had heard about but was generally associated with fundamentalist Christian families that wanted to avoid the secular “indoctrination” in public schools. Holt’s case (along with others’) was good enough for Sally and I to marshal all our courage to go against the conventional wisdom of our non-Internet world (including friends and family) and pull Eric out of school in the middle of eighth grade in favor of homeschooling him. It was an anxiety ridden time for us, wondering if we might in fact be dooming our son to perpetual ignorance and minimum wage jobs.

But the Internet resources and online community that Sally had found helped us get through, and after a difficult transitional year of “deprogramming” (which Holt and others had indicated would probably happen) Eric began to relax, get his feet back on the ground, and return to his natural auto-didact self, focusing his time pursuing and learning about the areas he was interested in. It all worked out in the end for us and Eric. He’s now 25 and a successful adult. (See my pieces on my kids’ unschooling story.)

I think it is fair to say that the Internet played a major role in saving us and particularly Eric from a metaphorical train wreak. Besides the expletive on the math test and having to leave him crying on the school curb each morning, he had started exhibiting other acting out behaviors, and I can only imagine the loss of trust in our relationship with him if we had continued to force him to go to school through his high school years. Let alone how a high school would punish a student with failed grades and more who refused to do most homework.

Our Web 2.0 Experience – Helping Me

In 2005 I reached age 50 in the midst of what I now look back on as a significant midlife crisis of sorts. Our kids were now older teens and our parental role was significantly diminished. My mom, now living with us and five years into increasing dementia (she died in 2006), weighed heavily on my partner Sally and I. I was putting my hours in at my “day job” as a business systems analyst, spending time with Sally the kids and her family, and volunteering as a Sunday school teacher at my Unitarian-Universalist congregation. I was also slowly destroying my health playing games on our computer often until 3am in the morning when I had to get up at 6am the next morning to go to work. I felt like I was putting in my time keeping my family going and then medicating the stresses of life by eating too much and staying up into the night to have my “own time”. I was burnt out.

But among my other computer activities, I started to participate in the email discussions on the AERO listserv Sally had discovered. I had now read several books Sally had found on homeschooling and critiquing our school system, and had several years now of our son’s homeschooling experience under my belt. I joined the discussion on the listserv about educational issues and found myself writing more and more and developing a voice as a supporter of “unschooling” and a proponent for what I called “many educational paths”. My Internet activities led to me attending several AERO conferences and making even deeper connections with other activist people in this area.

Without the Internet, I would never have discovered any of this, or had the opportunity to write, have an audience (even if it was only a couple dozen people) and find my “voice” as a writer. In 2008, at the urging and with the help of our son Eric (now a happy 22-year-old adult and budding entrepreneur with more Web savvy than me), I got my own URL (www.leftyparent.com), a WordPress blog template and I started to write and blog in earnest. As I framed it in one of my first blog pieces; since I was now past 50 and “over the hill”, I no longer had to fight gravity and could attempt to share whatever wisdom I had gathered from the first five decades of my life.

I took advantage of a layoff and five months severance pay to spend every day forcing myself to write (rather than hunting for a new job), until I got to a point where there was nothing I wanted to do more. Even when I did finally find a new job and went back to work, I did everything I could to structure my week so I would have two or three days devoted to writing. I am still following that path today.

As before with finding a different developmental path for our son Eric, I found my own path on the “Web 2.0” Internet. No longer just a consumer of other people’s opinion and expertise, I had a venue to put my own attempt at wisdom out there for others to consider. And as with Eric before, I can only speculate (and really don’t want to) where I would be if I had not found this outlet for myself and my own aspirations.

That’s my tale for today of the evolving life in the Information Age and the budding 21st Century. My counter to those who say that all the web is good for is wasting time schmoozing on Facebook or surfing porn. My hope for an accelerating human evolution as we meet the challenges ahead for our species.

Leonard Turton on Democracy & Education

Cooper Zale — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 20:37:36 +0000

Here is a provocative quote on democracy and schools, which I believe to be on the mark, from a person named Leonard Turton who I exchanged emails with on the AERO (Alternative Education Revolution Organization) listserv back several years ago. If you consider yourself a progressive person and you believe that our country should embody democratic principles, I think you need think long and hard about what he is saying, and if you can rationalize our current education system with those democratic principles…

Any society that does not allow its children to practice democracy on a daily basis in its schools is not a democratic society…it is a society whose fundamentals are controlled by other forces while maintaining a democratic front…you cannot have generations of people brought up under state school dictatorial conditions, being told every day what to do and what to think and what, chosen by others, is and is not important, and pretend that those generations of children , on achieving adulthood, are going to demand a true democracy, or even , for that matter, be able to recognize what democracy is or is not… I guarantee, however, that such schools will produce a mass of controllable people who will believe that democracy is whatever anyone in authority over them says that it is…

Though I might not have used such inflammatory language, I believe that what he is saying needs to be reckoned with when we look at our schools today and contemplate transforming education in the 21st Century.