Lefty Parent » alternative education

My Real Issue is Human Development

Cooper Zale — Sat, 05 Nov 2011 00:04:42 +0000

I write from the point of view of a parent, a “lefty parent” as I call myself, which is intended to have a double meaning of sorts. I grew up in the context and values of a liberal Midwestern university town (Ann Arbor MI), but also being left-handed, I tend to think outside the box of a mostly right-handed world, including the liberal or progressive “left” conventional wisdom of that world. My mom and dad were more left-libertarians than actual liberals and I have come to find that I share that subtle but significantly different orientation.

I really feel more like an ex-parent now, because our kids are grown up (now 22 and 25) and they have been basically running their own lives (for at least the past four years) since they learned to drive and figured out how to make their own living. That said we are still a close family, and their mom and I love seeing them whenever they are available and sharing our now mostly separate lives. We are proud of them and they reciprocate by acknowledging the positive role we have played in their lives, but otherwise the relationships between us look more like peers (though from different generations) than mentors and mentored.

Today at age 56, I have now had a full quarter century of both the perspective of growing up while being parented, and the flip side of being a parent myself (maybe now more ex-parent) and watching our two kids through their own growing up process. And you can squeeze about eight years in the middle there when I was a young adult pretty much on my own, neither parented or parent. All three periods have had their ups and downs, successes and failures, triumphs and tragedies, the whole range. But all in all, things have worked out for the better and I count my blessings (including my own health and my partner’s, plus our two kids surviving their youth and now fully functional as adults).

All that life experience, combined with a midlife crisis of sorts, inspired me to start writing this blog, and as of November 25 it will be three years since I posted my first piece, “Welcome to Lefty Parent”. Looking at the over 300 pieces I’ve written and posted since then, though many of them are about education and schooling, there are really two other more fundamental topics that are of the most interest to me. The first is human development in all its aspects. The second is what I have come to see as a key part of that development, which is the historical transition of human society, at least in the most recent 5000 years of history, from hierarchies of control to circles of equals.

Obviously formal education in school is tied up in those two topics. But from the perspective of my life’s experiences (either as actor or witness), I would say that formal schooling has less to do with individual human development than many of us conventionally think, while at the same time more to do with the development of societal governance than most people think.

I anticipate that many of you reading that last sentence will disagree with my assessment, and maybe you should, because I am of course biased by my own experience. But my reasoning is that though we can learn things by witnessing others and listening to what they tell us, we truly develop as individual human beings when we freely take action ourselves, experiencing the success or failure of those freely chosen actions, and the range of consequences in the wake of those actions. When we are merely complying with what people who claim authority over us tell us to do, we are not engaged at the same level and have less “skin in the game” as they say. Our compliance, or perhaps our decision to passively or actively resist compliance, speaks more to our learning about the ground rules for how we relate in community with others.

Recalling my youth, I had an inkling who I was but had very little clarity, and woke up every morning longing to someday be comfortable in my own skin. Growing up in the 1960s, swimming in the retribalizing ocean of electronic media to a soundtrack of life-affirming popular music, at least I had the thoughtful voices of the Beatles, Simon & Garfunkel, the Supremes and so many others acknowledging my struggle somehow, reassuring me, and giving me encouragement to keep on keeping on. So with this Greek chorus of popular music accompanying the comedy of my life (definitely more comedy than tragedy in my case), I stumbled through my youth.

Despite some popular song lyrics to the contrary, I accepted to a large degree the conventional wisdom that we pre-adults were incapable of much more than thrashing around and developing ourselves in fits and starts unless we took the direction and followed the scripts that parents, teachers and other adult authority figures in our life were supposed to give us. We older youth were just “teenagers” after all, a term I still hear many adults use with each other disparagingly (while rolling their eyes). But that did not feel right to me or make enough sense.

They say we need to learn the lessons of history. But as I studied history (among other subjects) in school as an older youth and young adult, the whole developmental narrative of the human race seemed similarly to lack sense and clarity and not feel right. How could it be that in a more enlightened age of science and government for and by the people, the 20th century seemed filled with as much war, hate and genocide as the ancient history of tyrannical empires thousands of years earlier? Was human history doomed to repeat itself and human society still just a metaphorical “teenager” thrashing around and needing external authority from God or whoever to guide its course forward?

But three decades later, with the benefit of wisdom gained from reading Riane Eisler’s alternative reframing of human history in The Chalice and the Blade, I saw the thread of developmental transition from a hierarchy of control toward larger and larger circles of equals. Definitely a three steps forward two steps back progression, but one that gave our history some clarity and gave me the sense of a developmental narrative that I could take some ownership of my small part in. the box of a mostly right-handed world, including the liberal or progressive “left” c

And a decade later I was introduced to alternative educational thinkers like Grace Llewellyn, John Holt and John Taylor Gatto who called out that young people were much more capable than conventionally believed, if they were not held back by assumptions and institutions based on the need for external control of their development. This was seconded by my own experiences as a youth and later as a parent, as I looked back at those experiences with this new frame. Our human development does not need to proceed in such fits and starts and we don’t need to feel so uncomfortable in our own skins as young people. The trick is to keep ourselves within an enriched environment including a circle of people that actively respect our inherent worth and dignity and expect and allow us to develop our own agency, share our voice, and use that agency to be the directors of our own development. That also means staying away from people and institutions that frame us as dysfunctional unformed beings requiring control and instruction before we are worthy of that respect. Easier said than done for most of us of course, and particularly so before we reach the age of majority.

Looking back with this alternative educational framing, I realized that I mostly was taught about things in school. But it was outside school in my “own life” where I encountered my most profound “curriculum”; it was in having to chart my own course that I really developed as a human being (applying perhaps at least some of the stuff I was taught in school).

Being taught about things was the content of my schooling, but it was the process and governance of school that was the real learning experience. I was learning how to function in a formal bureaucratic environment where I had little or no authority and was expected to do what my identified superiors expected me to do “for my own good”. Teachers I have talked to over the years acknowledge this paradigm when they observe that learning to do homework that seems boring and pointless is good preparation for adult life.

The conventional telling of history as I originally was taught it was that the human story is all about acquisition – of power, knowledge, new frontiers, etc. The conventional framing of education around the institution of schooling as I experienced it was also about acquisition – of knowledge, of grades, and ultimately the institutional blessing of credentials to move on and acquire the best possible place in adult society. But from the reframing of history and comparable reframing of education I have been privy to, I have come to the conclusion that life is all about development instead. Besides our development as evolving consciousnesses, everything else seems to me to be boring and pointless.

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!

Un-College

Cooper Zale — Sun, 03 Jul 2011 02:02:58 +0000

As a follow-up to my previous piece, “Unschooling Rather Than Highschooling”, I want to bring you up to date on my two kids’ unschooling sagas as they continue to choose to chart their own course as young adults. Neither Eric or Emma has chosen to go to college (though Emma has taken several community college and university extension classes). Instead, they have continued to launch their own projects, some successful and others significant failures, but all profound learning experiences moving them along their developmental paths.

It’s ironic that neither has chosen to enroll in higher education given the family pedigree. Their four grandparents all have college degrees, including one PhD. Their mom has two Masters, one in public health and a second in marriage and family therapy, while I have two Bachelors, one in speech and the other in computer science. Aunts and uncles are highly schooled as well. Certainly their parents and the entire extended family had the expectation when they were born that they would go to college. My partner Sally’s parents even starting significant college funds for them when they were born.

Trying and failing… some people say there is no better way to educate oneself. Yet we have a conventional education system for our youth built around externally orchestrated programming for success. Educators and savvy parents collude to prepare students for successful testing to get into the best possible college to guarantee the best possible chance for success on the job.

Both our kids have chosen not to go with that program. Here are some of the projects they’ve undertaken during what would conventionally be college years for many of their peers.

Deep Learning 7 – Building a Game Design Team

He reached age 18 in 2004 after four years of unschooling with the inklings and instincts of an entrepreneur. It was his goal to launch a successful game design business and using his people skills and wide circle of talented friends, pulled a team together to cut their teeth on designing a first-person shooter game based on cold war sci-fi kitsch. His team included a computer programmer, a graphic artist, a digital musician, a business savvy person, and himself as the creator of the game world and its back-story and the operational “glue” of the team and the project. Eric made it clear to all his recruits that this initial effort was not to develop and sell a commercial product, but just to develop an initial game for all of them to learn the ropes and have something for their portfolios and resumes.

Eric and his team members were busy for weeks completely rearranging our guest house (where Eric lived at the time), including setting up its little living room as a workroom with folding tables to accommodate computer work stations for all participants. The whole effort played out over many months, given that all of the participants were either in school (some high school and others college) or had jobs during the day. Eric did not have a job at this point, which gave him the time to play the main organizing role.

After some months of sessions on weekends and late into the night their effort ran into a number of problems, including a programmer with not enough of the needed gaming programming experience. On later reflection Eric told me that, “None of us knew what we were doing, and those of us leading the project were unable to move past the obstacles we were presented with.”

Deep Learning 8 – Entry Level in the Game Design “Salt Mines”

So when the game design project was put on indefinite hold, Eric, still 18, took an entry level job as a video game tester for the burgeoning computer game industry. It was his first “real job”, a full-time position that paid perhaps twice the minimum wage, which seemed like a heck of a lot of money to a kid who had just had allowance before.

Game testing may seem like an easy job to some, just getting paid for playing games you would otherwise pay to play yourself. But it is very hard exacting work, moving through every possible permutation of game play looking for mostly little glitches and filling out numerous “bug reports”. Eric, worked mostly testing cell phone games, staring at very small cell phone screens for eight to ten hour shifts. The job featured mandatory overtime (at a time-and-a-half hourly rate), which made it particularly grueling and wore him down.

Eric learned that if one could hang in there for a year or two as a successful tester (mainly by turning in well documented bug reports), that there was the possibility of moving up to be a “test lead” and then a “producer”, that led an entire team of testers like him.

After a couple years working as a tester for several game companies, and having made friends and contacts along the way, Eric decided that though he was still interested in game design, this work for the big companies was not the path forward for him. He would look again for a more entrepreneurial path.

Deep Learning 9 – Starting a Real Business

In 2007 the next plan to hatch was a collaboration between Eric (now 21) and two of his closest friends. His friends were involved in setting up and maintaining Apple computers and computer networks for businesses in the entertainment industry, but felt the company they were working for did a poor job of customer service. They envisioned starting their own company to compete, having Eric, with his people and organizational skills, managing their operational and logistical issues as the small startup’s Chief Operating Officer. A fourth partner was brought in with sales experience, and plans started to come together to launch their company, dubbed “Techies”. They opened for business in April 2008, of course not knowing that the deluge of the Great Recession would soon be upon them, their customers, and everyone else. All the partners had borrowed or invested significant amounts of their own money to try and make this dream a reality.

Though their company eventually suspended operations, after a little less than two years fighting to stay in business, the nearly three year life cycle they went through from conception through dissolution was a transformative learning experience for all the partners, and particularly for Eric. He started as a talented and thoughtful young man full of big ideas and dreams and a handful of yet unproven skills. Three years later, though the business ultimately failed, his mom and I watched him become a talented small business executive, with a burgeoning skill set and experience, and the confidence to tackle any sort of crisis or new challenge thrown at him.

At its zenith, Techies employed its four partners, plus two other employees (one handling the front desk and phones, the other doing pick-ups and deliveries) and a couple other contractors to help with the technical work. They had a dozen businesses and a number of individuals as customers. Their shop in Hollywood was a beautifully designed space built out by one of Eric’s other friends who was a talented contractor. I am no small business expert, but from everything I could see they had a good business plan, talented staff, and were doing everything right to be successful.

Eric, the math-phobic kid who six years early had written “Fuck Math” as his only answer on a math test, successfully managed Techies accounts payable and receivable, purchasing, payroll and personnel. He worked with their accountant and lawyer, including managing the company’s response to being sued at one point by one of their competitors (a suit apparently with little merit but designed to try and force them out of business). He also wrote most of their procedures and marketing materials and played a critical role wrangling his other partners and resolving issues between them.

This kid who I could barely drag out of bed in the morning to go to middle school worked nine to ten hour days, five or six days a week for two solid years to do his part to make Techies succeed. This unschooled young person, who some would write-off as an “eighth-grade dropout”, orchestrated everything with grace and forbearance (at least as far as I could see), and I think the fact that the four partners and the two laid-off employees are all still friends today is a testament to the quality of his skill and efforts.

That made it doubly tragic when their trend of growing monthly sales reversed in the fall of 2008 when the financial crisis and a festering potential strike by the actor’s unions in Los Angeles ground their clients’ businesses to a standstill. Securing some additional loans from family and friends, they managed to hang on for another year, waiting for the recession storm to finally pass. It was Eric who had to layoff their employees and the partners one by one (including himself) and then make the final call to pull the plug on their enterprise. He also had to orchestrate the shutting down of the business, including working with their customers to transition them to another vendor and liquidating the company’s assets.

Eric turned 24 the month after Techies shut its doors. I recall myself at that age, having graduated a year earlier with my university BA and moved to Los Angeles, stumbling around in Hollywood doing minimum wage film business “gofer” jobs. He was way farther along in his development than I had been at that age. For a young person you could not pay to sit in a classroom, this had truly been his “unschooling graduate school”, and he had the loans to repay to prove it!

Liberated in the middle of eighth grade to be his autodidact self, he had focused all his “unschooled” learning on this business, presenting his own culminating “thesis” of sorts struggling to hold the new enterprise together in the economic storm of a serious recession… and ultimately failing to do so, but learning so much for the future and perhaps other entrepreneurial endeavors.

Real learning is not always pretty, and at times can be some of the most uncomfortable “sausage making” you could ever bear to witness, and particularly so for a parent when your kid is involved. You long as a parent to somehow step in, pull some strings and make everything a success… proud and happy. But any fears we might have had that the failure of Techies would crush a fragile young spirit were quickly proven to be unfounded. Life goes on and so does Eric. He has a new job, working for another entrepreneur, who respects and leverages Eric’s logistical and project management skills, along with his ability to conceive and manage projects.

Deep Learning 10 – Working in and Managing a Restaurant

Emma, had just turned 17 in 2006 when she started her initial job hunt. Some of her friends already were working as baristas at Starbucks and other chain coffee places, but none of them were having good experiences. A consistent issue was with what I would call “the governance process” at these corporate-run businesses. Who were the decision-makers, what role did the worker-bee baristas have in that process to at least give feedback, if not be decision-makers themselves.

Emma, on the other hand, was determined to find a work environment on a more human scale where she would have more of an opportunity to participate in the “governance” of the store. Checking out all the neighborhood coffee places, she focused in on a funky little one called “Perks”, and chatting with the young baristas there, found out that it was owned by a woman named Gayle and was a nice place to work. Emma filled out an application and went back several times to follow up and after several months finally got an interview and was hired.

Perks differed from Starbucks or The Coffee Bean in that besides the typical range of coffee and smoothie type drinks and pastries; they also served a small selection of Paninis, Crepes, soups and other cooked foods. This made it a bit more challenging since it was a small place and the barista had to double as a short order cook.

I remember it was frustrating at first for Emma to get up to speed (literally) on the job, initially having trouble blending the drinks and grilling the Panini sandwiches fast enough. It was about six weeks into the work before she started to feel like she had the routine down to an acceptable pace.

The big benefit for Emma was that being such a small place with a small staff, she had the opportunity to learn every aspect of the business, including ordering, stocking, cleanup, and cashing out. Gayle the owner would also have regular meetings with her small staff and took their suggestions on improvements in the work process. Toward the end of her year there she was even doing a few shifts as the manager and helping with the training of the newer staff.

I recall my own experience some thirty years earlier at age twenty working as a cook at “The Cottage Inn”, a family owned restaurant in my home town of Ann Arbor where I worked side by side with one of the owners in the kitchen and was treated more like a colleague than just another worker-bee. Besides learning how to prepare and cook food and clean a kitchen from top to bottom, I learned the basic “critical path” skills necessary to have a table’s food all come up about the same time (by analyzing the order and starting the items that took the longest first), skills that would serve me well later in my project management work. Being comfortable and effective working in a kitchen is a useful and self-esteem-building skill for just about anyone, and certainly was for me and for my daughter.

Life takes on a much more promising and positive complexion when, as a young person, you reach a point when you are no longer intimidated interacting older adults in real-world situations. Emma’s confidence and self-esteem soared during that year working at Perks, earning the respect of the owner and her mostly older colleagues.

With that experience under her belt, Emma researched on Craig’s List and found her next job working for another woman-owned business, “The Baker”, a very popular small bakery restaurant. This time she was waiting on table, a challenging job mixing organizational and people skills along with physical stamina. With tips, she was taking home some real money, twice as much she was making as a barista.

Perhaps six months after going to work at The Baker, Emma started to do an occasional shift filling in as the manager when the regular managers were not available. With her growing poise, confidence and communications and logistical skills, Emma took to the job and became the regular manager the two days a week that the main manager took off. The work included managing the rest of the non-cooking staff, including the clean up and cash out at the end of the day.

I’ve been to the restaurant and seen her at work. She manages generally a couple servers, a barista, and a bus person. Since the restaurant is small (holding about 50 people) she has to function as the host (greeting and seating people) and taking any to-go orders over the phone, plus doubling as a server, barista or busing tables herself to give her other staff their breaks. She also has to deal with all customer issues, including at times very difficult and picky regular customers. There are times she has had to ask unruly customers to leave, and even occasionally has had to call the police. Given that, at least when I’ve seen her on the job, she runs the place with grace and aplomb. And based on all the stories she’s regaled me with over her years there, she has rarely lost her cool.

Where Are They Today

Ten years from the date we pulled Eric out of school in eighth grade, and six years after Emma parted company with high school, both kids are now earning their own livings, paying their own bills, and moving forward with their lives, building their own communities, and continuing to seek opportunities to learn and grow.

Though Eric has had much love and support from parents, grandparents, an extended family and a large circle of friends, he has been responsible for charting his own course and steering his own ship. And to continue the metaphor, there have been plenty of rough seas and dangerous shoals along the way. But he has made it through, and I now think I can finally exhale, and realize that this seemingly crazy unschooling idea actually worked.

Emma now lives in her own apartment with her boyfriend, and continues to make her living working as a manager at “The Baker”. Besides that “day job”, she continues to write and hopes to publish her now young-adult science-fiction novel. She continues to participate in her writers group, and take writing classes at UCLA extension, towards that goal.

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.

Education Alternatives 102: Mann, Dewey & Lane

Cooper Zale — Sun, 18 Apr 2010 02:49:42 +0000

Education Innovators Horace Mann, John Dewey & Homer Lane

Following up on my recent “School Alternatives 101” post, I want to share some quotes from three great educational innovators who were “parents” (in this case, all “fathers”) of the three types of educational alternatives I talked about in my post. I want to focus on their visions’ of who drives the educational process, which I believe is a key way to distinguish these three approaches from each other. This may seem like “education-wonk” stuff to some of you, but I think it is really important, even from a parent’s point of view, when considering educational options for your and other kids.

The three innovators I am talking about are…

1. Horace Mann, the progenitor of the American public school system in the early 19th Century.

2. John Dewey, who set the philosophical basis of American secular/progressive/liberal education in the early 20th Century.

3. Homer Lane, a lesser know Briton and contemporary of Dewey, who was the mentor of A.S. Neill and the “free school” movement.

The inspiration for this post was an article by Ronald Swartz in the most recent Spring 2010 Education Revolution Magazine (which is edited by my friend and colleague Ron Miller). Swartz’s piece is titled “John Dewey and Homer Lane: The Odd Couple among Educational Theorists” and focuses on this issue of who drives the educational process. According to Swartz, “Dewey and Lane are the founding fathers of two distinct twentieth century educational reform movements.”

Dewey and Lane represent key “parents” to two of the educational alternatives, “holistic” and “free” schools that I talked about in my previous piece. To enhance and complete the comparison, I think it is useful to compare the ideas of these two to the words of Horace Mann, a Unitarian (like me), and an educational visionary who has had arguably more impact on the American education system over the past 180 years than anyone else. Besides his role launching universal mandatory education of youth in our country, his words speak clearly to the vision of “instructional” schools, the alternative that is clearly predominant in America.

Again, in reading their quotes, we are looking at the process of education, that is, who drives the direction of a kid’s education. Every kid is different, and if the kid that you are concerned about does not seem to be thriving in the conventional instructional school, you may want to try and find and consider a holistic or even a free school.

Note that the italics below are all mine to highlight certain words or phrases in their quotes.

Horace Mann and State-Driven Instructional Education

I get my Mann quotes from a site called “Brainy Quote”…

On education as a tool of societal social engineering…

1. A house without books is like a room without windows. No man has a right to bring up his children without surrounding them with books, if he has the means to buy them.

2. Education alone can conduct us to that enjoyment which is, at once, best in quality and infinite in quantity.

3. Education is our only political safety. Outside of this ark all is deluge.

4. Education then, beyond all other devices of human origin, is the great equalizer of the conditions of men, the balance-wheel of the social machinery.

On the moralistic basis for education as social engineering and reform…

5. Let us not be content to wait and see what will happen, but give us the determination to make the right things happen.

6. Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.

7. If evil is inevitable, how are the wicked accountable? Nay, why do we call men wicked at all? Evil is inevitable, but is also remediable.

8. Jails and prisons are the complement of schools; so many less as you have of the latter, so many more must you have of the former.

And on the teaching process…

9. A teacher who is attempting to teach without inspiring the pupil with a desire to learn is hammering on cold iron.

10. Manners easily and rapidly mature into morals.

I can clearly see in Mann’s quotes his vision that education must be driven by the state, and in fact he was successful in getting his home state of Massachusetts to pass the first universal compulsory education, which inspired other states to follow. Schools alone can save our democracy by instructing all kids on exactly what they need to know to be righteous American citizens.

I think it is particularly interesting that the father of our public school system was not at all about reading, writing and arithmetic (which later became the staples of public education and are the featured skills today in most high-stakes testing). Mann was about instructing all of America’s children – Protestant, Catholic or Heathen – in good non-sectarian Protestant values – on which to build a unifying moral basis for American society (Protestant style, of course).

It was American Catholics, migrating to the U.S. in ever greater numbers throughout the 19th Century, who led the fight to eventually remove this religious indoctrination from the public schools. It was replaced by the “Three Rs” (which facilitated the education of the worker-bees of the Industrial Revolution) that still dominate state-standardized instructional education today.

John Dewey and the Teacher-Driven Holistic Vision

From Dewey’s book, Experience and Education…

1. Unless a given experience leads out into a field previously unfamiliar no problems arise, while problems are the stimulus to thinking… it is part of the educator’s responsibility to see equally to two things: First, that the problem grows out of the conditions of the experience being had in the present, and that it is within the range of the capacity of students; and secondly, that it is such that it arouses in the learner an active quest for information and for production of new ideas.

From Dewey’s essay, “The Child and the Curriculum”…

2. The value of the formulated wealth of knowledge that makes up the course of study is that it may enable the educator to determine the environment of the child, and thus, by indirection, to direct. Its primary value, its primary indication, is for the teacher, not the child. It says to the teacher; Such and such are capacities, the fulfillments, in truth and beauty and behavior, open to these children. Now see to it that day by day the conditions are such that their own activities move inevitably in this direction, toward such culmination of themselves.

Swartz notes in his article that, “For Dewey, the teacher was a behind-the-scenes authority who should help students learn those ideas and values which society considered to be important.” Dewey added this element of the teacher as the highly talented artist that would direct their students own sense of inquiry to obtain the knowledge that society wanted to have, which is beyond Mann’s more external vision of compulsion.

Homer Lane and the Student-Led Free School Vision

In his book, Talks to Parents and Teachers (page 109), Lane says…

The relationship between teacher and child should be pure democracy – the child should not be on the defensive, but should be free to ask all questions… self-government must be given, both in the team play of games and still more in team play made possible for work… We must give responsibility for, say, history and get the class to discuss the syllabus and the allotment of time to the part of it, and to assume responsibility for getting through it.

Swartz calls Lane’s approach “the policy of personal responsibility”, and definitely speaks to an educational curriculum and process driven by the student and not by the state, that breaks radically from both Mann and Dewey. As a contemporary of Dewey, though across the ocean, he was the alternative road less taken to the conventional instructional model put in motion by Mann. Lane was the educational mentor of A.S. Neill, who later started Summerhill, the most famous free school in the world, which has inspired many others, including Sudbury Valley.

As a parent, I think you should know about these three very different types of schools, though many or most families do not have the resources to send their kids to alternative schools, which generally are tuition-based rather than public (tax-based). Depending on your own expectations and your kid’s proclivities for self-direction, learning style and integration of education in real life, you may want to consider these options or add your voice to the beginning effort to broaden the range of public charter school choices.

My partner Sally and I had the resources to homeschool our kids during their high school years in a free school type approach generally called “unschooling”. (See my post titled “Unschooling Rather than High Schooling” about how our son Eric took to this approach.)

The Internally Motivated Learner

Cooper Zale — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 17:00:31 +0000

So what the heck does it mean to be an “internally motivated learner”? Is such an animal the exception or the rule? And can internal motivation drive even formal academic learning? In a culture where conventional wisdom seems to think that most of formal education needs to be mandated and externally motivated to be successfully undertaken, I think these are very important questions.

Certainly infants and toddlers learn most or all of what they learn for internal reasons. Infants don’t need to be motivated or instructed in how to walk, they are driven to do so and through practice, trial, and error they figure out how to do so. Toddlers learn to speak with a minimum of instruction, by listening to people speaking around them and learning to vocalize words and put them together into phrases and sentences. They learn a myriad of other skills involving coordination of their bodies with their brains on their own as well.

Older children learn social skills by playing with other kids and interacting with adults in their lives with perhaps a minimum of instruction (at times unsolicited…*g*). I hear of some kids who learn to read with little adult instruction. I suspect many more could as well once they encounter all the real-world motivations to do so, including being able to read those wonderful stories parents might read to them when those parents are not available for the task.

I say that based on my own kids both learning to type, before they were even teens, unbeknownst to me or their mom, without any external instruction at all. They were motivated by on-line multi-player role-playing games and the player forums that were associated with them.

Those forums in particular, where they often exchanged multi-paragraph posts in the voice of their “in-game” characters, was probably some of the most effective writing training they ever had. Nothing beats writing something that really interests you and that you know will be read and responded to by a number of others. All this was an example of totally internally motivated learning, completely outside the presence of instruction or adult supervision or critique.

In fact, both my kids were fairly accomplished writers by their middle-teen years even though our son left formal school in eighth grade and our daughter after ninth.

Being an internally motivated learner involves saying at some level, clearly (if only to your self), “I want to learn about this” or “I want to learn how to do that”. Once you have freely acknowledged this sort of need, you are much more likely to fully engage all your personal energies and other assets to the task.

We humans are learning machines, but being compelled to learn has a totally different dynamic to it. I have always been good at math and enjoyed much of the advanced math I have learned along the way, including number theory and calculus. But I took my high school math classes because they were required and my college math classes that were also required so I could get that degree in computer science that I was internally motivated to achieve. Interestingly, I have rarely picked up a book on mathematics and never taken a math class that wasn’t required for some larger goal.

Ironically, even though I have worked in information technology for the last 25 years, I have used none of that specific math in my work, and the generic analytical skills maybe indirectly here and there. I think my computer science major was designed to train me for aerospace engineering, a field I never got into, but was big in the 1970s when the University of California curriculum was probably designed.

With the invention and implementation of universal mandatory education in the 19th Century, the view of what motivates a human being to learn completely changed. Prior to this sea change, people had to take their own responsibility to learn or face the consequences of being unable to make their way and earn their living in the world. There wasn’t such a thing as “adolescence”, most young people were able to live in the real adult world by their early teen years.

With the advent of compulsory schooling, there was a paradigm shift. It was now in the state’s interest, and by extension, the state’s responsibility to make sure that everyone had a standardized education that inculcated all these kids from immigrant families with an appropriate set of approved American values. Teaching as a formal “profession” with formal training in certified institutions was invented to facilitate this huge exercise in social engineering. According to John Taylor Gatto, the author of The Underground History of American Education, this shift from personal responsibility to state responsibility, and the general bureaucratization and professionalization of education led to an emerging view that internal motivation was insufficient to get people, particularly kids, to learn what they needed to learn to be functioning adults.

Generation after generation of Americans being required to navigate this compulsory schooling, and a huge and ever growing educational-industrial complex that supports it, has continually reinforced a conventional wisdom that unless kids are forced to go to school, human nature is such that they would choose to learn little or nothing of value to become functioning adults.

In my thinking, this supposed wisdom is a fallacy, as well as going against the basic principles of liberty and self-responsibility our country was founded on. Human beings come into this world, at least for the most part, determined to be all that they can be. We are born learning machines, designed by god, evolution or whatever cosmic forces to be capable of taking ownership in our own development and should be expected, even at a young age, to do so.

If we as a community want to facilitate this learning process we can best do that by trying to create enriched environments, in the real world doing real things wherever possible, and allow and expect kids to choose an environment that best catalyzes their own innate desire to learn. That said, and given nearly 200 years of the conventional wisdom of externally mandated and motivated one-size-fits-all education, I acknowledge that this is a huge paradigm shift that will be difficult for many people to become comfortable with. But I am convinced this is our future, particularly if we envision that future as democratic rather than totalitarian, a partnership between equals rather than a hierarchy of superiors and inferiors.