Radical School Movement?

I’d like to see radical schooling as a prominent movement in the twenty-first century.  If communities got together, we could uproot the compulsory schooling system, and force an overhaul of traditional curriculum.

Emma Goldman was one of the leaders of the modern school movement, in the United States, back in the beginning of the twentieth century.  Schools, which functioned within this movement, allowed children to be uninhibited by structured classroom environments.  The kids could go outside and play at any time they chose; and reading was not imposed as much as it was coaxed.  Kids would be illiterate, sometimes, until the age of nine.

As much as I would like to extol the efforts of teachers in the United States, they are too often outwitted by our competition based culture.  Knowledge is not dependent on academia.  And it is not for the child’s soul to endure compulsory schooling from morning to afternoon—only to have homework at night.  The well-respected teacher and educational reformer—John Taylor Gatto—suggest that kids need less schooling.  He also suggests that compulsory schooling is a means of spying—not cultivating freethinking individuals.

People love to tinker with things that excite them; words and numbers are two of the more traditional avenues for teachers to incite curiosity in their students.  What if children were—with their families and teachers guidance—encouraged to develop their own lesson plans?  A young person, at a reasonable age, could develop a curriculum around an apprenticeship with a nearby handy man. 

Schooling is intended to create functional habits in learning; and we could do a lot better at instilling, in students, a life-long relationship to their minds if we let each individual set their intellectual trajectory.  Self-directed learning is a tool that provides a means to cultivating independence and creativity.  Sanctioning one building, as the place of learning, in any given community, and requiring that semi-uninterested students go to this building everyday to learn about words and numbers stifles independence and creativity.

What is encouraging is that there are alternative approaches to schooling that are practiced in a great proportion of our nation’s communities.  I am a product of one such alternative educational program myself.  What is unfortunate is that these programs are too narrow and limited.  Alternative education has to stop being an alternative and start being the norm.  Schools need to stop being centralized places to learn from books; schools need to not be schools but hubs for cultural enrichment.

Another movement in schooling which I’ve read about (I already mentioned the modern school movement) is the free school movement.   Free schools involve teachers and community members founding private schools which require no tuition in low income urban areas.  What is radical about this particular movement isn’t so much the curriculum but the organizational structure of the schools, which is far more horizontal than traditional schools.  And this allows these schools the greater flexibility in meeting each child’s needs.   

Radical schooling exists.  We just need to coax it a little so that it may flourish.