Welcome to the Daily KOS educational alternatives group, which intends to focus on applying progressive egalitarian principles finally to one of the last bastions of traditional hierarchical thinking, the United States approach to education. When it comes to education in America, we are advocating “many educational paths”, that is the availability of a broad spectrum of profoundly different learning venues including conventional schools, alternative schools, and alternatives to school like homeschooling and unschooling.
We are committed to discussing education outside of the box. If we can engage teachers, parents, and citizens in general in this kind of conversation, without nay saying ideas just because they're strange to us, then we've succeeded in something. The group exists to pull all those people together.
Read on for how to participate and more on what we are all about...
Education Alternatives Group Logistics & Governance
Here is how the group works, at least for now...
1. Sign up to follow the group by visiting our profile page and
clicking on the little heart next to our name. You need to do this even if you are a part of our group!
2. Leave a comment below if you would like to be invited to participate actively in the group. When you join the group, you'll fit into one of these three roles:
Admin - Facilitates the group by managing publication schedule, plus moving people in and out of the Admin and other roles.
Editor - Manages the queue of pieces submitted for publication on the group's page and decides when to publish each
Contributor – Submits pieces to the group's queue for publication
3. If you don't want to serve in one of those roles but are interested in just reading our diaries, that's great! Just sign up to follow us. (See item 1 above.) Remember... even if you are an admin, editor or contributor you should still sign up to follow the group!
4. For the moment, we are running the group in "a publish as we write" mode. As we gain more following and more writers, we may reassess and work with a publishing schedule. In the meantime, write, write, write and get your diaries in the queue. Let us know through the group messaging system if you have thoughts on timing for publication and we will do our best to accommodate you!
More on our shared values...
One Size Does Not Fit All
From the experience of many families, and the sobering statistics about how many kids don’t finish high school, we have come to the conclusion that the ubiquitous, one-size-fits-all conventional instructional public school does not, and cannot work for every youth, no matter how fully it is funded or how much it is “reformed”.
Making Conventional Instructional Schools Better
One of the main things that drags down the conventional instructional public school is that teachers have to try to teach all the youth who don’t belong or otherwise don’t want to be there. There is a mythology that if teachers are good they can motivate any student to learn the required material. But we hear teacher after teacher rightly complain about having to spend so much time and effort trying to motivate many of their students to learn and at the same time deal with the behavior problems of those who won’t.
So many of the features of a standard classroom - rules clamping down on behavior, required graded homework, and copious behavior modification techniques – are there to try to motivate or coerce students to learn who do not want to be there. For the rest of the students, who are interested in what the teacher has to teach them, these strong-arm tactics and the general negative energy of the other youth can poison the classroom environment.
Try asking a teacher how different it would be if every student in their class wanted to be there. They generally say that it would be wonderful, for them and for their students. Wouldn’t the conventional instructional school be transformed by just that one profound change, a teacher interacting with a classroom full of students truly interested in and grateful for the lessons the teacher was providing?
How Else Could a Kid Get an Education?
There are other schools that are significantly different than conventional public schools. Some are categorized as “holistic”, like Waldorf, Montessori, or those inspired by the education philosophy of John Dewey. Others are called “democratic free schools”, like Sudbury Valley in Massachusetts and the Albany and Manhattan Free Schools in New York.
These “alternative” schools are generally private, because their educational approaches are so profoundly different than the conventional instructional schools, and therefor do not meet the criteria of a highly standardized public education. They are generally more student-directed, including allowing those students leeway to work at their own pace and focus more on areas of interest. This can be great for a self-motivated student with some keen interests, but not necessarily in sync with the state standardized approach to testing and school in general, which assumes, for example, that every fourth grader has had the same instruction in English, math, science and social studies.
The main point is that many of the kids that struggle in our conventional public schools would do much better in one of these “alternative” schools, or even being educated at home (if the family has the resources).
A New “Third Voice” in the Education Debate
It may seem ironic to many progressives that Republicans are often closer to the many educational paths position. They are more likely to support homeschooling, “school choice”, and giving more educational decision making to parents. Then again, Republicans have also been some of the strongest proponents of scripted learning (like Open Court) and high-stakes testing, which makes it so difficult for truly alternative public schools to pass muster.
But beyond the conventional educational platform of both progressives and conservatives, we would like to see the dialog and debate on education and educational policy include a third position that champions “Many Paths” and educational alternatives behind a banner of liberty, democracy, and self-direction, within a context of local community responsibility for educating their young people.
We believe that embracing the idea of “Many Paths” to transform our education system, is sound policy for the 21st century. The dimensions, complexities, knowledge-base and skill sets needed to maintain human society and facilitate our continuing evolution require a profound move away from the “command and control”, one-size-fits-all education system that we developed in the 19th century to address an earlier industrial phase of our evolution. Today’s challenge is to create an enriched environment for learning so that our youth can find satisfying and rewarding careers that also contribute to their communities, which in turn would contribute to our larger common good.