Creating Learning Communities for Cultural Renewal
Elements of a new Educational Vision
For Further Reading
Introduction From Schools to Learning Communities: A Historic Shift
by Ron Miller
This book reflects a new way of thinking about teaching and learning, about curriculum and testing, indeed about the whole institution of schooling, that during the last few years has begun to make a great deal of sense to thousands of parents and educators, and to a growing number of social critics and futurists.
Public education is struggling to adapt to an intellectual, social and cultural transformation that has begun to emerge during the last thirty or forty years. New understandings on the frontiers of science, a growing awareness of the threats to planetary ecology, and a disruption of local communities and economies by the rise of globalization have made it necessary to rethink many of the basic assumptions that guided the development of modern industrial culture. It is increasingly evident that humanity faces the task of moving from an age of modernity into an uncharted post-industrial or post-modern future. By "modernity" I mean a cluster of ideas, beliefs, technologies and institutions that emerged with factory production in the early nineteenth century and become solidly established during the early twentieth century. Modernity is a form of culture, a dominant worldview, that emphasizes rapid progress and growth over tradition and stability, material wealth over spiritual depth, individual success over communal solidarity, and technological mastery over organic process. Cultural historians such as Lewis Mumford, Theodore Roszak and Jeremy Rifkin have argued convincingly that modernity essentially views society as a great machine that needs to be managed by expert technicians, a machine whose purpose is to turn natural and human "resources" into commodities and profits.
Historians of education confirm that the designers of public schooling were motivated by an early version of this view of the world. Horace Mann, the leading promoter of state school systems in the 1830s, explicitly sought to promote the rise of corporate industry, and this meant training a then agrarian and self-reliant population to accept the terms and conditions of work that factory owners offered them. Schooling was conceived as a form of social discipline that would enable the industrial state to harness the energies of the young generation to the demands of a competitive system of production. Industrialism became an increasingly powerful force in American culture after the Civil War, and its emphasis on expert management was deliberately applied to schooling by policymakers who sought "social efficiency." Historian David Tyack demonstrated in his classic study The One Best System that school leaders in the late nineteenth century believed that "obedience to bureaucratic norms" was essential to industrial development and social progress, and so "they tried to create new controls over pupils, teachers, principals, and other subordinate members of the school hierarchy." They succeeded.
Consequently, public education as it developed in the twentieth century became a mechanized process of inducting young people into the culture of modernity. By "mechanized" I mean carefully managed and controlled by a central authority, so that personal differences of style, desire, and aspiration were blurred by the need to conform to standards and preestablished roles. At the time, and still very much in our time, this definition of education has made sense; in a culture that values efficiency, competition, and the production and consumption of material goods above all else, what other purposes could schools serve? For the most part, modern people have not stopped to consider what a dramatic departure we have made from long-established understandings of what education is and what it is for. Our political, business and educational leaders seek to train young people to fulfill their roles in a vast, impersonal social machine, but in traditional (that is, pre-mechanized) cultures, young people were welcomed into the adult culture through apprenticeship and deeply meaningful rites of passage. Modern education equips individuals to compete for success in a system that only cares about their skills and credentials, while traditional cultures inducted (or shall we say conducted) young people into a social fabric where they had an identity that gave their lives meaning.
This is not a nostalgic appeal for a romanticized past. Clearly the individualism of the modern age has liberated us from oppressive fixed identities. Apprenticeship was in many cases an exploitative and class-bound institution. Even so, we are beginning to realize that we have sacrificed upon the altar of modernity some crucially important dimensions of a whole, integrated human life. We are beginning to see the need to reinvent social and economic arrangements that nourish the soul and reconnect the individual to culture, to community, to the organic processes and cycles of the earth, and to avenues of spiritual fulfillment. Traditional forms of education were grounded in personal relationship and shared commitment to a craft or to communal purposes, while a mechanistic education is impersonal--it assigns children to grade levels and measures their success with objective symbols. Learning does not arise from the activity at hand but is divided into subjects and packaged into textbooks and lesson plans. Teachers are not accredited for their mentoring skills but for their training in methods of class management and curriculum delivery. Schools are not accountable directly to students and families but to boards of education, state agencies, and mandates of the federal government. A mechanized system of education is not devoted primarily to learning but to efficient management of human "capital."
During the past twenty-five years, education has become ever more standardized, ever more mechanical, as it serves a political and economic agenda of competition, production, and corporate profit. Young people in the present system are not perceived as growing, active human beings who seek meaning and connection to the world, but as units of production whose academic achievements contain primarily economic value. The age of modernity has reached its zenith, so that now even first graders--six year old children--are rigorously tested to ensure that they fit into the system, while those who resist mechanistic discipline are sedated with powerful drugs.
However, the human spirit rebels against mechanization, and this system is not sustainable. In the long evolution of civilization, the age of modernity is a brief span indeed. Human beings have lived close to the land, attuned to the rhythms of the day and of the seasons, in small bands or communities, for eight or ten thousand years; we have lived in a highly mechanized, centralized, industrial culture for about a hundred and twenty, give or take a few. We have been so dazzled and pampered by the sheer output of industrialism, from automobiles to antibiotics, from motion pictures to genetic engineering, that we have come to accept as common sense that modern technological culture is the pinnacle of human achievement. But in fact, it is far too soon, after only a hundred-odd years, to declare the modern experiment a success. On the contrary, an increasing number of observers, including scientists, philosophers, historians, artists and spiritual seekers, are beginning to warn us that if modern trends continue, we are headed for an enormous cultural and ecological disaster. We are beginning to learn, they say, that human beings cannot survive in such a mechanized and systematized world. The moral, psychological, and spiritual costs, which are never figured into corporate balance sheets or the Gross National Product, will prove to be painfully high.
Many of us are convinced that school systems, as they were purposely designed and as they currently function, are inhumanly mechanical, undemocratic, damaging to personal growth and community health, and, in a word, obsolete. We argue that they reflect a mechanistic view of the world that denies the noblest and best qualities of the human spirit. We are not the first generation to make these claims. From the very beginning of modern education, various rebels have questioned the mechanical values of mass schooling: In the 1840s, the Transcendentalists (Emerson, Alcott, Thoreau and their friends) objected to Horace Mann's efforts. Later in the nineteenth century thoughtful educators such as Francis Parker and John Dewey began developing what would come to be known as progressive education--an attempt to engage young people's intelligence and creativity in meaningful rather than mechanical ways of learning. In the early twentieth century, the ideas of Maria Montessori, Rudolf Steiner, and Francisco Ferrer inspired radically new definitions of what "schools" and education could and ought to be. Most significantly, perhaps, in the 1960s a group of educators and social critics, including Paul Goodman, John Holt, A. S. Neill, Edgar Z. Friedenberg, George Dennison, Jonathan Kozol, Herbert Kohl, Neil Postman, Charles Weingartner, Ivan Illich and others explicitly criticized the "technocratic" nature of schooling and called for a complete transformation in our understanding of education.
The writings of this last group, appearing against the background of the civil rights movement and massive student protest, were widely read and contributed to a brief period of substantive educational reform in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Out of this creative period came hundreds of free schools (most of which failed to survive long), public alternatives (which paved the way for magnet and charter schools), and the homeschooling movement. Although the "revolution" that many sought in the 1960s did not materialize, significant cracks did begin to appear in the system of public education. The voices of "romantics" and dissidents struck a responsive chord among parents and educators who realized that something vital was missing from the schooling of modernity. Consequently, while the system has become even more rigid, hundreds of thousands of families have abandoned public schools to teach their children at home or to enroll them in numerous alternatives. Creating learning communities for cultural renewal
The model of "learning communities" that we present in this book follows from this dissenting tradition. It is not simply another educational fad or a modest type of school reform but an attempt to rebuild society's educational system on a post-modern cultural foundation that is democratic and person-centered rather than mechanical, as well as ecological and life-centered rather than driven exclusively by economic forces. We offer the idea of the "cooperative community lifelong learning center" as a seed for social and cultural renewal--a form of education that reclaims the organic qualities of learning from pre-mechanistic times for a post-modern culture in the making. Some of the writers here believe that community learning centers would replace schools as the primary educational agency in a truly democratic, collaborative, sustainable society. More specifically, many of us believe that diverse expressions of open-ended, evolving, community-based education would replace fixed and hierarchical school systems. A post-industrial society may still find a need for various "schools" as we now know them--places where children go to be instructed by professional educators--but this society would no longer be obsessed with, or limited by, the mechanistic trappings of control and efficiency that for more than a century have made educational processes subservient to political and economic agendas. Places of learning would not be held hostage to narrow indicators of "accountability" such as grades, test scores, or graduation rates; learning would not be constrained by textbooks and curricula established by anonymous bureaucrats; teaching would not be made narrow and petty in the service of "standards" that elite commissions impose on all learners of all persuasions in all communities.
The contributors to this remarkable volume explore what teaching and learning could look like in such a society. They represent many different experiences and perspectives: Some are innovative educators who demonstrate that when we shed conventional assumptions, schools can become dynamic, exciting places of learning that are responsive to students, families and communities. In this book's section on "school-based community learning centers," eight writers (many of them recognized leaders in the field of alternative education) explain different forms that some of these schools have taken. Other authors are homeschoolers--parents who have altogether removed their children from the institution of schooling and then sought other ways, more fluid and organic ways, to reconnect their children's learning to the larger community; one result is the model of the "homeschool resource center" so well described in the next section of the book. Still other contributors are scholars or activists who have explored learning in other community settings, or in the emerging "virtual" world of the Internet. Finally, the section on "philosophical roots" explains the ideas, the ways of thinking, that have moved the authors of this book, and so many other people in recent years, to seek alternatives to the modern system of schooling.
Some of these ideas are explicitly pedagogical. That is to say, many pioneers of the "learning community" concept are primarily concerned with how young people actually learn, and how we as adults can best help them learn. As John Holt argued so forcefully in several popular books published between the 1960s and 1980s, learning comes naturally to human beings, especially to children, and the more we control it and parcel it out and measure it and push it, the harder it becomes. Give young people an interesting, encouraging, caring, and supportive environment, and they will learn, just as they will breathe and eat and grow taller. Mechanized schooling is not intrinsically interesting to most children, not encouraging, not caring, and not supportive, and so if we are truly dedicated to learning, say these authors, we must provide another kind of environment. A learning community is explicitly a place where caring, responsive people nourish each other's learning in the context of authentic relationship.
Other advocates of learning communities are more obviously concerned with the social and political implications of this new model of education. Aside from any pragmatic notion of what kinds of learning environments work better pedagogically, anyone who is committed to democratic values should be dismayed by the rigid system of thought control and behavior management that goes by the name of "public schooling." While Jefferson (and even Horace Mann at times) argued that publicly supported common schools formed the backbone of a democratic society--an argument that liberals and progressives today continue to defend passionately--the historical record seems to suggest that massive institutions controlled by centralized bureaucracies do not--indeed cannot--serve the diverse interests of people in their intimate communities. In the late nineteenth and then the twentieth century, the successful effort by political and economic elites to construct "the one best system" obliterated cultural, intellectual, religious and other forms of human diversity. Standardized education is an intellectual and spiritual monoculture that diminishes rather than encourages participation in the affairs of the community and state. Students are not taught that their voices matter, that they can collaboratively determine the conditions of their lives, but the opposite--that success comes only from playing by the established rules and competing against one's fellow citizens for scarce economic and social rewards. In contrast, the learning community model deliberately involves participants in discussion, collaborative decision-making, and a sense of involvement in and responsibility toward the surrounding world.
We find still another perspective on the learning center phenomenon in the writings of futurists and other observers who perceive that new scientific/cultural "paradigms" have emerged over the past thirty or so years. These writers believe that the worldview of modernity has entered a period of transition or transformation, and that sometime in the future (whether in ten years or a hundred is hard to determine) humanity will in fact inhabit a global civilization as dramatically different from twentieth century modernism as our present culture is from medieval times! (This emerging worldview is sometimes called "Gaian," after the ancient Earth goddess Gaia who personified the organic unity of life on the planet.) These observers claim that the global ecological crisis, new findings in science, the rapid pace of technological innovation and other factors will force modernist culture to evolve to a more complex and dynamic--and ecologically aware--set of fundamental beliefs. As this transition proceeds, they say, it will become ever more evident that mechanistic systems of schooling are simply obsolete. Centralized, standardized forms of learning will increasingly be perceived as ineffective, stifling, and anachronistic, for they do not embody the more dynamic and holistic understanding of reality that the emerging paradigms represent. According to this view, the homeschooling movement is not merely a rebellion against public schools by a random lot of libertarians, but the first significant wave of a new educational culture in the making. Elements of a new educational vision
Despite the diversity of perspectives brought together in this volume, several themes appear consistently across the chapters. All of the authors are concerned with reclaiming a sense of authentic personhood from the roles we play in modern society--roles such as expert, teacher, student, consumer, employee. Each individual possesses (or simply is) a complex personality containing many dimensions of experience, knowledge, feeling, and purpose. According to the contributors to this volume, social institutions need to be made more responsive to this unfolding and dynamic complexity. Roles should not be frozen in place by the rules or the power structure of an institution, particularly an institution devoted to learning!
Second, this emphasis on the uniqueness of each individual does not imply an atomistic society in which every one simply looks out for his or her own interests. As we find throughout the "new paradigm" literature (systems theory, holism, etc.), there is a recognition of larger contexts within which individuality flourishes; we are all whole and our wholeness deserves to be recognized and respected, but at the same time we are part of larger wholes--family, community, society, culture, the biosphere of the planet, and some even larger dimension of cosmic purpose, which many people term the "spiritual" dimension. Not all the authors here are explicit about this holistic worldview, but any reader who is expecting a book so supportive of homeschooling to be a manifesto for rugged individualism or Adam Smith-style free market solutions to social problems is in for a surprise. The connection made between "learning" and "community" in this book is the very heart of its argument. Learning is a relational endeavor; it connects human beings to each other and to the world. Competition is one form of relationship, but a very limited one, and it is dangerous when elevated above all other forms. This book describes a vision of society in which mutual encouragement, support, and love take their rightful place above competition.
A third common theme might be termed "participation," as in participatory democracy. All the authors here suggest, if they do not say so outright, that individuals should be directly engaged in the affairs of their communities and, as much as possible, concerned with the health of the planet as a whole. If the age of modernity has given us rule by experts and CEOs (which we call technocracy), with the rest of us pacified by consumer goods, electronics and sports, the post-modern society envisioned by these educators is ruled locally and collaboratively by involved and concerned people. Face-to-face dialogues, supplemented perhaps by Internet contacts with people elsewhere in the world, lead to creative, dynamic, and mutually beneficial solving of our common problems. When young people become involved in their communities in this way, they will no longer experience alienation to the point of murderous rage. When people of diverse racial, ethnic and religious backgrounds can come together to learn from each other, rather than remain locked in competition for power and control over centralized institutions, then we have a chance to build what people in the civil rights movement called "the beloved community"--a society truly devoted to peace and human fulfillment.
The authors of this volume do not prescribe exactly what schools or community learning centers should look like in the future. The diversity of models and ideas presented here demonstrate an openness to experimentation, innovation, and flexibility. There is not an ideological litmus test that parents or teachers must pass to qualify as genuine "post-modern" educators. If there are any defining hallmarks of the learning system of the future, they are precisely these qualities of openness and flexibility. I like the term responsiveness, suggesting that educational methods must not be practiced in an experiential vacuum, in the service of fixed ideals or standards, but should adapt to the needs of specific times, places, and personalities. The new educational vision presented in this book is not merely the "romantic," anti-intellectual, child-centered caricature that traditional educators have always projected onto alternative visions, nor is it tied to the leftist critique of education in capitalist society that many progressive scholars are discussing (primarily with each other) in journals and conferences. The models and ideas presented in this book are fresh, authentic, spontaneous manifestations of a true grassroots movement in education. They arise from the experiences and insights that a growing number of parents, educators and social critics have discovered in their search for more meaningful and fulfilling ways of learning and human development. We still have many challenges to work through--for example, making these ways of learning available across lines of class, race, culture and socioeconomic status (what public education, in theory, was supposed to do)--but as this book documents so well, the work has begun. An educational revolution is underway, and it is gaining momentum. The future of learning will be different from the recent past. For further reading - -
(Numerous books address the topics and questions raised in this introduction and throughout this volume. Editor Ron Miller recommends the following titles for beginning to explore these questions more thoroughly): Stephen Arons, Short Route to Chaos: Conscience, Community, and the Re-constitution of American Schooling (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997). Arons, a Constitutional law scholar, examines how the standardization of public schooling has led to increased social conflict rather than democratic consensus during the last half century.
George Dennison, The Lives of Children: The Story of the First Street School (New York: Random House, 1969). This is one of the finest descriptions of the philosophy and practice of alternative education in the entire literature, still fresh and provocative after thirty years.
John Taylor Gatto, Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling (Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1992). A boldly innovative public school teacher explains why he left the system. Mass schooling, he argues, does not support young people's learning or authentic development.
John Holt, Freedom and Beyond (1972, reprinted by Heinemann (Portsmouth, NH, 1995) ), and Instead of Education: Ways to Help People Do Things Better (New York: Delta, 1976). These books encompass Holt's critique of modern schooling and his vision of a community-based alternative. Holt's other books are all worth reading, particularly How Children Fail (1964), Teach Your Own (1981), and Learning All the Time (1989).
Chris Mercogliano, Making It Up as We Go Along: The Story of the Albany Free School (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1998). This stirring book cuts through all the jargon and misconceptions surrounding modern schooling and reflects deeply on what we as adults need to do to nourish our children's hearts and minds.
Ron Miller, What Are Schools For? Holistic Education in American Culture (Brandon, VT: Holistic Education Press, 3rd edition, 1997). Describes the ideas underlying alternative education movements from Rousseau in the eighteenth century to the holistic education movement of the present, and contrasts these alternatives to the social and cultural purposes of the dominant system of schooling.
James Moffett, The Universal Schoolhouse: Spiritual Awakening Through Education (San Francisco: Jossey Bass, 1994). Moffett argues that standardization and obsessive testing run counter to what is truly important in education--the cultivation of every person's inner life. This book presents a compelling vision of a society that promotes authentic learning in many places and contexts.
Nel Noddings, The Challenge to Care in Schools: An Alternative Approach to Education (New York: Teachers College Press, 1992). Noddings, one of the wisest (and most readable) educational theorists of our time, reflects on the nature of education for a democratic society. She argues that we need to replace the emphasis on competition and academic achievement with values of caring and compassion.
Jeremy Rifkin, Biosphere Politics: A Cultural Odyssey from the Middle Ages to the New Age (New York: Crown, 1991). A panoramic view of the development of modernity, showing how science, politics, military power and economics have turned all domains of the natural world into commodities for the benefit of powerful elites.
Theodore Roszak, Person/Planet: The Creative Disintegration of Industrial Society (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1978). Roszak is perhaps the most astute observer of the emerging transition from modern to a more ecological post-modern civilization, and all his books are worth studying. This work presents his ideas concisely and contains a superb chapter on education.
Joel Spring, Education and the Rise of the Corporate State (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972). This is a fine historical study of the social and political forces that have shaped modern schooling. Spring is a radical scholar who, in other work, has written about libertarian alternatives to public schooling.
David Tyack, The One Best System (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974). Acclaimed by other scholars as one of the finest studies of the emergence of modern schooling. Ironically, Tyack supports the concept of public education and would probably not like to see his work cited in this context.
* * * * *
© Copyright 2000. Ron Miller - All Rights Reserved.