Some Profiles
Community Learning Centers from the Past

Pioneers in Community-Based Education

by Ron Miller

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Some Profiles

Several names appear again and again in the various chapters of this volume—John Holt, Paul Goodman, Ivan Illich, Paulo Freire, and John Taylor Gatto, in particular. Readers may not be familiar with some of these radical educational writers who have influenced the rise of alternative schools and homeschooling over the last thirty years, and so we introduce them here.

John Holt (1923-1985) taught in private progressive schools in Colorado and the Boston area in the 1950s and early 1960s. Gifted with an uncommon sensitivity to children’s experiences and perspectives, Holt began to realize that conventional schooling routines hindered rather than promoted authentic learning. He published his careful observations in a landmark book, How Children Fail, in 1964, which established him as a leading educational critic just at the time when the civil rights movement and campus unrest were raising the public’s awareness about the flaws of American institutions. Holt wrote numerous articles for popular publications, toured the country speaking to parents and students, and helped many people start “free schools” as alternatives to public schooling. Within the next several years he came out with additional books that presented his educational vision and social critique, including How Children Learn, What Do I Do Monday?, The Underachieving School, Freedom and Beyond, Instead of Education, Teach Your Own, Escape from Childhood, and Learning All the Time. By the early 1970s he concluded that school reform was an inadequate response to the problems of modern education, and began to support families who were educating their children at home, through his newsletter and mail-order resource catalog, Growing Without Schooling. Holt advocated for “unschooling”—allowing children to learn through their interactions with the adult world rather than through formal instruction. He strongly believed that learning is a natural, organic function of the human being that needs to be respected rather than managed. “I want to do away with the idea of compulsory learning, and the idea that learning is and should be separate from the rest of life.”

Paul Goodman (1911-1972) was a poet, essayist, novelist, and scholar who was interested in a wide range of topics, from urban design to psychotherapy (he co-authored a classic text on gestalt therapy) to political theory to education. He was one of the leading American anarchist writers, describing an organic vision of society where “living functions” would be free from coercion and “abstract power.” Although considered romantic and Utopian, Goodman traced his ideas to grassroots populism and John Dewey’s thoughts on participatory democracy. In 1960, Goodman published a critique of corporate industrial society, Growing Up Absurd, that established him as one of the main intellectual influences on the New Left and youth counterculture. During the next few years his writings on the problems of mass schooling in modern society, particularly Compulsory Mis-Education and The Community of Scholars, made him (with John Holt) one of the major voices of the emerging free-school movement. “We can, I believe, educate the young entirely in terms of their free choice, with no processing whatever,” he wrote. “It seems stupid to decide a priori what the young ought to know and then try to motivate them, instead of letting the initiative come from them and putting relevant information and equipment at their service…Free choice is not random but responsive to real situations; both youth and adults live in a nature of things, a polity, an ongoing society, and it is these, in fact, that attract interest and channel need.”

Ivan Illich (1926- ) burst onto the educational scene with his book Deschooling Society in 1970. Illich had been a radical priest involved in popular education and social change through his Center for Intercultural Documentation in Cuernavaca, Mexico. After his book was published, CIDOC attracted various Americans, including John Holt, to courses and discussion groups focusing on the radical transformation of education through the abolition of schooling. Illich argued that the massive growth of institutions in modern corporate society had severely impaired individuals’ and communities’ opportunities to meet their own needs through their own initiatives. Schooling was key to this process, because people were trained at a young age to accept the authority of institutions over their own perceptions and judgments. In Deschooling Society and later books, such as Celebration of Awareness, Tools for Conviviality and Shadow Work, Illich analyzed the institutionalization of modern life and called for people to reclaim their autonomy and local collaboration. Illich wrote that “learning is the human activity which needs least manipulation by others. Most learning is not the result of instruction. It is rather the result of unhampered participation in a meaningful setting.”

Paulo Freire (1921-1997) was exiled from his native Brazil in 1964 for teaching illiterate peasants to critically examine the conditions of their lives. Freire believed that education must serve the cause of social justice by empowering oppressed people and enabling all students to “read the world” critically. He rejected what he called the “banking” conception of education, which seeks to simply deposit knowledge in students’ passive minds for safekeeping, and emphasized a more dynamic educational model involving dialogue and collaboration. Some of his best-known books include Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Education for Critical Consciousness, Pedagogy of Hope, and We Make the Road by Walking, a series of dialogues with Myles Horton, who practiced a similar form of liberatory education at the Highlander Center in Tennessee. Friere’s passionate, radical thinking has inspired many educational writers including Jonathan Kozol, Ira Shor, Henry Giroux and Peter McLaren. According to Freire, education “is never neutral. When we try to be neutral, like Pilate, we support the dominant ideology. Not being neutral, education must be either liberating or domesticating…Students have the right to know what our political dream is. They are then free to accept it, reject it, or modify it. Our task is not to impose our dreams on them, but to challenge them to have their own dreams.”

John Taylor Gatto (1935- ) was named New York City Teacher of the Year three times, and then state Teacher of the Year in 1991. When he addressed the legislature upon receiving this award, he delivered a shocking indictment of public schooling and then left the system to write and lecture around the world. He has become the leading critic of public education in this generation. His book Dumbing Us Down (1992) is widely read among homeschoolers and alternative educators, and his finely crafted essays and speeches have inspired thousands of people who harbor doubts about the school system. Gatto argues, essentially, that public schooling was not designed to assist young people in their intellectual, moral and spiritual development, but to mold them into compliant citizens, employees, and consumers. He insists that genuine learning can only take place in intimate settings where caring adults engage young people in authentic, meaningful experiences (as he did, in resistance to the system, while a teacher in New York). “Was it possible I had been hired not to enlarge children’s power, but to diminish it? That seemed crazy on the face of it, but slowly I began to realize that the bells and the confinement, the crazy sequences, the age-segregation, the lack of privacy, the constant surveillance, and all the rest of the national curriculum of schooling were designed exactly as if someone had set out to prevent children from learning how to think and act, to coax them into addiction and dependent behavior.”

Community Learning Centers from the Past

The Peckham Centre
Created with state funding in 1935, the Peckham Centre in London, England, was designed by two biologists to explore health among working-class people, and the sorts of conditions and things people need to maintain their health. By creating a family club—swimming, cafeteria, gymnasium, plenty of rooms for a wide variety of meeting spaces—and providing annual medical check-ups for the families, the Peckham Centre allowed these scientists to view how adults and children chose to do or create important learning and health activities without professional management of their thoughts or movements. The authors of The Peckham Experiment: A Study of the Living Structure of Society, Innes H. Pearse and Lucy H. Crocker, concluded that “it is not wages that are lacking; nor leaders; nor capacity; certainly not goodwill; but quite simply—and one would suppose ordinary—personal, family, and social opportunities for knowledge and for action that should be the birthright of all; space for spontaneous exercise of young bodies, a local forum for sociability of young families, and current opportunity for picking up knowledge as the family goes along…Health is more, not less, infectious and contagious than sickness—given appropriate circumstances in society for contact.” (The Peckham Experiment, by Pearse and Crocker, was published by Allen and Unwin, London, 1943; p. 274): For more about the Peckham Centre also see, Being Me and Also Us, by Alison Stallibrass (Scottish University Press).

The Learning Exchange
In Deschooling Society (1970), Ivan Illich suggested that computers could be used to create “learning webs.” Illich wrote, “What makes skills scarce on the present educational market is the institutional requirement that those who can demonstrate them may not do so unless they are given public trust, through a certificate. We insist that those who help others acquire a skill should also know how to diagnose learning difficulties and be able to motivate people to aspire to learn skills. In short, we demand that they be pedagogues. People who can demonstrate skills will be plentiful as soon as we learn to recognize them outside the teaching profession.” (p. 90.) Illich suggested using computers to match up peers in every field of work or topic with people who wish to meet them as a way to avoid unwanted pedagoguery.

During the early 1970s, such learning webs were emerging around the US. John Holt described them in his book Instead of Education: Ways to Help People Do Things Better (1976). To give one example, he wrote about the Learning Exchange of Evanston, IL, that followed Illich’s proposal closely. The Learning Exchange was started in 1971 and ended some time in the mid-seventies. “The Exchange,” Holt reported, “began its work in a borrowed office, with a borrowed phone, a small file box and some 3 x 5 cards, and $25 from Northwestern University. Six months and $27 later it had built up a file of two hundred and ninety topics. By the end of 1973 The Exchange had its own office, a staff or four, and the names of fifteen thousand persons interested in two thousand topics.” Holt discussed numerous other learning resources and networks, distinguishing between “S-chools,” institutions where education is compulsory, and “s-chools,” diverse places where people willingly come to learn.

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© Copyright 2000. Ron Miller - All Rights Reserved.
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