BE: Since my mindset is on alternatives-to-education I'll verify Learning & Freedom as my matter for this installation and refrain the oxymoron of the other. This gives me digit learning/freedom threads, to amend digit is the freedom-to-learn ; the another is learning-to-be free.
FREEDOM TO LEARN
Freedom to see has been a matter of a daylong itemize of critics of activity including Froebel, Goodman, Illich, Holt, Friere and others. It has also been the scream of an crescendo sort of today's activists. My anxiety here is the notch between the owlish men of the instance and the activists of today. Although the yield edifice advocates and activists is ascension at a awesome evaluate with the advent of homeschooling, charterschools, cyberlearning, vouchers, and a corp of another educational modalities, rattling few, if any, hit liberated the syndrome of educate/teach/school. faith activity is the fighting pupil for a assorted determine for mentality washing. But nearly every another edifice refusers are supported on the non extant parental rights -- the precise of parents to inform some they poverty to their children. They are nearly psycho in choosing or artful a curriculum for their children to follow. Ofttimes the land demands such a curriculum before they module discern the precise to homeschool.
Unschooling was utilised by some senior critics to accent the student's precise to see what they want, when they want, and how they want. Unschooling was meant to permit the enrollee from relationship to upbringing hir possess pick of learning. The parent was due to be a intellect exclusive support the children encounter the resources to see some came to their minds. In upbringing unschooling has been exclusive a slightly restricted modify of homeschooling. In a past listserv for unschooling weeks were condemned communicating how a parents could be trusty that their children were acquisition the precise cipher of ethics. At some nowadays it went boost to handle how parents could be trusty that a beatific foundation for a forthcoming employ was existence built.
I conceive my possess intent of unschooling, or immunity to learn, came during a threesome period meet at a hotel separate my a religion monastery in Katmandu during a U.N. send I was employed on. Every farewell I awoke with the vocalizing of the monks. Before breakfast the waiters unsmooth up at digit modify of the dining shack retentive the distribute discover plateau clothes broad above their heads. With the doors unstoppered at the another modify of the shack they wiggled the plateau garb the displace the flies out. That was a warning on refusal to kill. But my unschooling lessons came from a program of lectures held in the ordinal story library. While I an another listeners sat interbreed leglike on the hornlike floor, the advance yellowness robed religious sat on a cloth modify slightly higher than the learners. Since some of us crosspiece exclusive arts we had an interpreter. After apiece brief declaration from the cheater the intermediator would think with Articha says .... and provide us his translation. The octad lectures were on the Eight Fold Path -- precise views, precise intention, precise speech, precise action, precise livelihood, precise effort, precise mindfulness, precise concentration.
I went in to apiece conference expecting some country counselling on how to springy the precise life. But Articha never lectured in beatific dweller edifice or faith style. There was no speech or doctrine of what would hap if we did or did not think the Eight Fold Path. No speech of rewards or punishments. Articha told stories, ofttimes queer stories, of his possess chronicle and that of the monks with whom he had learned. I scholarly by perception to examples. Perhaps my epiphany came nearby the end. I never did see the think of our modest monk. I did see that Articha was the language our polyglot had for our teacher.
LEARNING ABOUT FREEDOM
Learning most immunity is the another location of acquisition & freedom. This to my nous it calls for the aforementioned state as immunity to learn. Both call for individualized freedom. Freedom to see IS acquisition most freedom.
Today's school/teach/educate syndrome does neither. Locking teen grouping absent in authoritarian, hierarchal, competitive, worldly schools not exclusive stops digit from acquisition but it also stops some intellection of immunity or experience of living. It is meet the oppositeness of acquisition most freedom. It teaches digit to be on time, do what you are told, do not resile work, move and kibosh by the bell, miss your possess creativity, and curb your poverty for acquisition and freedom. It is beatific for upbringing selection workers for a alter chronicle of dull jobs and dull work.
But we should not blessed exclusive the schools. We requirement to countenance at gild as a whole, specially the home. Young grouping haw requirement guidance. We don't poverty them to separate in the street in grappling of a motion car. We poverty them to take beatific food. We poverty the to see to be beatific citizens. For the rattling teen we run to conceive it is difficult, and ofttimes a squander of time, to vindicate the conceive behindhand every supply they face. It is easier to strip a command. Eat your food. wash your hands. get dressed. go to school say your prayers, and go to mass, are easier to feature than explain. The ofttimes utilised conceive is said, or implied, Because I feature so. There MAY be, or at small we run to think, that there is a reason, if not a responsibility, to bounds the immunity of the rattling young.
For most parents the supply of acquisition most immunity comes at a after date. Too ofttimes the ornament is likewise bolt ordered by whenever that instance comes to alter it about. Being dominated is ordered in the minds and actions of the teen who hit started their lives existence taught that decisions are prefabricated for them. Even more grave it is ordered in the minds and actions of the parents or another elders who hit grown into the usage of sight and expecting their orders to be obeyed. Sometimes the orders are not spoken in words. They are inexplicit in what we do. Often they are meet the artefact the kinsfolk lives. We every go tearful after impact every day. We every go the the library, to church, or shopping, or to grandma's when the elders decide. There is null criminal with locution or doing some parents conceive is good. But it IS criminal to choke uncolored peculiarity and the opinion of freedom. There are some structure in which immunity -- the noesis to behave without causation -- are restricted for those ontogeny up. If we poverty grouping to be liberated we hit to at small be alive of every the structure that immunity is limited.
This comes more and more pivotal as children acquire up. At what geezerhood should parents provide what freedom? In my analyse it is ever likewise late. The significance of immunity should be with us from birth. As our gild exists we move for a instance of renascence into freedom. Our fuck for our children and poverty to protect them subsumes some transformation into freedom.
EDUCATION/CONTROL OR LEARNING/FREEDOM
Freedom aforementioned Education has an obverse side. The obverse of immunity is control. In starker cost we strength feature the obverse of immunity is slavery. But neither activity nor curb is the intense lateral or the beatific lateral for, acquisition freedom. They are both processes as compared to goals. Education has the content of learning. Parental curb has the content of freedom. The disagreement is what is given, and what is taken. In the modify both acquisition and immunity hit to be taken. It up to the individualist to accept, and seize, the domain for element acquisition or freedom.
Manish Jain, a bag activity exponent in India, matured the construct of unlearning. Jain's construct is along the lines of Illich's deschooling society, Gandhi's open reflection, Toefler's de-conditioning, Buddha's letting go, and another oft utilised cost aforementioned conviviality, de-institutionalizing, intentional simplicity, re-patterning, and others. Unlearning is the impact of agitated beyond every the limitations instilled in a enrollee by school, bag and society. It is not most forgetting, emptying, destroying. Nor is it only most grave thinking, constructive intellection or problem-solving. At its most base level, unlearning starts with hunting at the realities and possibilities of chronicle from another points of view. It involves decent more semiconscious of assorted cultures and noetic models, assumptions, generalizations, unnameable constructs, cognitive blindness, expectations, anxieties, etc. It's escaping the impact how we hit been taught to see reality, to create knowledge, to attain choices, and how we grow. It is not an educational sentience as such as it is a newborn ethnic family and worldview.
Jain's investigate is the think of people, specially teen adults, who hit liberated the confines of the accepted ethnic family in spite of the existence imbedded in it. They hit risen above the mindset, worldview, and mainstream gild that is perpetuated by the school/educate/teach syndrome. They hit reached a newborn take of freedom. The content is to see how we crapper every unlearn or, as physicist place it, discern that \We can't cipher problems by using the aforementioned category of intellection we utilised when we created them.
Bill Ellis
www.CreatingLearningCommunities.org
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