Wishtank

From schools to learning communities: A historic shift

by: Dr. Ron Miller

education “self+learning” “home+schooling” “Ivan Illich” school schools

Public education is struggling to adapt to an intellectual, social and cultural transformation that has begun to emerge during the last 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.

Lewis Mumford

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.

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. 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 25 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 120 years, 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, have proven to be painfully high.

Many 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. The argument is 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 others) 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 education could and ought to be.

For example, Montessori wrote (in Spontaneous Activity in Education, 1917) that “he who interrupts the children in their occupations in order to make them learn some predetermined thing . . . thinking it is important to direct their culture, confuses the means with the end and destroys the man for a vanity . . .  Our care of the child should be governed, not by the desire to make him learn things, but by the endeavor always to keep burning within him that light which is called the intelligence.”

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 alternative schools, learning centers and specialized programs within existing schools.

Creating learning communities for cultural renewal

The model of “learning communities” that we are discussing comes 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. The idea is 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. In this reform, community learning centers would replace schools as the primary educational agency in a truly democratic, collaborative and sustainable society — i.e. open-ended, evolving, community-based education could 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.

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, parcel it out, measure 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 — so if we are truly dedicated to learning, say these pioneers, 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 always taught that their voices matter, that they can collaboratively determine the conditions of their lives, but often 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 (e.g. David Ray Griffin, Charlene Spretnak, Fritjof Capra, Hazel Henderson, et al.) 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 world view 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

The post-modern educational vision includes the reclaiming of a sense of authentic personhood from the roles we play in modern society — roles such as expert, teacher, student, consumer, employee, et al. Each individual possesses (or simply is) a complex personality containing many dimensions of experience, knowledge, feeling and purpose. According to thinkers of this mode, 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.

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. Post-modern education has 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. Post-modern education holds 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, with the remainder of the population 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 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.

It is impossible to prescribe exactly what schools or community learning centers should look like in the future. The diversity of models and ideas being offered 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. The term responsiveness fits: 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.

Pioneers in community-based education

Several names appear again and again in the history of alternative education — John Holt, Paul Goodman, Ivan Illich, Paulo Freire and John Taylor Gatto to name a few. These radical educational writers have influenced the rise of alternative schools and homeschooling over the last thirty years.

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,” he wrote.

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 (coincidentally titled 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 by some to be 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 (1926–2002 ) 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.

Ivan Illich

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.

Paulo Freire
Photo by Lia Costa Carvalho

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.

John Gatto

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, Illinois, 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.

A revolution unfolding

In this essay, I have sketched an overview of a new “paradigm” in education, a new way of thinking about the essential meaning of teaching, learning and schooling. Global and cultural forces are making our current educational systems increasingly obsolete, and the desperate response of policymakers — i.e. more control, more authoritarian management, more testing — does not address these underlying new realities. Freedom and diversity, not standardization, will be the hallmark of learning environments in the unfolding post-modern era. Educational settings will become more fluid, more flexible and more responsive to learners and their communities than they are in the over-managed technocratic society of today. Educational dissidents of the past two centuries have planted seed ideas that are just now gaining relevance and recognition. An educational revolution is in the making.

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