Pros: decentralized, individualized, all the cool punk buzzwords.
Cons: drastic educational inequality (rich parents have lots more money to homeschool), bad/abusive parents, lack of accountability, lack of social cohesion.
Thoughts?
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I think there could be some middle ground with smaller classes, less rigid schedules and more non-professional teachers. Probably also more online or digital edutainment stuff to replace frontal classes held by full time teachers.
Regular home-schooling like we have now seems more often like a kind of child abuse in very religious households, but of course other better examples exist as well and I am under no illusion about the child abuse that regular school often is.
I’d agree with this. I don’t think it’s great when a child is only exposed to one other person’s perspective, as it can happen in homeschooling. Even if the person is not a fanatic right wing ‘christian’. That’s what a school is great for, you meet a whole range of people different from you and your immediate family. We could recreate a setting more like a skill library than a school, where kids could visit different specialists and learn from them, largely on their own pace and by their own choice.
They are not exclusive. My children go to public school, to get socialized and learn a broad range of topics including STEM and ELA. They also get homeschooled, to make sure they get a deep education in ethics, practical life skills (eg. gardening, cooking, making their own clothes, carpentry), financial literacy, civics, and art; subjects that are key to a fulfilling, self-reliant life but aren’t always well-covered by formal education.
- Francisco Ferrer, The origin and ideals of the Modern School
- Robert H. Haworth at PM Press
- ed. Mark Bray and Robert H. Haworth, Anarchist Education and the Modern School: A Francisco Ferrer Reader
- ed. Robert H. Haworth and John M. Elmore, Out of the Ruins: The Emergence of Radical Informal Learning Spaces
- ed. Robert H. Haworth, Anarchist Pedagogies: Collective Actions, Theories, and Critical Reflections on Education
- Akilah S. Richards, Raising Free People: Unschooling as Liberation and Healing Work
- Judith Suissa, Anarchism and Education: A Philosophical Perspective
We have used an online school since COVID and it has resulted in flexibility, open mindedness, continuity, and opportunities that were not possible in other schools. We’ve seen our kids are above the fray on the playground, and better capable of resolving conflict. They are natural leaders. The school is platform agnostic, so the kids have an iPad and a Debian laptop and go to work.
Public schools: There is no Mandarin locally. The teachers locally are underpaid due to the political system, and it resulted in a brain drain of teachers. The local school board is in a culture war, and spends whatever money they have to fund studies on why books need to be banned. The other private schools are all Christian and still hit their kids as punishment. None of that.
