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The White Paper PDF
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Bill Ellis
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Aug 07, 2003 18:42 PDT
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The white paper Life Long Learning, -- the road to the future is now
available in a pdf file you can download and print the URL is:
http://www.creatinglearningcommunities.org/resources/Life-longLearning.pdf
It has been prepared by an editorial task group with input, commets and
suyggestions from many sources.
It's goal is to inform those not in the Homeschool and AltEd communities
that a major transformation of the way we learn, and of the way future
cizens are introduce into society, is happening.
The paper is for you to use any way you wish. It is not copyrighted, nor
fixed in cement. Just some ideas for moving society and learning to their
next step in evolution.
Please forward to colleagues, newsletters, information media, education
scholars, progressive writers and others who are open the examining the
future of learning.
Read, use, and enjoy.
********************THE WHITE PAPER**************************
lIFE LONG LEARNING
In the past three decades, there has been a growing
movement to
reinvent the way citizens learn and how young people are introduced into
society. Homeschooling, charter schools, cyberschools, unschooling,
life-long learning, Waldorf schools, and Sudbury schools are just a few of
the elements of this movement. The movement has been growing exponentially
each decade since 1980. It has become a challenge to the traditional
school/teach/educate system. Life-long learning has been promoted by
management guru Peter Drucker in "Post Capitalist Society" on one end of
the
spectrum and, on the other end, by Elise Boulding in "Building Global Civic
Culture," and by many scholars in between.
The bottom line in this movement is to provide the
freedom,
opportunity and resources for self-learners of all ages, with their
families
and in community, to choose to learn what they want, when they want and how
they want -- to self-learn.
RECOGNITION
In spite of the rapid growth of this movement, it has
drawn little
positive attention from governments. Professional educators and their
unions
have shown concern that the proliferation of homeschooling will draw funds
away from the public school system. A few public school systems have
accepted the challenge and established special programs to provide would-be
homeschoolers and other self-learners more autonomy within the public
school
system. Some have established parent-teacher programs that depend on
parental involvement and give parents greater autonomy in the learning
process. But, as parents are increasingly recognizing that personal liberty
and private protection from control by majority rule applies to their
children's learning, none of the existing systems have completely
incorporated that concept. Nor do they fully meet the needs of our
information society which requires a life-long learning system to provide
for each individual's continual learning processes, as detailed in the work
of writers and thinkers from John Holt and Alfie Kohn to Daniel Pink and
Howard Gardner, among so many others.
Foundations, likewise, have been slow to rise to the
challenge and
opportunity that is unfolding. The millions of dollars for public schools,
coming from all levels of government, is followed by millions more coming
from private foundations. But little, if any, of this private funding is
available for the many non-public school experiments being undertaken. A
search of the philanthropy databases with words like "homeschooling" comes
up with no program in any foundation. Whereas a search under "schools" or
"education" comes up with many thousands. Individual appeals to hundreds of
foundations by "homeschool support groups," "learning co-ops" and other
forms of nonschool learning communities are regularly returned with the
words "this proposal does not fit into our current program of support."
MOTIVATION
Motivations for moving toward self-learning and
abandonment of
traditional public schooling are many. Perhaps the most prevalent is
parental concern about the loss of control of the learning of young
children. Many families want to take direct responsibility for their
curriculum, approach to learning, and the principles and values upon which
these are based. Some parents believe that the public school system
instills
values which run contrary to those of their family. Some are explicitly
guided by their religious beliefs to direct the education of their
children.
Others have had disturbing experiences with schoolyard bullies, unfeeling
teachers, or misdirected bureaucracies. A few hold that government
support
is inherently controlling, and that their tax dollars are binding families
to a failing system.
Self-learners are also influenced by education critics,
philosophers
and religious leaders. Some, like Ivan Illich, believe our current life,
including school, is based on the principle of work now for future rewards.
They urge that schooling, and life, be convivial and vernacular. That is,
that learning and work should be carried out in joyful collaboration with
family, friends and neighbors. And that it should be embedded in the local
culture, ecology, and friendships.
With Paulo Friere, some see schools as perpetuating the
socioeconomic
rich/poor status quo and preventing the natural social evolution that would
occur if future citizens were given more freedom to self-learn in their own
families, communities, and nature.
Following John Holt and others, many believe that every
brain, that
is every student, is unique and no two are prepared to learn the same thing
at the same time in the same way. They believe that schooling is not an
efficient way to learn, nor for future citizens to be introduced into
society.
Most great philosophical traditions, including those
embodied in
Gandhi, Tagore, Aurobindo and Krishnamurti, recognize a spiritual component
to learning, teaching that knowledge is more than a way to get a job or
score well on a standardized test; that it is the purpose for living, it is
being human. Rabindrnath Tagore started his learning community,
Santiniketan, to transform the human mindset from self-interest,
competition
and materialism to mutual aid, cooperation, and the love of learning.
Growing out of a variety of personal, philosophical,
educational, or
religious motivations, the life-long self-learning movement continues to
expand.
PROOFS OF EFFECTIVENESS
It is impossible to measure the success of self-learning
with tests,
grades, and scores. Perhaps the most interesting successes are found among
those learners who do not flourish in a traditional setting with standard
measurements of success. These individuals are free to blossom in their own
ways and do -- anecdotal evidence abounds about happy and successful
learners who have traveled a nontraditional path to their own personal
success.
Self-learners are equally honored among our greatest
leaders. Thomas
Edison, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Abigail Adams, Benjamin
Franklin, the Wright Brothers, Helen Keller, Albert Einstein, and Margaret
Mead are only a few of those who have learned without school. The
newspapers
are filled with stories of less well-known successes. Ryan Abradi, of
Maine,
showed an interest in numbers at an early age, so his parents let him stay
home and self-learn; by age 10 he was working his way through second-year
college calculus. Caitlin Stern of Haines, Alaska, stayed out of school and
became a recognized expert by studying bald eagles in the wild. Jedediah
Purdy, a self-learner from West Virginia, graduated summa cum laude from
Harvard University; in 1996 he was selected as a Truman Scholar and as West
Virginia's nominee for the Rhodes Scholarship. He then went on to Yale Law
School and, in the meantime, wrote a best selling book.
The growth rate of self-learning is a partial measure of
its success.
From a few scattered homeschoolers in 1980, perhaps 20,000, the number has
grown, according to Newsweek Magazine, to over 200,000 in 1990, and into a
broad integrated network of an estimated 2,000,000 today.
Considerable research has shown that students learn much
more easily
when they self-learn. As long ago as 1930, the "8 Year Study" of 30
special
schools demonstrated that: "The most effective schools used a different
approach to learning. Instead of organizing learning by subjects, they
organized it around themes of significance to their students." There seemed
to be an inverse relationship between success in college and formalized
education as opposed to student selected learning.
A recent Cornell University study confirmed this and
showed that
schooled children become "peer dependent" while those who learned with
their
parents have more self-confidence, optimism, and courage to explore. A
Moore
Foundation study of children of parents who had been arrested for truancy
found that their homeschooled children ranked 30 percent higher on standard
tests than the average classroom child.
Providing possible insight into the reasons behind these
successes, a
UCLA project showed that the average schooled student receives 7 minutes of
personal attention a day but the self-learner receives from 100 to 300
minutes of attention daily. Following this, a Smithsonian Report on genius
concluded that high achievement was a result of time with responsive
parents, little time with peers, and considerable time for free
exploration.
Standardized tests reflect self-learner success as well.
Time
Magazine reported that "the average home schooler's SAT score is 1100, 80
points higher than the average score for the general population."
Dr. Lawrence M. Rudner, conducted a study in 1998 that
included
20,760 students in 11,930 families. He found that in every subject and at
every grade level (K-12), homeschool students scored significantly higher
than their public and private school counterparts. Some 25 percent of all
homeschool students at that time were enrolled at a grade level or more
beyond that indicated by their age. According to the study, the average
eighth-grade homeschooler was performing four grade levels above the
national average. The average ACT score was 21 out of a possible 36 for
public schooled children. It averaged 23 for self-learners. This qualifies
the average college-bound self-learner for the most prestigious
universities.
VISION
This movement is not only addressing the why, how, when
and what all
citizens learn, but is also rebuilding the foundation for the society in
which we all live. How we learn determines the kind of society we build.
Authoritarian, hierarchal, undemocratic schools prepare future citizens for
an authoritarian, hierarchal, undemocratic society. A life-long learning
system based in family, community, society and nature could be the
foundation for new democracies of freedom, equity and justice.
The movement continues to promote the concepts of
life-long
self-learning, in all its complexities, to a wider audience, to address
critics on the issues of accountability and credibility, and to raise funds
to help those working to bring its ideals to fruition.
*************ENDS OF WHITE PAPER******************
Notes:
"Resources and Further Reading" at:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/LearningCommunities/files/Life-Long%20Learning
/
<http://www.CreatingLearningCommunities.org>
Discuss: Creating Learning Communities discussion list --
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/LearningCommunities/
Discussion, Comments, or suggestions to:
<LearningCommunities-subscribe @yahoogroups.com> or
Nance Confer <marbl-@aol.com> or
Bill Ellis <tra-@rangeley.org>
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