but it will never work ...

The Matchmaker - The Boston Globe
So one typical answer to what sounds like the pie-in-the-sky idea of ending compulsory attendance and making our schools service-oriented centers that start asking families and kids what they want and need, one answer is always: but that would be impossible to actually do.  How on earth would you schedule classes that were asked for by so many with so many variations when schools can barely manage a block schedule now?

So it was good to know that there are people and ideas out there who could make it happen.  And this interesting article about Alvin Roth and other economists who actually get into the nitty-gritty of things and make them work, looks like something that would be useful in implementing more advanced scheduling methods for schools where families choose services as much as possible. And after that, the entire city can do the same.

Or swap trading technology could be used and the families and kids themselves could arrange and rearrange their schedules.  Collaborative consumption can help with distributing and enlarging the learning materials used which would enable learners to use materials specific to their needs and learning styles.

the mother of all demos

Reading about the Mother of All Demos and wondering what schooling could look like in 40 years:  could most people have envisioned Silicon Valley and the Internet in 1968 like Douglas Englebart?

Can we imagine schools of the 21st century finally free of the authoritarian and Victorian mindset?  How about making the public schools really public with real access and control not by a board or standards but by families and communities really working together?

• kids teleconferencing with other kids on projects on a national and international level
• schools as hubs of real research and work on local problems
• preschool and daycare happening at schools in small modules like parent coops with support and staff
• kids taking classes as they choose, dropping in for what they need
• kids and families offering classes and services 
• after school classes, night classes, weekend classes, people coming and going 
• creative social environments with after school kids, homeschool kids and schedules in between all at times in classes together
• families connected and working with all this of their own accord without coercion
• no grades are given until a family decides to create a portfolio or take a test to prove mastery for a vocational path they are pursuing
• lots of adults in schools and teachers, in the old sense, are a small part of the coordinators, counselors, specialists, IT, builders, chefs, artisans, and citizens working with kids
• teachers teleconferences in global sessions on learning issues together and frequently have their own classes going on
• food being grown and cooked by staff as well as teachers and kids together
• DIY school maintenance projects: schools building solar hot water heaters together
• mixed ages working together on learning projects
• kids initiating classes and projects
• carpooling databases and networking and kids tracking energy usage of their families and schools
• schools networking with families to save money on supplies; non-standardization means some classes work with different materials from others 
• kids are often excited and happy to go to school
• kids are active in non-violent resolution skills and support groups thrive

Compare with a similar list at Dangerously Irrelevant up now at Big Think. 

deschoolers

A blurb about Olsen's book on the deschoolers of the 1960s collects what some of us actually read and got motivated about back in the day.  These educational activists have contributed to the real education reform movement, on the ground, citizen-led, grassroots, known as homeschooling.

I first read A.S. Neill 's Summerhill when my neighbor attended the Free School and I wanted to go.  My parents were against it.  I read John Holt, before he wrote Teach Your Own, in 1971.  I also read Goodman  and I wound up applying and being accepted into an alternative high school run within the public school program. The alternative high school, Freedom High, had classes that met in the basement of a church and in an old house where we cooked lunch together every Thursday. I took the bus.  My sister would join a different alternative high school, again within the public school system, modelled after the Parkway Project in Philadelphia.

motivation

The Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Daniel Pink at the RSA website is yet another instance of the sea change within our knowledge of human beings and how they learn in the 20th century.  But our public school production line was developed before a lot of this research was done (Peter Gray's work comes to mind).