post in space: video

Showing posts with label video. Show all posts

what if we trusted you?

What if we trusted you?: Jerry Michalski at TEDxCopenhagen 2012 - YouTube: "
"

snippets (transcription mine)
... the new OCD: obedience, compliance and dependence ... the compulsory education system ... scarcity and abundance of trust ... scarcity of time and segmentation of time for all 12 years ... the system is actually very, very broken ... we over-regulate [zero tolerance} ... oversurveille ... overmedicate ... why would be perpetuate a dysfunctional system? ... we fear chaos ... we want scale .. we don't trust parents, children and consumers to come together and learn together ... what institutions ... involve trust ... Wikipedia ... what does it look like to learn in a world of abundance ... if you weren't locked in school, you could go learn anywhere in the world ... in a lot of countries, taking your child out of school is illegal ... unschooling ... free range kids ...edupunks .... deschooling ... it takes about 100 hours to learn basic reading ... and maths ... the child has to want to ... when you compel ... we wind up wasting ... lives ... what if every school on earth was a voluntary drop-in center ... institutionalized violence and boredom and dependence ... isn't this naieve ... then bake in processes that take care of bad actors ... lets not design the system so that it starts from a place of distrust ...

Jerry Mintz and Occupy Portland

AERO Conference 2012 livestream of Jerry Mintz and Occupy Portland on community organizing set to go live about 7 pm PDT at Ustream AlternativeEd channel. #aerocon

Streaming video by Ustream

AERO 2012 Sir Ken Robinson

Sir Ken Robinson at AERO Conference 2012 (twitter #aerocon).

Update: video was made private today by the owner. Not sure if the conference videos will be available for viewing. Watch live this evening for Jerry Mintz and Occupy Portland:

Jerry Mintz and Occupy Portland - Sat Aug 4 at 6:30pm PDT

Yaacov Hecht - Sun Aug 5 at 10:30am PDT

Livestreaming tonight on UStream, AlternativeEd channel

on Twitter #aerocon #revolution

Broadcasting live with Ustream

AERO livestream events

The AERO Conference 2012 is underway in Portland, Oregon and they will be live streaming Sir Ken Robinson tonight, Jerrry Mintz and Occupy Portland tomorrow night and Yaacov Hecht on Sunday.

Naomi Aldort - Thur Aug 2 at 7pm PDT (recorded)

Sir Ken Robinson - Fri Aug 3 at 6:30pm PDT

Jerry Mintz and Occupy Portland - Sat Aug 4 at 6:30pm PDT

Yaacov Hecht - Sun Aug 5 at 10:30am PDT

Livestreaming tonight on UStream, AlternativeEd channel

on Twitter #aerocon #revolution

Below is Naomi Aldort who spoke last night:

an Austrian unschool

A video interview with an Austrian unschooler who speaks about her experiences. From the video page:

In Germany there still exists compulsory education. However, it doesn¹t exist in countries like Austria or France.

Just a few months ago, we visited our friend, Daniela *Ela* Gumpoltsberger in Upper Austria and we were totally surprised by her positive UNSCHOOLING-project! We were very happy to see the space and the courses she offers for the children that they can learn freely and happily. Therefore we decided to make a short film about her project. It is a project not only for children, but also for adults, to learn voluntarily, with joy and freedom.

UNSCHOOLING in Austria - YouTube:

'via Blog this'

schools on buses

India's mobile schools - video | Global development | guardian.co.uk: "

"In Delhi, children from low-income households are being encouraged to attend school on old buses that have been converted into classrooms [the kids also spend time outside in the film]. The buses travel to selected points of the city and offer two hours of lessons a day. The scheme is supported by Unicef and the local authorities."

And this rescue by students when their driver had a heart attack happened in Washington state last week:

previous posts

the school bus

green school buses

other articles

15 unusual and creative bus stops (some of these are amazing)

homeschooling activism in Sweden

Jonas Himmelstrand

Note: I believe Himmelstrand is at this time in exile on a nearby island technically outside of Sweden because of the anti-homeschooling law.

Jonas Himmelstrand, President of the Swedish organization of home education, ROHUS. The ROHUS YouTube channel and a blog post with video of John Holt speaking in Sweden, from Pat Farenga's page.) Himmelstrand is also a business consultant and founder of the Mireja Institute. From their About page:

The Mireja Institute focuses on a key, but forgotten, aspect of the Western welfare system: Close relationships, often synonymous with family in the widest sense – all constellations where people live together in close intimate relationships.

In Sweden many families find that they lack the power to make their own decisions about their close relationships, especially when children arrive. The symptoms are visible in the national statistics: High levels of stress-related sick leave, ambitious but insecure parents, increasing psychological ill heath among youth, plummeting learning results and more disorder in schools.

The impediments are often well-intentioned: The everyone-to-work policy, gender equality, high subsidised day care, pre- and after-school care and school. But rather than create more welfare, these are in effect often hindrances to the close relationships which are so important to human health, learning and development.

The Mireja Institute is politically and religiously unaffiliated and is neither based on any specific ideology, apart from democracy and human rights. The purpose of The Mireja Institute is to present the knowledge available today about health, learning and personal growth through attachment and relationships, to the political level.

This knowledge is lacking today in the political debate in many countries, Sweden being no exception. When this knowledge is publicly known family policies in most political camps will look different, even though the solutions may vary.

The goal is to make available the knowledge about the potential in close relationships to build welfare, development and democracy.

Jonas Himmelstrand, Founder of The Mireja Institute

Another very good talk that delves more into issues that Sweden faces is here, presented to a UN Expert Group Meeting in June, 2011. There is more discussion of childcare/daycare issues in this talk.

Sweden has been grappling with home education movement. The sad case of Dominic Johansson brought Sweden to many homeschoolers' attention, a case about which I have posted.

Talk at 2011 Conference
Note: Partial transcription is mine. Himmlestrand discussed many legal issues as well in his talk but these quotes on socialization stood out to me.

"Home education is no longer merely an alternative form of education ... or an alternative lifestyle ... I would say that home education today is a spearhead of social change that .... will change our understanding of families and how children learn. We see that schools do not work and we are looking in the knowledge society for something new."

'via Blog this'

"Sweden is very family-phobic ... 92% of our 18 month to 5 year olds are in daycare. Strongly urges by our government. It is very rare to see a two-year-old out of daycare. And the social authorities in Sweden regard you with suspicion if you haven't out your two-year-old in daycare."

"A key factor in here seems to be socialization and what we found in Sweden is that there is a new paradigm, a whole new way of thinking of how children are socialized. We got a lot of help here from Dr. Gordon Neufeld … he will basically say that social competence is not achieved through social activity. In fact, social competence cannot be achieved by cognitive means at all. Social competence is a process of maturation nourished by love and attachment and closeness. Its actually a function of the brain in the pre-frontal cortex where you learn to take in two feelings at the same time. Its the process when you can feel your own feelings in the presence of another …and the feelings of another … This process is often impeded in school due to much stress, too many friends, and too many peers and too few adults. He says that peer orientation is what happens in schools today when there are age-segregated groups, … many groups, few adults … the children have to find emotional support in one another, which they cannot provide … bullying and all of these things come from this and in this way, peer orientation may actually be the biggest hindrance to socialization today."

...

"Home education supplies a loving adult with … more experience than there peers in school…. and they can guide young people … more experience than young people in school … and this is something that homeschooling can offer and it doesn't matter what you believe in, the key thing, you are there for your child and you take care of them fully and they are not fully mature until they can, as Dr. Neufeld puts it, they can mix without blending with others. They can mix with others, be with others, without losing themselves and that a process that usually takes until 18 or 20 years of age until you fully can do that. … this paradigm is a key thing to understanding … once the world understands how socialization happens … school in the form we know it today is dead."

"Home education is here to stay and to grow. And in Sweden, I will say that the homeschooling movement is probably the strongest freedom movement we have had in the past 100 years … "

related

Homeschooling and the European Union « Homeschooling Research Notes:

homeschooling in the UK

Shena Deuchars with Education Otherwise talks about her journey to homeschool in the UK, where homeschooling is allowed and she shares how she homeschooled her children, some of whom are now in college.

She discusses autonomous education, her gifted child with aspects of aspergers syndrome, learning to read, First Lego League, and entering college.

Shena Deuchars (U.K.) - YouTube:

homeschool activism in Germany

Homeschooling activists face resistance from the German government which they discuss here. These mothers share a lot about the legal situation and what homeschoolers are doing to cope with that. Homeschoolers, like these activists in Germany, are helping change ideas of education and schooling, by bringing power back to families, the people cut out by compulsory attendance laws designed to override and exclude the family from schools in undemocratic and authoritarian ways.

Karen Kern, Silke Ohlert and Kelley Schwab (Germany) - YouTube:

These three women discuss homeschooling in Germany where the legal situation is very difficult. Activist families of all beliefs are homeschooling in Europe and they are organizing. And yet you can hear what homeschoolers in the US will recognize: families gaining strength in the task from their children, from seeing the improvement and happiness of their kids. Others can see it, too. This is a common experience among homeschoolers.

Karen Kern wound up moving to France after trying to homeschool in Germany and coping with two court cases. The speaker runs the German Clonlara program (Clonlara is a longtime homeschool curriculum provider.) And the legal situation and fines are also discussed.

The whole thing is worth listening to but at 24:00, there starts an especially good section just after a long question in Spanish. Kelley Schwab is quite eloquent and she is honest about how hard the fight is in Germany. She is an American married to a German and she says many good things, from the reliance on institutions to the distrust of ourselves and the belief in experts, from how happy her kids are to neighbors that think the kids are really nice, she makes a lot of standard homeschooling points in a very intelligent and passionate way. Very worth a listen.

24:00 (roughly) "... they all say 'we have to protect our pluralist society' but the homeschooling society is the most pluralistic community that I know of …. no community is as pluralistic as the homeschooling community …. from strict conservatives …. to unschoolers …."

Socialization

Mass schooling is the experiment, not homeschooling. The provision of public schooling may at one time have strongly supported local communities by providing hard-working families positive options. But today, our mass factory style education, extended for an ever-increasing number of years, exists in an entirely different world, a world of declining social capital. The schools themselves have become concentrated, refined like white flour is refined for longer storage, schools have centralized massively and the social experience within schools has also intensified and changed. Increasingly toxic social experiences, like school shooting, are signs of this change.

The socialization experience of schools needs re-examined in our society. An increasing amount of evidence on the effects of testing, grading and ranking on learning shows how the factory model of learning works against our natural human instincts. And the growing documentation of the effects of peer-orientation fostered by ever longer time spent in institutional settings is alarming. These findings draw on knowledge gained the hard way by those coping with the orphans and separated families left in the massive destruction of WWII. Attachment theory would grow out of these events and also out of the new science of psychology. And now this knowledge is helping people understand the difficulties parents face trying to raise kids who spend so much time in large, authoritarian institutions.

We can change schools in ways that actually maximize the socialization process by empowering families with real choices in every school. Only by empowering families with the ability to control and modify what services they access, can families each make decisions about their social lives and in doing that, begin shaping a more positive social experience. Democratic methods could help families and communities transition from a credential factory model to a learning services model that allowed users to shape their learning and social experiences. That kind of granular control could reshape social experiences across the board.

2011 homeschool conference in Spain

First in a series from the conference. These are videos of the recent homeschooling conference in Europe in Spain in 2011 last fall. Homeschool activists from all over Europe attended, with their children, of course.

NOTE: The videos are on YouTube as well as here on HSLDA's site. HSLDA, the conservative homeschool organization, helped with the conference but not all participants share those views. I want to show some of the activism on the ground and I will be posting more about this topic soon including how homeschooling can help build a true multi-cultural society. As an activist who has worked with families of varying religious and political viewpoints, I see this movement of citizens working together as a grassroots movement that has spontaneously arisen in response to the disempowerment of families by mass schooling.

This first video is an overview with lots of pictures of the families.

This video shows home educators from Bulgaria, United Kingdom, Portugal, Germany, Holland, France, Sweden, Spain, Poland, and Italy who each give short statements (mostly) on their countries' homeschool movements.

EU Homeschooling Meeting 2011 - YouTube: "

the independent project

The Independent Project, the blog with lots more student work, and a white paper on how to do it. The wonderful clip below explains the project and this excerpt if from the white paper:

The Independent Project is an alternative student driven school-within-a-school that was started at Monument Mountain Regional High School by a student.

The idea for The Independent Project came about from that student’s own experience of high school, and his observations of the experiences of his peers. The two main things he felt were missing from many high school classrooms were engagement and mastery. He also felt that even students who were engaged were often learning material that was not very intellectually valuable. They were learning lots of information, but very little about how to obtain information on their own, or even create new information. His intent was to design a school in which students would be fully engaged in and passionate about what they were learning, would have the experience of truly mastering something, or developing expertise in something, and would be learning how to learn. He felt that the most important ingredient to a school like that would be that it was student-driven. Research by Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi on engagement suggested that if students have more control over what they are learning, they will be more engaged, excited, and committed to their studies. He also felt that it was important for the school to be focused on methods rather than specific topics, having students work like actual scientists, mathematicians, or writers.

Eight students were accepted into the pilot program of the school, which ran for one semester and is now complete. The school, dubbed The Independent Project, is now in the stage of redesign and replication.

redshirting

Redshirting (don't confuse with redlining) is holding a child back until they are the oldest instead of the youngest in a class. Parents want to ensure their kid doesn't get left back in a system that is all about ranking and sorting all along the way. Even the youngest children are now graded and tested and good jobs are not available for those with only a high school degree, though prisons proliferate, which means kids must perform to earn scholarship money for colleges that are unaffordable to the majority. But no pressure.

Gladwell's Outliers had chapters on the youngest phenomena and Canadian hockey leagues and it is interesting stuff. I thought the book revealed a lot about how an industrial approach to sorting kids into programs coupled with a culture that likes to use competition to further sort and reward/punish people, is completely unfair and a crude mechanism at best. Of course, schools do not have to function this way. We can move away from a factory model where we entrust children to professionals who process through the controlled content so they can be credentialed. We could move toward a learning services model that allows families to make choices and children to learn without the grading and ranking that cause redshirting.

But don't look for any insights into our industrial, factory-model school system or any clear-headed facts about how unsupported and stressed the American family is in the neoliberal, winner-take-all society. No, 60 Minutes blames that perennial favorite, bad parents for this problem.

Viewed from the comfy salary level of these reporters, parents, pushing for what they see as small but meaningful advantages for their child in a society so harsh and punitive, are just trying too hard. Relax. Your kids will turn out fine.

At least it feels that way for those 1% journalists so bemused and befuddled by middle-class US families. If you want to give your kid a leg up as a working-class parent, however, the humor is over, and the so-called crime of theft of education will keep families in line. The sorting and ranking will not be subverted and a more democratic and citizen-based approach to schooling doesn't make for a well-behaved 99%.

Schools that allowed families to choose classes and participation level would allow families ways to ensure their kids are rested, healthy and able to shape their social world as well as their learning journey. In doing that, schools could expand the social life of entire communities.

UPDATE: Just saw this on G+, h/t Mike Elgan

Influence of relative age on diagnosis and treatment of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder in children:

"Boys who were born in December were 30% more likely ... to receive a diagnosis of ADHD than boys born in January. Girls born in December were 70% more likely ... to receive a diagnosis of ADHD than girls born in January. Similarly, boys were 41% more likely ... and girls 77% more likely ... to be given a prescription for a medication to treat ADHD if they were born in December than if they were born in January."

60 Minutes Overtime, 03.04.12 - 60 Minutes - CBS News:

UPDATE: Gladwell's answer to the problem is here (break up classes by birth date) of course, schools rarely work out solutions since they have police power over families. I'm betting lots of districts just make a rule about this even though the ADHD finding speaks volumes about the schools' ability to handle and understand child behavior.

background post
blaming parents, blaming the family
make public schools truly public
what's wrong with the schools?
every parent should have real choices
semi-private clubs called schools

occupy education actions

Privatization is underway and we are hearing that austerity is necessary for everyone but the 1% for whom no bonus is too big. Privatization has been tried and it has proved a failure in Chile. The centralization of schools has made them remote from the people they serve and vulnerable to political machinations and corruption and corporate schemes of control.

March 1 was occupy education day but actions will continue in some places through the 5th or the 8th.

Feeds and information at occupy education.

uprisingradio.org » Students Across the Nation Organize Day of Action on Education:

"We refuse to accept the dismantling of our schools and universities, while the banks and corporations make record profits.” Nationwide, public school students are seeing an average tuition or fee hike of 8 percent, while their counterparts at private universities are facing a 4.5 percent average increase. California has been a national hub of education activism, with protests ranging from marches to actions aligned with the Occupy movements that have resulted in police brutality against students. Since 2004 the cost of attending a California State University rose 191% and students attending University of California schools are paying 145% more than 8 years ago. Today’s national day of action will be continued in Sacramento and on many campuses in the state next week with 4 days of protest and walk-outs from March 5th – March 8th."

March 1, 2012: Galileo Drum Corps Perform @ San Francisco's "Occupy Education" Rally (below)

(below) Over parent protests, school board in Chicago closes 17 schools.
Full multi-part series is here.

Occupy Education: Teachers, Students Resist School Closings, Privatizations, Layoffs and Rankings:

"As students across the country stage a National Day of Action to Defend Public Education, we look at the nation’s largest school systems—Chicago and New York City—and the push to preserve quality public education amidst new efforts to privatize schools and rate teachers based on test scores. In Chicago, the city’s unelected school board voted last week to shut down seven schools and fire all of the teachers at 10 other schools."

update on the GED

(Update: second part of this post with more info)

In Today's Economy, How Far Can A GED Take You? : NPR:

""The GED is a credential. Is it adequate for gainful employment and a living wage in the United States of America today? I do not think so," says Los Angeles Schools Superintendent John Deasy. His top lieutenant in charge of adult and career education, Ed Morris, is even more blunt.
"If I were prepared today with a GED, and that's what I had as an 18-year-old, I'd be scared to death of the future," he says."

and this:

"Some critics would like to scrap the GED altogether, but Chestang says that's not going to happen. Instead, in 2014, the GED will morph into two new tests — one that's aligned with more rigorous high school standards, the other more attuned to career and college readiness."

Lots of good comments, too, at the site (NPR)

More on the changes coming and this, too and the GED site as well

The new business, modeled to represent a public-private partnership, will retain the GED Testing Service name. The new GED Testing Service will build on its past experience in adult and continuing education by harnessing the considerable resources of Pearson, the world's largest education and testing company, with the nearly 70-year history of ACE to expand access to the GED Test, ensure its quality and integrity, and adapt the GED Test to 21st century testing practices. The three primary components of the GED 21st Century Initiative will include:

A new, more rigorous GED Test aligned with Common Core State Standards designed to ensure career- and college-readiness;

A national test preparation program featuring an expanding array of innovative and personalized learning resources; and,

A transition network that connects GED test-takers to career and postsecondary educational opportunities.

more on chilean education protests

A New Chile is Possible: Students and a Society in Motion : Edufactory:

"This time around, however, the movement is not limited to students, nor is it exclusively focused on education. Chile is going through a crisis of legitimacy brought on by the inability of the political system inherited from the dictatorship to meet social demands. As the “Manifesto of Historians” points out, society is debating again, questioning top-down authority and enacting “forms of direct and decentralized democracy.”"

Haunts: Indignant women and girls ignite the Chilean Winter – women in and beyond the global:

"The students began their protests to challenge and change the inequalities within the educational systems and structures, inequalities that are funded, or better de-funded, by mass privatization, on one hand, and a tax structure that sends relatively little money into the schools. Most students attend grossly underfunded public universities while the wealthy few attend the very few exclusive and exclusionary private universities. At present, Chilean university education is one of the most expensive in the world. Students assume extraordinarily high debts, with 50% of them considered heavily indebted. The schools are both expensive and lousy.

As inequality has grown in Chile, so has segregation. According to some, Chile is the second most socially segregated country in the world. The rich study – and play and live — only with the rich, the poor with the poor."

Latin America, 2011: A Year Marked by Social Movements · Global Voices:

"Images of Chilean student protests made news around the world for months. While most international media focused on the recurring clashes between protesters and the police, on social networks citizens shared analysis, reports, images and videos from the ground."

From Aljazeera:

"Chilean students have taken over schools and city streets in the largest protests the country has seen in decades.

The students are demanding free education, and an end to the privatisation of their schools and universities. The free-market based approach to education was implemented by the military dictator Augusto Pinochet in his last days in power.

The protests are causing a political crisis for Sebastian Pinera, the country's president. But what are the underlying issues driving the anger?

As the demonstrations in Chile coincide with protests erupting globally, Fault Lines follows the Chilean student movement during their fight in a country plagued by economic inequality."

chilean superheroes

the school bus

Approximately 26 million kids ride the bus every day in the US. Schools in my town recently cut back severely on school bus service without providing any help to families, not even a carpool forum on their massive website. Schools need energy efficient transportation

Changes (via Wikipedia)

"... Several manufacturers have introduced hybrid school buses while alternatives to diesel fuel are also being explored. Seatbelts, always a controversial topic, have become more common in school buses; buses with 3-point seatbelts have been introduced. School bus crossing arms, first introduced in the late 1990s, have been adopted by a number of jurisdictions. Electronics have started to play a role in school bus operation. GPS tracking devices have been added to school buses in the past decade; this is used in a dual role of fleet management as well as a means of keeping parents updated. In addition, alarm systems have been developed to prevent children from being left on unattended school buses overnight.[22]"

Diesel-Electric Hybrids

Diesel-electric and gas-electric hybrids"Eleven states joined together for an exploratory purchase of 19 school buses from IC Bus. New York, California, Texas, Florida, Pennsylvania, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Arkansas, Iowa and Washington will be the first states in the nation to receive these diesel electric hybrid school buses.[citation needed] Since then, hybrids have slowly begun to gain acceptance in the marketplace nationwide as the incremental cost of these vehicles comes down. Hybrids generally cost about $200,000 as of spring 2011, compared to more than $100,000 for a regular-sized diesel school bus.[45]"

Nanny vans in Hong Kong:

"In Hong Kong, younger students are transported between their homes and schools by "nanny vans". These vehicles are typically van-based and are smaller than a minibus. When nanny vans originated, they were regulated primarily by the schools and the van drivers. Today, in the interest of safety, nanny vans are government-regulated vehicles that run on fixed routes."

A Brief History of the School Bus from Learning Matters:

background post
green school buses

homeschool movie

ABOUT THE FILM | Homeschool Movie:

"Class Dismissed will focus on the topic of education, specifically the validity of homeschooling as an alternative to the industrial school model. Framed within the historical context of traditional schooling, and particularly at a time when education across the nation is in a state of crisis, the film will examine the numerous approaches to home learning, exploring both its history and recent growth. "

A new documentary is underway about homeschooling. They just got finished shooting at Village Home in Portland OR, a remarkable resource center for homeschooling families. There have been lots of movies about public education but not so many about homeschooling. And at a time when we have education and our economy in crisis and in need of effective and real change, homeschoolers have many insights that can be of great value to our society. This is a project to keep track of and if you can, help with their fundraising here.

paul goodman film

I remember first reading Paul Goodman's Growing Up Absurd when I was in high school. And I did some work with the wonderful Rae Perls, daughter of Fritz, and some know Goodman was a co-founder of Gestalt therapy.

A significant figure of the 1960s, known by anarchists and libertarians, a new film is coming out on his life and work:

Paul Goodman Changed My Life — A film by Jonathan Lee:

"Paul Goodman Changed My Life is the first documentary about Paul Goodman, the late social critic, poet, philosopher of education, or, as he called himself, “man of letters in the old-fashioned sense.” "

See a dynamic movie trailer at the site and slightly different version at IMdB.

james baldwin on education

Updated 7-16-13
The eloquent James Baldwin wrote his essay "A Talk to Teachers" in 1963. An brief excerpt:

America is not the world and if America is going to become a nation, she must find a way – and this child must help her to find a way to use the tremendous potential and tremendous energy which this child represents. If this country does not find a way to use that energy, it will be destroyed by that energy.

We have seen these words come true. Society needs the energy of these children in order to be sustainable and strong. A modern nation-state cannot be stable and effective by wasting its human capital. Strengthening the police state has been attempted since Baldwin's time and it has failed completely. Police and war and prisons create crime and war for jobs and destroy communities, families, and the environment.

Eleven years later, here is Baldwin discussing education, a clip put up by the utube uploader, youwhohear, who says this:

Thanks for watching! i cut out this selection, along with another, from a longer Q&A with Baldwin at UC Berkeley in 1974. The full thing can be found on youtube in two parts, but i thought a few of these clips so important, prescient and relevant that i wanted them to be more accessible.

[my own transcription/captioning is questionable]
" ... the truth is it is very hard to talk about education in this country you can hardly talk about schools without talking about cities, and the cities are in the hands of financiers ... and our children are the victims of the principles according to which the country is run ... the country is not run according to the will of its citizens [I hope] or the good of its citizens [I know that] but profit, for money, to make money .... and education is a billion dollar industry and the least important part of that industry is the child ... "

"..... we tried to educate our children ourselves, to be responsible for the teaching, the curriculum, the books ... we did that for three years in New York some years ago and the experiment succeeded .... and because it succeeded it was crashed, smashed by the board of education, by the teacher's union, and Albany ... so that is what you're up against ....."

Growth of Homeschooling
Baldwin is speaking in 1974. The historic civil rights movement and the growing power of a military-industrial complex to engage in professional war, spawned many citizen movements to change mass institutions. They worked for change within and without the system.

Many African-Americans went into the public school system and worked to achieve what they had been denied. Some educational activists forged ahead to clear a path outside the institution. Homeschooling which would begin in earnest a few years later. From Wikipedia:

Similar to Holt, the Moores embraced homeschooling after the publication of their first work, Better Late Than Early, 1975, and went on to become important homeschool advocates and consultants with the publication of books like Home Grown Kids, 1981, Homeschool Burnout, and others.[9]

At the time, other authors published books questioning the premises and efficacy of compulsory schooling, including Deschooling Society by Ivan Illich, 1970 and No More Public School by Harold Bennet, 1972.

In 1976, Holt published Instead of Education; Ways to Help People Do Things Better. In its conclusion, he called for a "Children's Underground Railroad" to help children escape compulsory schooling.[8] In response, Holt was contacted by families from around the U.S. to tell him that they were educating their children at home. In 1977, after corresponding with a number of these families, Holt began producing Growing Without Schooling, a magazine dedicated to home education.[11]

In 1980, Holt said, "I want to make it clear that I don't see homeschooling as some kind of answer to badness of schools. I think that the home is the proper base for the exploration of the world which we call learning or education. Home would be the best base no matter how good the schools were."[12]

Neoliberalism and corporate dominance would tear away at the family-sustaining wage and big box stores and fast food would push the boundaries of what was defined as work adn a job. The war on drugs and teh war on crime converged in mass incarceration. And the working-class family would be shattered in the intervening years. Schools would undertake zero tolerance as accountability and testing drove profits. Public schooling, once an admired investment, made no continuing investment in services and the growing incarceration state reached into the schools as the juvenile justice system helped pipeline kids out of schools and into prisons.

I think we can now talk about how the next step which is how schools can be transformed into a social service that supports all families of all kinds. Schools could strengthen all communities and families' lives by providing services that families can choose how they use if families were given input and real choice within the system, a system that weakens families and increasingly, criminalizes families and children.

Notes
A reader wrote in, last month, to note the description of Baldwin in a piece on African writer Alain Mabanckou (whose picture is shown; Update: pic now removed).

More Baldwin is up on utube:

James Baldwin v. William F. Buckley Jr. Debate

david friedman talks unschooling

Libertarian Parenting: David Friedman and Unschooling (Video) « Little Alex in Wonderland Part three in a series on Libertarian Parenting. A long interview with David Friedman, a professor and son of Milton and the remarkable Rose Friedman.

I agree with the Friedmans that we need to empower families and give them choices but a voucher doesn't seem to offer much real choice to families to me. All a family can do is choose another school. Even the universal voucher used in Sweden seems to confine what is called choice to an exceedingly narrow band:

While schools must adhere to the Swedish national curriculum and testing, they are free to design their own programs and implement any teaching style they see fit.

That's not much of a choice. How about families choosing what they want at the schools they already support? How about the schools providing services for families rather than families being drafted and ordered to serve?

But all that aside, in this interview, David Friedman talks insightfully about: the status of children, "adults who deal routinely with children .... are likely to be intellectually sloppy because of the superior status they have" and discussion of the corrupting influence of having power over kids, gaming; how gameboy time is more productive than being in school, learning what you are interested in, how his unschooled son learned math for college and much more.

Oh and if you wonder about Friedman's proof that two cars hitting each other at 50 mph are not the same as one car hitting a wall at 100 mph, surf over to the utube home of the video and the discussion there has some commenters exploring that a bit.

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