Although I envision this blog for a lay audience, I am going to venture into school board policy now. The reason is that the answer to "what is an alternative school" is spelled out in a board policy adopted in 2006. The link is here.
This policy was a result of the alternative community getting together and working long and hard to describe what they held in common. It's very general, which I why I hope to flesh it out on this blog with real stories, but I think it's a valid and useful starting point.
Current district leadership is hesitant to really get behind the policy, in part because they say it is what should be the vision for all schools. We say great! We're approaching it in very real and sometimes different ways in our schools; come and see.
The policy, already an abbreviated distillation, can be further collapsed into 5 "bullet-points." I'm going to create 5 posts below to contain our stories that fill out the details.
My own observation is that while you hear some of these ideas on many kindergarten tours at SPS traditional schools, and may actually see some them in a classroom here and there, there will be very different things going on in the class next door. The difference is that in an Alternative school you have the entire school community working together to approach this vision.
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My vision for all schools is this... well, actually its a vision for all children and our society/world, and schools are just a mechanism for enabling that to manifest...
ReplyDeleteChildren are considered as unique individuals with a unique combination of qualities, talents, interests, skills and abilities, which it is in our interests, as a society, to nurture to maturity and expression...
We 'grow' our children in an environment where each has the freedom to evolve at his/her own pace, in whatever direction is appropriate for the authentic expression of that individual uniqueness... just as in nature, we have a variety of growth patterns happening with our children... we have early bloomers and late bloomers and those who bloom somewhere in the middle of that continuum... and all of it is just as it should be for that unique human being, and each child is accepted just as he/she is and is given the space, time and resources to bloom in his/her own time...
Schools have a vertical curriculum, and each child has an independent learning plan... schools offer all the teachings and experiences (languages, arts, crafts, social, sciences, whatever the individual interests are) necessary to form whole human beings, including teachings that are considered 'esoteric'.... children progress from one level to another when they have developed mastery, when they are ready, at whatever stage/age that is.... the core 'academics' are incorporated unobtrusively, naturally in all classes because they are present at the core of every day life... and they are all related - math is related to language and art and music and vice versa - there is no separation of knowledge into individual boxes...
Schools are small communities, with all classes being multi-age, just as our real world families and communities are...
We are organised along site-based, consensus-driven, democratic management principles, just as, hopefully, our families and communities are...
Education, including tertiary studies, is completely free as an educated, mature, holistically healthy society is a benefit to us all - we are investing in our future as a species and as stewards of the planet...
now, how to make that happen? Alternative schools have already made some inroads.... moving mainstream schools in that direction will take some education and the realisation that mainstream education does not grow children - it manufactures widgets, cogs in the machine of a capitalist economic system... our world is already collapsing under the burden of that reality... will we change direction in time to turn that around?
For some idea about where leading mainstream thinkers are suggesting we need to go with this, I recommend that people begin with reading Peter Senge's book "Presence"...