Learning webs

1. Learning webs Reinventing Education Week 4 Dr Will Curtis

2. Ivan Illich (1926 -2002) “Many students, especially those who are poor, intuitively know what the schools do for them. They school them to confuse process and substance. Once these become blurred, a new logic is assumed: the more treatment there is, the better are the results; or, escalation leads to success. The pupil is thereby "schooled" to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new. His imagination is "schooled" to accept service in place of value. Medical treatment is mistaken for health care, social work for the improvement of community life, police protection for safety, military poise for national security, the rat race for productive work. Health, learning, dignity, independence, and creative endeavour are defined as little more than the performance of the institutions which claim to serve these ends, and their improvement is made to depend on allocating more resources to the management of hospitals, schools, and other agencies in question.” Deschooling Society (p. 9)

3. Illich – ‘deschooling’ society • What’s wrong with institutionalisation • What’s wrong with professionals / ‘experts’ • Education as a commodity • The rule of counterproductivity Eg. ‘Free skools’ (schooling) = Summerhill School

4. Learning webs….. Education should: - anyone should have resources to learn at any age - provision for those who want to share knowledge with those who want to learn from them - provide opportunities for people to be able to make issues public Deinstitutionalised, informal, widespread, ‘convivial’, self-determined not compulsory, communal, dialogic, networked….. • Reference services to Educational Objects • Skill Exchanges • Peer Matching • Reference services to Educators at large Identify and/or design a toolfor each

5. “We must move away from a view of education as a rite of passage involving the acquisition of enough knowledge and qualifications to acquire and adult station in life. The point of education should not be to inculcate a body of knowledge, but to develop capabilities: the basic ones of literacy and numeracy as well as the capability to act responsibly towards others, to take initiative and to work creatively and collaboratively. The most important capability, and the one which traditional education is worst at creating, is the ability and yearning to carry on learning. Too much schooling kills off a desire to learn.... Schools and universities should become more like hubs of learning, within the community, capable of extending into the community... More learning needs to be done at home, in offices and kitchens, in the contexts where knowledge is deployed to solve problems and add value to people's lives. (Charles Leadbeater, The Weightless Society, 2000: 226-227)” (http://members.tripod.com/~ozpk/00000inf)

6. Further questions…. • Are there lessons we can take from the ideas of deschooling? • Are there dangers with expertise, professionalism and specialist institutions? • What sorts of learning spaces / relations are opened up by technology? Holt on Growing Without Schooling: http://www.holtgws.com/growingwithoutsc.html School of Everything Swap a Skill Informal Education

7. Building communities in schools • ‘Urban Village schools designed on ‘human-scale school’ design principles • Bishop’s Park in Clacton-on-Sea is one of these schools • Channel 4 - News - Dispatches - The Children Left Behind

8. Next week…. Education, transformation and subversion Please read: Postman and Weingartner – first 3 chapters Freire – chapter 2