this is the saving grace. certainly it has been for me in my own
education experiences.
>
>It is a good question whether traditional schools can be reformed or just be
>put aside by slow proliferation of innovative schools.
Reform/ re-form; means basicially using the same materials but
changing the shape, no?
>Or will it be a
>revolutionary explosion?
too much TV. don't see that happening either.
>Or everything above? Or school should simply
>disappear?
now I think we're onto something. If schools were declared unfit learning
environments, then we might be able to see a swing to some of Stephen's
interests in Learning Environments - altho' I still do think that
difference needs some clarification...
> I think even in our time when the educational pendulum swings
>back to its "basics" of mistrust to teachers to teach and children to learn
>it is important to think and work on alternatives to a traditional school.
absolutely positively... alternatives are crucial... When I was home this
past summer visiting the folks, my father asked me, "So, after all these
years of school,.
what's the answer?" (har-dee-har-har)
and I said, "I think if nothing else I've learned that it's really hard to
ask the right
questions." Alternatives emerge out of those questions, I think.
As someone very brilliant once said to me, there's no such thing as an
original idea.
It took me a while, but I realized it's accurate: I mean, the key is to
cobble together
the ideas that are out there into something else, something different -
it's the not that ideas are endless, but that the possible combinations of these
as possibilities
are endless.
therein, she sighed, is hope.
>When Soviet troops crossed the borders to Afghanistan in the last days of
>1979, dissident Saharov was working on a project of moving troops back and
>plan for rebuilding the occupied country.
Sounds like Canada's Reform Party, actually. :-) (A wee Canuck-yuk)
>
>I personally do not expect to see mass change of schooling in my life but I
>want to work on rebuilding of institutional education. Diane is right that
>assumptions that we have learned by just being here is so difficult to see
>or change.
I'm not sure it's so difficult see as it is incomprehensible; that is,
difficult to
understand - not "too hard" to understand, but too complex. And
most of the analytical tools we rely upon invariably seem to be used in
ways that make
it simple to see, or less complex for understanding... which may be what drives
assumptions about schools, too. That mytht of simplicity. (or is that
the myth of Sisyphus?)
diane
"Every tool is a weapon if you hold it right."
Ani Difranco
*********************************
diane celia hodges
faculty of education
university of british columbia
vancouver, bc canada
tel: (604)-253-4807
email: dchodges who-is-at interchange.ubc.ca