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Bringing Tribes Together?

“You go to school to learn to be stupid.” (John Holt, 1963)

Can we all be friends?

Today I’ve been doodling around at Will Richardson’s Big-Daddy-On-the-Block blog about how technology is changing everything about how we think and learn weblogg-ed http://weblogg-ed.com, and living and learning in the EduCon, Classroom 2.0, David Warlick, how-our-tools-are-changing-our world, world.

I am a new commenter to this discourse community, this tribe, and really loving it.  And coming from where I come, it is TOTALLY FASCINATING how the ideas that are resonating there, about the nature of “real” education, choice in learning and what propels deep engagement, and the punishments and toxicities of the institution of school, parallel very directly the so called “alternative school” movement in this country. Beginning with the radical school critics of the 1960s (John Holt, Ivan Illich, Paul Goodman) who felt that the institution itself couldn’t be reformed, there are little bands of outliers out there who have been pursuing free school and democratic school models for decades. (Check out the Education Revolution and their decades of organizing at www.educationrevolution.org). But most of the alternative educators I know are not on Netvibes, at EduCon, using Bloglines, or even commenting at Huff Post.  Alternative educators are very invisible politically, at least in terms of online communities, something I get on my friend Ron Miller http://ijoanjaeckel.blogspot.com/2009/01/r-o-n-m-i-l-l-e-r-five-principles-of.html about all the time. (Ron and I have written a piece about this that is about to be published!)

There is much mutual learning that might occur. How might we get these tribes together?


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