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CHAPTER THREE A NEW VISION The nontraditional educators and educational critics I read not only offer a critique of how traditional schools are set up, but they also provide an alternative vision of how things should, or could, be if done differently and more in accordance with our society’s highest ideals. Not every nontraditional educator argues for the exact same ideas, and this fact poses a difficulty in naming this movement or alternative vision of education. In some respects, the authors and educators who came to guide me can be defined as progressive educators; in other respects, they fall more along the lines of existentialist or humanistic educators; in still others, they are critical social theorists. My purpose here is not to delve into the deep theoretical divisions between various educational philosophies, but it is to show how my readings of various authors within the student-centered and social reconstructionist educational philosophies impacted my view of American education and led me to explore different ways of educating. While the differences between these groups are many and can be either subtle or quite obvious, I found running through these educators’ visions and writings a series of similarities that led me to believe that a fairly unified underlying vision exists. Although I have never encountered a term that would satisfy me as an umbrella name for this movement, I choose to refer to them as progressive educators. I do not use the capital “P” progressive because I am not arguing that these authors are all loyal followers of Dewey’s Progressivism; instead I use the lowercase progressive because these authors are rejecting the traditional and seeking a new vision for education, one that helps us to transcend and progress beyond the status quo. As mentioned, I found in these authors’ writings a series of common threads about education; they offer different assumptions about learning and knowledge, assumptions that then influence the curriculum, materials, roles of teachers and students, and school settings and timings. What follows is a 41 42 FREE SCHOOL TEACHING summation of these commonalities. These are the ideas that fired my imagination and ignited a desire to see these conceptions of education played out in a real school. ASSUMPTIONS ABOUT LEARNING AND KNOWLEDGE Progressive educators argue that traditional schooling is organized and structured around the inaccurate assumption that knowledge is objective, that it exists outside of and distant from human consciousness. Learning, according to this assumption, is the memorization of those objective facts by breaking them down into discrete, fragmented chunks. The end product (i.e., the successful transmission of existing knowledge) is what is of most value to traditional educators. The purpose of this knowledge absorption is to socialize and acculturate the individual into society. In other words, absorbing this body of knowledge allows the individual to function in society (socialization) and, by “learning” this knowledge, the individual becomes a member of a specific society or culture (acculturation). Zvi Lamm, in “The Status of Knowledge and The Radical Concept of Education,” wrote that in traditional schools, “the imparting of knowledge whether as a means of socialization or as a means of acculturation is a process designed to make people alike (or at least to mold them according to patterns of given social roles or cultural groups). . . . The difference between people is something which has to be overcome in order to include everyone in the common denominator which is given in society . . . or in culture.”1 Thus, the main tenets or assumptions of traditional education concerning knowledge and learning are: 1. Knowledge exists outside of human consciousness; thus it is hard and given vis-à-vis the students.2 2. “Learning” is the absorption and memorization of this knowledge by students who are considered soft and malleable in relation to the hard-and-given knowledge. Students, in order to be made to learn, are often manipulated so that they fit the existing knowledge.3 3. Knowledge is learned for the purpose of making people alike so that the society/culture can continue to exist as it is. In the opinions of the progressive educators, on the other hand, the more accurate assumption about knowledge is that it is not fixed or static— it is, instead, individually and socially structured and created. Learning, according to this assumption, is the construction of knowledge and meaning done through the interaction of self with others and experiences (hence the term “constructivism” for this educational belief). Knowledge construction is meaning making, the process of giving...

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