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  Lance Box

  Sep 12, 2020 at 20:51 in Australia

  This is definitely a picture of how education could unfold in the near future.

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  Susan Ritter

  May 22, 2020 at 04:30 in Penang, Malaysia

  Lance, thank you for sharing this. This Dad is so on the mark!! I have subscribed to his channel as recommended and shared his video on Kidingenius!
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  Lance Box

  May 22, 2020 at 20:49 in Australia

  Awesome!

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  Lance Box

  May 21, 2020 at 07:24 in Australia

  There are clearly a lot of people re-thinking the place of schools in education.
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  Susan Ritter

  May 21, 2020 at 11:52 in Penang, Malaysia

  Excellent article - that would be Patrick - hence homeschool!

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  Lance Box

  May 21, 2020 at 07:12 in Australia

  The COVID-19 has really accelerated conversation about education delivery. Topics which were not even heard in the mainstream are now becoming mainstream. This is awesome! What a time to be alive if you are into education!
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  Susan Ritter

  May 21, 2020 at 11:58 in Penang, Malaysia

  Excellent description of unschooling and its benefits!

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  Lance Box

  Apr 23, 2020 at 02:31 in Australia

  Yuri Quintana has review the state of internet-based learning in his piece at: https://web.archive.org/web/20160330072445/http://www.isoc.org/inet96/proceedings/c1/c1_4.htm This is dated because it does not seem to consider the effectiveness of Zoom and other like platforms to solve some of the challenges that he lists in his analysis. In short, Quintana is relatively positive about online delivery of education, as long as we consider and work to cater for those who are challenged by some aspects of the delivery mode. Well worth the read, though dated, as mentioned.

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  Lance Box

  Mar 9, 2020 at 20:24 in Australia

  "The education-industrial complex is structured around organizing children by age. This is a bad idea for so many reasons. "First among them is that this notion is based on a false assumption that young people of the same age have roughly the same skill level in subjects across the curriculum. Clearly, this is not the case. Even the maturity level between genders is a schism. Likewise, different students with different interests and interest levels have wildly different abilities. "But grouping by age remains an "objective" easy criterion, one whose inaccuracy has done nothing to minimize its use. "More importantly, putting children in groups of "peers," organizing students to emphasize their social sameness, necessarily forces them to emphasize and exaggerate their differences. Stop for a moment to imagine the Kafkaesque nightmare of being part of a community that was organized because someone thought you all were interchangeable. You would spend a lot of energy differentiating yourself through your actions and your dress and ultimately through forming social cliques. "Monocultures don't work. They are the product of a dated manufacturing mentality of mass production, and are seldom found in nature. That is why the waste from a deer in the wild enriches the soil, whereas sewage from a massive pig farm causes a health risk to the communities that live downstream. "In childhood learning, diversity of ages and experiences allows everyone to find their strengths in a vibrant ecosystem. Adults and kids should interact. Older people can mentor younger ones. Younger people can use their strength and vitality, each of them wanting to contribute and find a role to fill uniquely." A 'Quality Education', therefore, will be conducted in an environment where there is a diverse range of ages in the cohort that is learning together. The common thread in the cohort would be interest, not age.
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  Flourish Balami

  Apr 13, 2020 at 08:45

  I totally agree.
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  Lance Box

  Apr 13, 2020 at 10:39 in Australia

  Thank you for taking the time to make a comment. Keep safe and have a great day!

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  Lance Box

  Mar 5, 2020 at 22:07 in Australia

  His full comment is worth noting: "No matter what his or her age, when a child has a serious and productive interest in something, do anything possible to feed it. Be the perfect enabler. Drive anywhere. Fly anywhere. Rearrange schedules. Get or otherwise provide access to the supplies and props (and animals and vehicles and equipment and ...). Find the experts, communities, even mentors. (Eventually you'll want to find people who can provide real and credible feedback.) Just as importantly, protect the child from the trivial work inevitably and often mindlessly and reflexively foisted on him or her by others. A year absolutely dedicated to a single area of deep passion is better than the potpourri of modem curricula. Some care needs to be taken not to subvert the interest or overwhelm it. And admit your own humble status as not being an expert. Childhood passion based on curiosity and real interest is one of the most powerful forces. This is what eventually shapes industries and nations." If we agree that this looks like how a quality education might look, then we must agree that this cannot be done within the parameters of schools and schooling; it is an element of "Quality Education" that has to be pursued in an unschooling context. Agree? Disagree?

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  Lance Box

  Feb 27, 2020 at 18:10 in Australia

  He writes: "...class size should be about five. This allows common presentations, peer-to-peer conversations, and one-to-one coach-to-student interactions. ... with this ideal class size comes a redefinition of class, from 'entire community all day' to 'time of focused learning'. From the point of view of the education [I would say 'schooling'] industry, fifteen is a calculated target -- a stretch goal for more funding without actually meeting the needs of the students. Once you get past their framing, the ideal number is much different." Five is an interesting number. It enables a team to be assembled that has representatives from each of the energies, and an extra to ensure that there is a good balance of profiles in the mix. Perhaps 'Quality Education' could be delivered in the context of learners coming together in learning teams, and the teams being assigned problems and challenges that they get to solve. The coach would function as a supply of resources, when necessary, and would supply leading questions and suggestions when there were blocks in the learning experience. These teams could change from learning situation to learning situation, and provide an opportunity for young people to find others with a common passion around common interests. Students could be working on several or only one learning opportunity at a time. This idea has logistics challenges, and would not necessarily support the top-heavy administration infrastructure of a regular school. However, if this kind of education was delivered in the context of a micro-school, that did not have layers of administration to support with the funding, then quality education might be a reality. There would certainly be an absence of the the negative dynamics when you have a large cohort of age-graded students, which always degenerates to the lowest common denominator.

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  Lance Box

  Feb 25, 2020 at 04:38 in Australia

  Written after reflecting upon my own schooling journey to the top of the tree.

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  Lance Box

  Feb 24, 2020 at 21:10 in Australia

  "Those leading the education-industrial system have two incompatible goals: "On the one hand, they are ever more following the dated and disproved top-down "management" theories of metrics, standardization, and short-term accountability. "On the other hand, those at the national level who track skills, because they are terrified at the drop in mathematics and science competencies in today's students, are trying to change schools to better develop our nation's capabilities in these disciplines. "The truth here is that for schools, getting out of the way may be the best thing they can do. Students, left alone, will build things. They will create unique, surprising ways to meet specific needs that often only they understand (even if the need is to enable an elaborate prank). "Building can be done with computer code or lumber or ingredients or fabric. And building is the opposite of consuming, which is done with movies, textbooks, restaurant meals, most video games, or lectures. "The next generation of engineers and scientists are not going to be the ones who are the best "students" who memorize a given week's lists of tables and equations before heading off to history class where they do the same with historical figures and dates. In fact, it will be a failing graduate school that draws from this lot. The next generation of engineers and scientists will be the ones who are skipping the class but painfully and meticulously gathering the building blocks in their secret workshop and putting together something unprecedented." Now this sounds to me like an element of Quality Education as it should be.

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  Lance Box

  Feb 24, 2020 at 05:24 in Australia

  On p. 64 he writes: " ... teach only what will be used immediately in the real world ... it should ... encourage more activities. ... For example, math that is taught should be subsequently applied to managing a budget for a project and writing techniques that are demonstrate in class are employed in blogging news articles." This implies that much of the school work, and busy work that is done in schools - much of which is done simply to aid in crowd control has no educational purpose whatsoever - keep the children busy, otherwise they will get bored and then you will not be able to control them. Quality Education must, therefore, have real world application and the application needs to be immediate and with a positive, meaningful outcome in view.
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  Rita Juse-Cirkse

  Feb 24, 2020 at 08:11 in Internet

  agree

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  Lance Box

  Feb 22, 2020 at 18:28 in Australia

  The booklet is not very long, but is compact in its ideas. The following set of quotations were lifted from the above text, and the page number relates to this edition of his work. "Quality Education" is home-based education that is conducted in community, not in isolation. (p. xix): “Universal education through schooling is not feasible. It would be no more feasible if it were attempted by means of alternative institutions built on the style of present schools. Neither new attitudes of teachers toward their pupils nor the proliferation of educational hardware or software (in classroom or bedroom), nor finally the attempt to expand the pedagogue’s responsibility until it engulfs his pupils’ lifetimes will deliver universal education. The current search for new educational funnels must be reversed into the search for their institutional inverse: educational webs which heighten the opportunity for each one to transform each moment of his living into one of learning, sharing, and caring.” Here, as in other parts of Deschooling Society, Illich identifies that schools and schooling, because of their very essence, are unable to deliver true education. Reformation of schools will not bring about the changes that are necessary to enable education to be accomplished. Schools are, fundamentally, anti-education. The thing that schools do best is school their attendees. No amount of reformation, according to Illich — adjustments to the ways schools are constructed and run, changes in teachers’ attitudes to students, the use of technology in the classroom, and even a change in how students are engaged — will alter the outcomes of schooling. Schools can only school. And they can only school, and not educate, because they are total institutions that are designed to control every participant and process within them towards a stated end: egalitarianism and unquestioning submission to the state or some other dominating institution, i.e. an organized religion. This is not an education, it is indoctrination. It breeds narrow-mindedness, and an incapacity to think independently. Schools are not to be reformed, they are to be abandoned altogether, and the vast resources that are taken from families and businesses (through taxation) to fund the schooling industry should remain with the families and the businesses to fund home-based education and more financially viable private enterprises. The proper context for education to take place, according to Illich, is living life: “the opportunity for each one to transform each moment of his living into one of learning, sharing, and caring.” And the support structures for a thorough education are “educational webs.” Education must be in a context greater than the family. The family is an essential base from which children move in and out. Parents are important gate-keepers, who must vet and monitor the kinds of influences that their children are exposed to in the marketplace. However, no parent is able to provide everything that the child needs for a well-rounded, reality-grounded education. There are three essential agents in an education. The three essential agents are: the family, compassionate social entities (i.e. churches, synagogues, foundations, trusts, etc.) and the marketplace. And the family needs to engage both these entities and the marketplace as important sources of educational moments and experiences, not just lock their children away in a family fortress, as some (even though a small minority) home schooling families do.
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  Rita Juse-Cirkse

  Feb 23, 2020 at 09:00 in Internet

  Agree

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  Lance Box

  Feb 13, 2020 at 23:51 in Australia

  According to Clark, Quality Education "should have extensive downtimes--that is stretches without scheduled activities and even without the context of impending homework" (to catch up on what was missed during the downtimes - LB). When I was teaching in a classroom I was taught to provide children with "busywork" (extra worksheets for those who finished before the others so that they could keep busy and not cause mischief through boredom). There was no educational advantage, just less messiness in the classroom to try and keep under control. How I would love to have my life over again, with the knowledge that I have now. I sure would have done a lot of things differently.

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