Challenging Assumptions In Education: From Institutionalized Education to Learning Society

by Wendy Priesnitz

A fresh and exciting approach to the inevitable - and urgently needed - revolution in education, which demolishes the one-size-fits-all, industrialized model of processing and warehousing students and creates a community-based, individualized learning society accommodating learners of all ages, interests, abilities and styles.

An award-winning journalist says the current crisis in public education is evidence of a system that has outlived its usefulness. And the solution is to abandon the myth that learning must happen in schools.

Bringing together current knowledge about how people learn, electronic tools for learning, the demand for life-long learning, the deschooling/homeschooling movement, and the new trend toward grassroots democracy, this book makes a compelling case for formalizing into the mainstream of public education what a variety of futurists and management consultants recognize is already happening on the fringes.

Genres: Nonfiction

123 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2000

About the author

Wendy Priesnitz is a book author, award winning journalist, editor, former broadcaster and mother of two adult daughters. Along with her husband Rolf, she runs Life Media, an independent publishing business that Rolf founded in 1976 as The Alternate Press to publish books and Natural Life Magazine. Life Media now also publishes Life Learning Magazine, Natural Parenting Business Journal, Natural Child Magazine, and a variety of websites about natural family living.

Wendy is an agent of change who, when she was barely out of her teens, recognized the need for rethinking how we work, play and educate ourselves in order to restore the planet’s social and ecological balance. For the last forty years, her mission has been to help people understand the interconnections within the web of life on Earth and to encourage them to challenge the assumptions inherent in the often conflicting choices we make in our daily lives.

from http://www.wendypriesnitz.com/about_w...

Reviews

[Christine]

This book isn't too over the top in the self-congratulatory memoir or polemic department. It does make some points I believe in and have encountered elsewhere. For example kids used to be an integral part of society learning from one another and all the adults around them, not segregated in a building to learn from adults trained mainly in one profession. Kids could still learn this way if we could organize our communities to allow it. See http://www.swaraj.org/shikshantar/ for lots of inspiration. I would love to introduce some of the ideas in this book, like replacing Compulsory Schooling with Guaranteed Access to Education Services. I mean when I worked on assessments for the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, I thought, "okay if we want to copy the medical field with board certification, why don't we also copy the idea of only going in to school when you need help, just as you only go to the doctor when you need help getting well?"

The idea is to trust kids to learn, to let them learn what they are drawn to and good at it without holding "failure" over their heads, and to count on them to develop their own creativity so needed to solve the world's problems. We will only make it harder to solve these problems by educating kids in lockstep with outmoded curriculum designed to produce docile factory workers.

[Angie]

Well, at least it's a quick read. I literally read the whole thing standing up. It's sad, but this has to go on the junk shelf. I completely agree with the author's conclusions, but her argument and reasoning is weak, illogical, and frequently, self-contradictory.

I mean, one one page, she rails against nuclear power and modern hospitals, but about five pages later, she blasts modern curricula for lacking a scientific basis. So, it seems like she only supports science when it supports her agenda. Otherwise it is inauthentic knowledge dribbled from the mouth of worthless "experts." Then, another five pages later, she mentions that she is less able to judge the history of education than an historian.

So which one is it? Is a scientific grounding important or not? Are experts useful or not? Don't ask Prieznitz; she concludes one way or the other depending on which is most convenient at the moment.

(By the way, let me be clear that the safety of both nuclear energy and modern hospitals are beyond dispute.)