There was a time not so long ago when I was intensively studying the best of every innovative approach in the world to integrate into a charter school design. And we did end up creating a successful, progressive school. And then through doctoral coursework, I continued to advocate for an educational design process that would be based on new thinking and societal needs and vision, applying that not to niche schools but to entire systems. Gradually, however, it occurred to me that perhaps Ivan Illich was right: schooling will always, to some extent, be schooling, and not synonymous with "education." All educational systems, no matter of what stripe, produce most of the same problems that they seek to struggle against, because they work to standardize and contain. The very notion of education "systems" themselves may be outdated. Now I advocate for deschooling - not homeschooling, which is still a form of schooling - but for working toward decentralized, non-bureaucratic, network-based (not to be read as "computer-based")learning that allows any individual, of any age, and any family, to utilize every resource at their collective disposal to organize and structure learning experiences customized to their individual and collective emergent needs and interests. So long as we insist on the "scientific and techno-rational pursuit of improved professionalized education," we'll continue to perpetuate the enslavement of the mind and the spirit, no matter how well-intentioned the advocates. I haven't made friends with this view :-)
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