The above video features students from Legacy high school in Manhattan and Paul Robeson high school in Brooklyn — both of which are being closed by NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Chancellor Dennis Walcott — for being so-called “failing schools”.

How a crackpot theory of education reform became national policy

Mark Naison is a Professor of African-American Studies and History at Fordham University and Director of Fordham’s Urban Studies Program. He is the author of three books and over 100 articles on African-American History, urban history, and the history of sports. His most recent book, “White Boy: A Memoir,” was published in the spring of 2002.

No Child Left Behind: 10 States Receive Waivers From Education Law’s Sweeping Requirements

In a sign of what’s to come, President Barack Obama on Thursday freed 10 states from some of the landmark law’s toughest requirements. Those states, which had to commit to their own, federally approved plans, will now be free, for example, to judge students with methods other than test scores. They also will be able to factor in subjects beyond reading and math.

Book: Backwards into the Future (Chaos in the Classroom)

At a time when neo-liberal ideology and corporatisation are more infused in our education systems than ever, Heathwood has chosen to publish this insightful and thought-provoking presentation by Arnold De Graaff. As relevant to the trials of today’s schools as it was to the specific context in which it was originally presented over a decade ago, De Graaff offers a lucid critique of the new Ontario, Canada curriculum that was being implemented at the time, and outlines some valuable alternative ways to think about and approach education.

One of the benefits of homeschooling is that it is generally unnecessary to hold to a rigid schedule. In other words, I let my kids sleep until they are no longer tired. Even my own two children have different schedules–the older one wakes up first, almost at the same time every day–the younger one can often sleep to an hour that others might find ridiculous. We don’t have the option of “sleeping in” every day, but when we do, I let them.

This morning, my eldest stumbled into my office about thirty minutes past his normal “wake time.” He looked at me sleepily, and said “My alarm went off at 8:30, but my brain said ‘No’ so I went back to sleep.”

The great mass of the world is on a schedule–school, work, errands. Everything has a time and place assigned to it. It must start and stop at an appointed hour. But must it? How did we arrive here? Why is this the way?

Some of the most creative and productive people do not do anything during “regular hours.” As adults, they are given the freedom to figure out what to do and when. As young people, often these adults did not perform well in a hyper-structured environment (think Thomas Edison, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates). We don’t allow children that same luxury because for a school system to function there must be a set start and stop time. Now, “after school” time is spent bent over homework or rushing to and from activities, only to come home, eat, bathe, and go to bed before 9pm so you can start it all over again the next day. A hamster wheel comes to mind when I think of it, as does a factory. In fact, factories are why we operate this way.

The compelling reasons kids need nature were explained factually and forcefully by Richard Louv in Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder. In fact, that book inspired major new efforts to reconnect kids with nature including Children & Nature Network, National Wildlife Federation’s Green Hour, and No Child Left Inside.

Louv reaches out in his newest book, The Nature Principle. Through groundbreaking research and compelling stories, Louv demonstrates why we need to balance our use of technology with the restorative powers of nature. Seven overlapping principles show that humanity can truly thrive when in partnership with nature.

Inspired by Khan Academy, Mr. Thrun discusses online education and his new educational endeavors through online education. How education and the world is changing, offering free courses from Stanford to the world. How do you think conventional schools will react to this?

Good Morning America gets into the mix at looking of Unschooling with a family in California. Afterwards Dr. Robyn Silverman discusses unschooling and the clarification and distinctions that unschooling and regular education have. How would a dialogue between someone that has been doing unschooling for a while start with someone just checking it out?

I was recently asked to write a column for a national education magazine. When the editor told me the theme of the issue was educating children in a world of violence, I immediately thought to myself, “That’s precisely the problem—most children are being educated in a world of violence.”

Here I very specifically mean the world of school itself, not the surrounding layers of family, society and culture, because all too often the violence embedded in the educational process goes unnoticed. Education is, after all, one of America’s most sacred cows.

Lest you think I am overreacting when I declare that the means and methods by which nearly all of the children in this country are educated are inherently violent, consider what Webster’s lists as its third definition for “violent”: “caused by force; not natural, as in a violent death.”

Conventional education is all about force, beginning with each state’s compulsory education statute. The failure to cover the state mandated curriculum, or its equivalent, is punishable by law. Even worse, students and teachers trapped inside schools that sort, grade, and rank children like fruits and vegetables face an increasing specter of punishment if the students don’t measure up on mandatory—and soon to be nationwide—high stakes standardized tests. Students are told that, if they don’t pass, then they can’t move on to the next level. Teachers are told that, if their students don’t pass, then it’s time to look for another job. The indelible bottom line: learn or else.

And then there is the competition that urges the educational process forward, whereby learning is stripped of its individual sanctity and turned into a group contest to see who can be fastest and best. But isn’t competition, the drive to gain superiority over others, one of the root causes of violence of all kinds and at all levels, from city streets to nation-states?

Which brings us to the second half of the dictionary definition of “violent.” What could be more “not natural” than confining education to sterile, age-segregated classrooms, and demanding that it progress according to a standardized timeline? Add to this artificial mix the pre-packaged curricula to which most teachers are chained today, and the technology that has almost entirely supplanted nature as a primary source of learning, and there you have the recipe for a “violent” education—as in a “violent” death.

Fortunately, a growing number of groups and individuals are committed to removing violence in all its various forms from education. A million or more homeschooling families are a living demonstration that learning is a natural, joyful act. The success of an entire generation of homeschoolers who are now adults proves without a doubt that it in no way depends on coercion and government regulation.

Anya Kamenetz, the author of DIY U, shares her research and knowledge about the current state of higher education. How do you view the current system? What can be changed?

Is it possible to have caring education or a meaningful democracy in a culture that is fundamentally competitive, materialistic, and technocratic? What has brought many of us to this conference is the realization that our political, social, and economic problems are ultimate rooted in a cultural context—the pattern of meanings that guide our lives. The same is true of our educational problems. What makes modern schooling dehumanizing and mechanical is the same set of assumptions, the same taken-for-granted notions about the nature of the world, that underlie our other institutions.

Education in modern culture is defined as a process of training for employment and economic decision making; the procedures of schooling are intended to shape young human beings into components of the corporate machine. Young people’s minds are to be molded into predictable shape by a standardized curriculum; their economic value to society is to be assessed by high stakes standardized tests. If this is what the word “education” has come to mean, then the phrase “caring education” is an oxymoron. It is perceived as nonsense, and for the last 150 years, those of us who have advocated holistic or progressive education have generally been dismissed as romantic cranks.

So the push for standardized, mechanized learning has been around for a long time, and the corporate-led crusade in recent years for greater so-called accountability is not new. However, the pressure today is greater, and more politically powerful, than it has ever been. The corporate takeover of schooling appears to be nearing completion. Recently, for example, Mayor Richard M. Daley of Chicago shared his educational vision with reporters at a major computer trade show. The Chicago Sun-Times quoted him as saying “If Chicago is going to continue to attract and retain high-tech companies, our schools have to produce graduates with skills these companies require. The idea is not to listen to those who run education, but to listen to the employers. What do they require?”

The corporate educational agenda could hardly be stated in more naked terms. It is the mission of schools to “produce” a certain type of graduate, as if human beings are not purposeful moral, intellectual, or spiritual agents but the results of a manufacturing process—a process that is run by corporate managers to serve their economic goals. Mayor Daley, like virtually all political and corporate leaders today, begs a fundamental question: What is education for? Our culture now teaches us that children are born on this earth solely to contribute their hearts and minds to the consuming task of generating ever greater profits and shareholder value. That is explicitly how our leaders want us to treat them in school.

Although educators are not infallibly wise, people who actually work with children, who actually pay attention to the intricate processes of teaching and learning, do understand the needs of healthy human development a whole lot better than do corporate employers. If our culture were truly interested in nourishing the unfolding abilities and personalities of our children—that is, if we were interested in providing a caring education—then we would listen to educators and not to employers. Let the employers train their workers at a more mature phase of their lives, when they voluntarily apply to be employed by them. To educate young people means—or it should mean—helping them bring forth their creativity, their compassion, their curiosity, their moral and aesthetic sensitivity, their critical intellectual skills, their ability to participate in a robust democracy—in a word, their wholeness—and a decent culture, a culture that isn’t blind to everything outside the economic sphere of life, would recognize this.

Taking a long term view—which I ought to do, given my training as a historian—one could argue that the mechanization of education is a temporary phase, perhaps a necessary step in the evolution from feudal and totalitarian societies to those that are genuinely democratic and spiritually meaningful. After all, we can be grateful that Mayor Daley and his cohorts aren’t turning children over to the requirements of military leaders. In some sense, the desire for material prosperity reflects the liberation of the masses from cruel forms of oppression and abject poverty that have characterized human society for many centuries. But now, people are discovering that material wealth alone does not satisfy the yearning for spiritual meaning and that the single-minded pursuit of wealth is dehumanizing, so our cultural evolution is not yet finished. That is why we are here.

At the present time, our culture operates with a perverted understanding of human development. Indeed, we have inverted the normal, organic way of supporting human growth and we do things precisely backward. Instead of giving children the freedom and encouragement to play, explore, investigate, imagine, and dream—those things that naturally form a healthy and whole human personality—we force them into an artificial, constraining learning environment, and demand that they conform to schedules, routines, norms of behavior, and unforgiving tests that strangers have arbitrarily selected for them, with the threat that we will brand them as failures or drug them if they do not so conform. Then, we have a society full of alleged grownups who, instead of growing in maturity, wisdom, and spiritual depth—the true developmental goal of adulthood—are obsessed with pleasure, play, entertainment, sports, and various hedonistic pursuits, as if to make up for the childhood they were denied.

A culture that is fundamentally competitive and technocratic needs to produce generation after generation of immature citizens who are too busy amusing themselves to raise serious questions about the system. Mindless and spiritually starved consumers buy more stuff to fill the aching void at the core of their lives. Our mechanical system of schooling is intended to raise the gross national product. Advertising in the classroom is only the tip of the iceberg; the entire system is geared to production and consumption, to management and employment. It is not set up to nourish caring or compassion.

What are we to do? How might we bring about a meaningful education that could truly lead to a meaningful democracy? I would like to propose four radical but concrete steps in that direction:

1. Explicitly address the question, “What is education for?” Whenever anyone—whether the President, the state or local school superintendent, or the person behind you in the checkout line—expresses the unexamined notion that we need more discipline or achievement in our schools so that our nation can remain economically competitive, we should step forward and ask “Is that really how we want to educate our children? Is the supremacy of American corporations the highest dream you hold for our children?”