Author: AERO Webmaster

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AERO New Year’s Quiz With Prizes; No Correct Answers Last Week so Prize Doubled!

AERO New Year’s Quiz With Prizes

So you think you know all about alternative education. Take this quiz and see. All winners will receive free books from AERO.
1. In what year was Summerhill founded?
  • A. 1960
  • B. 1948
  • C. 1934
  • D. 1921
2. What contest did a democratic school in Israel win during the IDEC there?
  • A. Computer programming
  • B. Best democratic meeting
  • C. Best art project
  • D. Best music program
3. What was the documentary, “If there is a Reason to Study” about? It what country was it made?
  • A. Montessori education
  • B. The effect of testing on students
  • C.Democratic education
  • D.Pearson exposé
  • E. Extra credit, which country?
4. Name a boarding democratic school in the United States.
  • A. Sudbury Valley School
  • B. Brooklyn Free School
  • C. Highland School
  • D. Windsor House School
5. What is the title of Jerry Mintz’s new book?
  • A. No Homework
  • B. Summerhill Revisited
  • C. School’s Over
  • D. School’s Out
6. What 80 year old pioneering activist and author was a keynoter at this year’s AERO conference?
  • A. Jonathan Kozol
  • B. Nikhil Goyal
  • C. Sir Ken Robinson
  • D. Pat Montgomery
7. What AERO member was a pioneer in the health food and organic farming movements?
  • A. Sudbury Valley School
  • B. Summerhill School
  • C. School of Living
  • D. Grassroots Free School
8. Who founded Clonlara School 50 years ago?
  • A. Mother Teresa
  • B. Pat Montgomery
  • C. Sandy Hurst
  • D. Mary Leue
9. Which school did AERO support during Hurricane Maria?
  • A. Houston Sudbury
  • B. Grassroots Free School
  • C. Espacio A
  • D. Nuestra Escuela
10. Where will the next International Democratic Education Conference be held?
  • A. Israel
  • B. Kenya
  • C. India
  • D. United States

Reply to JerryAERO@AOL.com. Put in the question number and your letter response

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News From People Responding to Membership Renewal AERO Membership Discount for 2 Days

From Ken Danford, North Star and Liberated Learners

“We are pretty busy with Liberated Learners these days.  We have about a dozen centers in the network, and one opening in Dover, NH, called BigFish.  There are a few more in the planning stages.

We are consulting with these Starters, and we are mutually supporting each other with all the existing centers.  We do the Webinars (the ad on the AERO website) about once every six weeks, and I also talk to interested people one time, no-charge, about our model, about once per week.  So there is a lot of discussion around spreading the North Star model.
I’m also working on a book.”
“These are our Existing Centers:
The Learning Cooperatives
Erin Flemming writes from Canada
Erin in a graduate of AERO’s Online School Starter Course
We Learn Naturally is celebrating its third year running alternative education programs in Hamilton Ontario.  We have a forest school style recreation program called Learning in the Woods that serves homeschoolers and young children during the week and public school learners in the summer and during school break.
The Barn School is opening this spring, in Burlington, Ontario as a learning center, offering full time learning options for families who wish to use it as a private school. We have a separate residence onsite reserved for guest speaker accommodations so if you are in the area, feel free to reach out!  There seems to be interest in having a similar style center in Hamilton, so we are currently looking for space that could accommodate us in the city.
We’ve also been busy working together with other local educational alternatives to organize the Hamilton Educational Alternatives Conference in Hamilton on January 20th.  This conference is aimed at parents so they can meet some of the educational alternatives available in our city and we have some guest speakers lined up including AERO members Deb O’Rourke and Stephanie Schuler Fages.
Uniting and organizing local educational alternative advocates and participants has been both rewarding and complicated!  I’m learning a lot and I often think of the efforts that must go into the AERO conference!  Best wishes to my fellow AERO members who are committed to choice in education.  I’m so thankful to be on this journey with you!

 

From Wayne Jennings about Minnesota alternatives:
“Good to maintain contact. Here’s the MN scene:
About 140,000 students are in some type of “at-risk” alternative program, some all day, some for just summers, some just an hour or two a day. They are students labeled dropouts and others based on 10 categories. Many are programs established by the Legislature called Area Learning Centers; these operate year round. Other alternatives include online, substance abuse, etc. Some serve elementary students.. A strong active association exists with several statewide and regional conferences, the MN Assoc. of Alt. Programs. (MAAP) It’s mission: To lead, promote, and support innovative learning experiences. I and others have pushed for innovative approaches and programs rather than being little high schools. I can report some progress on that.
Still, there wouldn’t be the need for such programs if traditional education were not so hide bound and backward.
About 40,000 students attend one of 160 charter schools. They have a state organization: MN Assoc. of Charter Schools (MACS). Perhaps 20 of schools are innovative including a  few I started and contributed services to. I chaired the boards for two of them for 17 years (still continuing with one at age 87). The MN charter statute is quite strong in giving funding and decisions to the schools. Too bad the schools make little use of the purpose of the legislation (try new ideas) and some freedom from regulations and contracts.
The parochial and private school scene has shrunk. Some privates became charter schools, e.g. Southside Family.
I’m close to having the book on schooling done, I’ve worked on for 60 years, most of it collecting stimulating materials. It will be on Amazon about early Feb. Also as an eBook. Chapters: Introduction, Purpose of Schooling, Failure of Traditional Schooling, Near Impossibility of Changing School, New Era We Live in, How children and Youth Learn, Principles of School Transformation, Specific Steps to Transformed Schools, A Deeper Look: Staffing, Facilities, Assessment, Technology. It has 400 footnotes on the page itself (instead at the end of a chapter or in the back of the book) and several hundred items in the bibliography,  wonderful quotes, and materials now long gone from present generations. It’s now being professionally proofed and formatted. AERO is in the book.”

The Western Institute for Social Research (“WISeR”) by John Bilorusky, PhD, WISR President

In 1975, the Western Institute for Social Research (WISR) was founded in part as an attempt to improve on both conventional and alternative higher education as they had evolved into the 1970s. At that time, many educators and students were debating the merits of the university’s role in the community and in social change, and the “relevance” of the curriculum to each individual student.  After 43 years, and given growing income inequality, continued racial injustice, threats to our democracy, and the intensified and narrowing pressures to use education only for career advancement, WISR’s mission and learning methods are more needed and important than ever.[ www.wisr.edu/welcome ]

  • WISR combines theory and practice. All students do active reading, writing, thinking, and discussing while they continue wrestling with specific, practical problems, with the guidance and support of faculty and their fellow students.
  • WISR is intensive and individual. Each student builds, and continually revises, a personal learning plan and works with faculty, other students, and community resource people, on the problems s/he deeply cares about.
  • WISR is a small, multicultural learning community. WISR is designed as a living experiment in cooperation among people of different races, cultures, and personal backgrounds. Active collaboration with others, not competition and distance, lend richness and interest to each person’s learning process.
  • WISR is inquiry-oriented. Learning at WISR builds on the excitement of actively doing one’s own research, growing out of action, experience and observation, and dialogue with others. We aid and support one another to use curiosity, imagination, and critical mindedness, while probing for insights beneath the surface of everyday impressions, and searching for the interconnections between our immediate experiences and the “bigger picture.”
  • WISR focuses on professional study that is also mindful of personal growth and values, along with developing leadership skills for community and/or professional transformation.
  • WISR is dedicated to social change. WISR students and faculty are people committed to changing today’s oppressive patterns of race and gender relations, of wealth and poverty, of extreme power and powerlessness, in peaceful and constructive ways.
  • WISR offers distance learning to all students, as well as the option to meet with faculty and students on site, in advising sessions, seminars, study groups and conferences. All seminars, study groups and conferences are available to students both on site and from a distance by internet and phone access to video and audio conferences with those on site.
  • Most importantly, WISR helps students to build bridges to fulfill their plans for the future. We believe it is important to consciously and continually help students to design learning activities—action projects, research, and writings—that help to build bridges to the student’s desired career and life paths, and oftentimes this includes working toward a more sustainable and just future. We believe that people should not have their visions limited by the definitions of existing jobs and careers, and that they can, and should, be encouraged to be both visionary and realistic in pursuing a life path that makes sense to them. Consequently, WISR’s educational programs are suited for learners with many different types of future goals, including but not limited to: changing careers, pursuing advancement in one’s existing career, becoming more capable and more meaningfully engaged in one’s existing job or career niche, writing books and articles, organizing people and networks for social change, or creating new organizations and programs.
 
You can sign up for or renew AERO membership here. The please send us an update on your work for the e-news.
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Letter From Taiwanese School Under Attack

Dear all,

This Heather from Taiwan.

Our school is in an emergency. We need your help!!

Humanity School’s Elementary and Junior High is funded by the government. It is run as a not for profit, founded by our parents, The Humanity and Differential Education Foundation. This model is sometimes translated as a “Charter School,” but it is not exactly the same as the way it is in America.

Yesterday we got a very sad news. The government announced to cancel the contract with our foundation!!! Which means, the Humanity School is being taken back by our local government!!!!

The main reason the local government is taking back Humanity School from us is: For a long time, we have been neglecting the academic achievement of our students. We receive payments in addition to government-funded tuition (For example, the budget that the government provides only supplies classes with a 1:30 teacher-student ratio, while the ratio of Humanity is 1:7. But we always seek for financial support for those in need.) Therefore, they say we are harming students’ growth and is socially unjust.

In the year of 2014, Taiwan passed the “Three Acts Governing Experimental Education”, which accredits three forms of experimental education: The Non-School Form, the School Form, and the Charter Form. By calling them “Experimental Education,” it means that none of these experimental initiatives are required to follow the national regulations, such as the national curriculum, among others.

We have always been proud of Taiwan’s policy change. But I feel it’s a shame that our school’s situation could still happen at a local level

How can I just let it happen and do nothing!?

So we need your help!

You can help us by doing the following steps:

  1. Take a short video (around 30 seconds), or write a letter. Tell everyone what the value you see in our school is, and in what way is our education important to the world.
    In the end of the video, please tell us: Where are you from, what is your name, what is your organization/position, and say “don’t kill the pride of Taiwan.”
  2. Where to put the video or letter? Please put on your Facebook page, hashtag #DontkilltheprideofTaiwan #別用框框扼殺孩子的未來 and also send the profile to heather1314520@gmail.com for me.
    If it’s possible, please do it before December 10th, because we are in hurry.

Thanks for everything~~~
We will keep you updated when we have more information!

heather1314520@gmail.com

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A Letter to Everyone in the AERO Community

Dear AERO Community:

Sometimes we assume that all 14,000 of our readers know about everything that AERO does, has done, and wants to continue to do and why you should support us. Here is a short list of some of the things for which AERO has been a catalyst.

We helped start well over 100 schools and programs that we know of:

These include Brooklyn Free School, which was organized out of the International Democratic Education Conference that AERO hosted in 2003. In 2004 it became the first democratic school in New York City in decades. Now there are several others.

One of them was Manhattan Free School that has evolved into the Agile Learning Center. ALCs are now spreading around the world.

We also helped to start one of the first homeschool resource centers in England, A Place to Grow, in Stroud. It is now being replicated in other parts of England.

When Summerhill School was threatened with closure by the English education bureaucracy in the late 1990’s, AERO helped organize support for them around the world, including organizing the International Democratic Education Conference in 1999 at the school to demonstrate this support. Summerhill won their case and continues to this day.

When we helped organize the IDEC in Germany in 2005 democratic education was illegal there. We had the last day of the conference in a well known university and that was a game changer. Now there are democratic schools all over Germany.

AERO’s website is #1 on Google for Alternative Education. AERO has helped innumerable parents find educational alternatives for their children, and teachers find schools in which to teach. We also help people who want to start homeschooling. Mostly we do this free of charge. Furthermore, we often don’t hear  about people who find the resources they are looking for directly on our website, through our lists of member schools and democratic schools, for example. Many people have told us they have visited as many as 50 of the schools on our member list. Tens of thousands of people have accessed and copied the Ten Signs You Need a Different Kind of Education for Your Child. It has been translated into many languages.

We have over 600 member alternatives listed in 57 countries and 45 states. But it’s an open secret that we won’t remove any school that has ever joined because we know what an important resource it is for people who come to our website. So only about a third regularly renew their memberships. It’s a dilemma for us. Nobody ever asks us to have them be removed from this list because every student enrolled is worth thousands of dollars to them. We also provide current member schools with free job ads.

We used to publish Education Revolution as a quarterly magazine. People subscribed to it through paid membership. Now we publish Education Revolution free as an e newsletter every week, more than 50 times a year. Many people depend upon it for the latest news about learner-centered education.

AERO is a book publisher. We sometimes publish books that need to be published but can’t find a publisher. For example, we published the book of Nikhil Goyal, a 17-year-old student, One Size Does not Fit All. At the time we told him it could lead to having another book published by a mainstream publisher, and it did. His second book, Schools on Trial, was published by Doubleday. He is now getting his doctorate in England. AERO has now published more than a dozen books and e books. We also carry a hundred other hard to find books on educational alternatives in our online bookstore.

After AERO hosted the IDEC in 2003 we started having yearly AERO conferences and have now had 14 of them. Even though many of our attendees are not wealthy and our conference fees are very low, we’ve had keynoters who might ordinarily be expected to be at much higher-powered events. These included people such as Zoe Readhead, Head of Summerhill, Sir Ken Robinson, Sugata Mitra, Riane Eisler, Mimsy Sadovski of Sudbury Valley School, Alfie Kohn, Yong Zhao, Peter Gray, Debbie Meier, Yaacov Hecht and dozens more!

Many organizations and documentaries got their initial launch at an AERO conference and make good use of AERO’s resources to keep their important work going.

AERO is one of a very select few organizations in the world that brings anyone interested in educational alternatives and the idea of people as natural learners together under one banner.

We appreciate everyone in the AERO network and AERO truly is all of you. Just staying subscribed to the e newsletter and going to the AERO website do help us some because we have advertisers that support us. But if you want to help in a more substantial way and keep us doing this work please get our books, downloads, enroll in our courses, come tothe AERO conference, make a tax-deductible donation, or better still, join the AERO elite and become a sustaining member for as little as $5 a month.

Your support will enable AERO to continue the transformational work it has been doing for decades and embark on new initiatives. We need much more support to really be a catalyst for the Education Revolution. Only you can help us do that! We’re not satisfied to just survive.

We know we don’t need to put in any special carrots or gimmicks! Nevertheless, all donors will get free membership or membership extension and a signed copy of my book.

Thank you for your support.

Yours,

Jerry and the AERO Team

You can make your donation here.