Category: News

Peter Berg will sell his new book first at the AERO Conference. It will be for sale here weeks before you can buy it on Amazon or anywhere else.

Book Description:  

In The Tao of Teenagers:  A Guide to Teen Health, Happiness & Empowerment, Dr. Peter Berg takes readers on a journey through his experiences working with teens over the last 25 years.  He shares his approach to teen health, happiness and empowerment through his eyes and the eyes of teenagers.  This book is as a much an invitation to dialogue as it is a guide.  

Berg details the experience of teens he has worked with, he invites adults and teens alike to practice different approaches to teen health and happiness as they empower themselves to make the best decisions for their lives.  An essential book for any adult who lives, learns or works with teens and essential for any teen interested in their health, happiness and empowerment. 

Bio:

Dr. Peter Berg, the founder of Youth Transformations, works with youth as a board Certified Holistic Health and Mental Health Coach and is currently the Principal of The New School, a Democratic School, in Maine. 

His work includes helping teenagers empower themselves so they can take charge of their health and happiness and be the masters of their own lives.  

He holds a Doctorate in Educational Leadership and has written extensively on alternative, holistic, integrated educational theory and integrated health.  He also serves as a faculty member for the Self-Design Graduate Institute.  

Peter organizes the Alternative Education Resource Organization representatives worldwide and is a reviewer for the American Educational Research Association.  He has consulted on many school and organizational startups.  

To learn more about Peter's work, please visit www.youthtransformations.com.

The alternative education movement goes back well before there was a name for it. In fact it could be argued that what we now call alternative education and homeschooling was the norm for humankind for millennia.
 
The difference in paradigm between what we now call alternative education and the current mainstream education is very dramatic. In 95% of schools around the world it seem that a basic belief is that children are naturally lazy and need to be forced to learn. We’ll come back to that later.
 
The paradigm for alternative, learner-centered education is that children are natural learners and do not need to be forced to learn.
In fact modern brain research has shown that the more you force children to learn things that do not interest them, the more you extinguish the natural interest and ability to learn.
 
If you accept the first paradigm that children must be forced to learn you need a whole series of external devices to force it. This would include competition for grades, homework assignments, suppression of spontaneous learning, suppression of verbal interaction. In other words, you would have a typical classroom.
 
If you believe in the second paradigm that children are natural learners your main job would be to help find resources for the students, coach them in the direction they choose to go. You would have to develop the ability to listen well to them to help determine these things. There are definitely differences in the ways alternative educators do this, which we’ll talk about later, but the commonality is that it is a learner-centered approach.
 
As I said, the alternative education movement goes back far into the past. It could be argued that the current public school system is just a relatively short experiment, spanning only 150 years or so.
 
The ideas behind a learner-centered approach keep on popping up throughout history, perhaps because they work. One early proponent was Jean Jaques Rousseau, whose Emile also known as On Education, was based on these ideas. Emile was banned in Paris and Geneva and was publicly burned in 1762, the year of its first publication. Ironically, during the French Revolution, Emile served as the inspiration for what became a new national system of education.
 
We move forward to Bronson Alcott. Born in 1799 and largely self-educated, he founded a series of controversial schools in the 1830’s in the Philadelphia and Boston area. He was influenced by the European reformers such as the Swiss Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi and Friedrich Frobel.
 
In 1830, with William Lloyd Garrison he founded an anti-slavery society.
 
One of his schools, the Temple School (because it operated out of a Masonic Temple) was a forerunner of progressive and democratic schooling. It caused a lot of controversy because he accepted an African American girl and refused to expel her. Many parents withdrew their students and soon he was left with just a handful, including his own daughter Louisa May Alcott. As you know, she went on to write books such as Little Men and Little Women, largely based on her experiences in her father’s alternative school.
 
By the way, some of the connections back then were amazing. Emerson was a financial supporter of Alcott and in 1845 Bronson Alcott lent his Axe to Henry David Thoreau so he could build his home at Walden Pond.
 
Many of Alcott's educational principles are still used in classrooms today, including "teach by encouragement", art education, music education, acting exercises, learning through experience, risk-taking in the classroom, tolerance in schools, physical education/recess, and early childhood education

This 2016 International Democratic Education Conference was held in Mikkeli, Finland. It was co-sponsored by the EUDEC, the European Democratic Education Community, which is one of the sub-groups that grew out of the IDEC. The first IDEC was a small meeting of democratic educators that was organized by Yaacov  Hecht in 1993 at the Democratic School of Hadera, in Israel. The IDEC is not an organization,  by design. At each conference we find schools and organizations to organize future IDECs.

There was a weekend of EUDEC meetings before the IDEC officially started on Monday, June 6th. The key organizer of this IDEC was Marko Koskinen, who worked with several  local partners.

One of the most striking discoveries that the participants first realized is that it is still light in Finland well past 10 PM at this time of year and that the sun comes up at 4 AM! This makes sleeping problematic for some. Also, the days were packed full of activities. Sometimes going past 11 PM.

Unlike many education conferences, more than half the participants are students, many from democratic schools. People came from 35 countries!

We learned several  startling things about Finnish public schools:

Parents can not be charged for education because of the need for equality. If you start an independent school the government pays for most of it. Homework is restricted to a half hour time and it is illegal to give homework for weekends or vacations. There is practically no testing of younger students and very little thereafter.  Teaching is an esteemed profession. As everyone knows,  Finland scores the highest on international measurement tests, so why do we ignore what they do?

One significant thing we learned from this conference is that democratic and learner-centered schools and programs are expanding rapidly in many countries. For example, the first democratic, learner-centered school in Poland was started by a woman who took AERO’s school starter online course. She also subsequently attended an AERO conference. Not only is that school flourishing, but it has led to several  others being started around Warsaw, and about 30 around Poland! We found there are two  new democratic schools that have started in Paris and more that are starting around the France. Much is also happening in Spain, with a new democratic school in Barcelona represented at this IDEC. There was an attendee from Egypt, which underscores the fact that there were several students in this year’s school starter course from Arab countries. A large group attended from Korea, which hosted the IDEC two years ago. When there was an attempt there to rein in the many new democratic schools that had started there, we  organized a protest in Seoul. It was apparently successful as they backed off this attempt.  There was another large delegation from an alternative school in Taiwan,  as well as a representative from mainland China. Israel already has over 25 public democratic schools and there are at least six more starting. In Germany, there are now more than 100 democratic schools and in general, there are no openings and a waiting list. When we had the IDEC in 2005 in Germany democratic schools were illegal and people were being arrested for it. Our presentations at an important university partially led to this change.  After a huge increase and a steep drop when Netherlands instituted a national curriculum, democratic schools are again on the rise there. Keynote speaker Brother John Kennedy Omondi Oronjo from Kenya has started a learner-centered boarding school for orphans and dropouts for 300 students. They plan to host the 2019 IDEC in Kenya.

Of course, there are still many schools in some countries that are struggling with rigid school bureaucracies.  For example,  new schools in Hungary and the Czech Republic have great difficulties. Home education is still illegal in many countries, such as Germany, Netherlands, and Sweden.

For the first three days, spontaneous workshops were posted and presented. In one interesting presentation, an educator from Netherlands who  has experienced many difficulties with school inspectors and bureaucrats there talked about how he has developed a strategy to work with the school inspectors. It included learning how to speak the inspectors’ language and finding out what they needed.  One interesting piece of information was that the closing of democratic schools may have been collateral damage in the closing of radical Islamic schools.

After several  new schools mentioned to me that one of their great needs was the creation of an international accrediting agency to aid with their problems with the education bureaucracy,  I organized a workshop on the subject.  One of the attendees,  Derry Hannam, was a former English school inspector who has helped many schools with such problems. Many people, particularly AERO school starters have been asking AERO to do this for a long time. We will investigate possibilities.

I went to a workshop by Vlad and Natalia, Summerhill parents. They have started a website and an organization to provide support for parents looking for educational options, particularly democratic schools. One thought we had was to have success stories and examples on the site. Another was to have a limited livestream of democratic schools so parents could have more direct experience with this.

I went to a workshop with EUDEC staff member Chloe Duff about the establishment of a continuing IDEC website instead of a new one each year by each organizing group. We ended up buying a domain and getting the ball rolling.

We had a meeting with the organizers of next year’s IDEC, to be held in Israel in March 2017. There were ten organizers of previous IDECs there to help them. It was an amazing meeting covering such things as financing, location, scholarhips, and fundraising, among other things.

During the first three evenings, we had IDEC meetings. One issue was the question of whether the Sri Aurobindo Ashram/orphanage in Nepal would still be able to host the 2018 IDEC after the extensive earthquake damage they sustained. Unfortunately, Finland refused to give the Nepalese visas so they could attend the IDEC even though funding had been found for them. I was able to Skype them and Ramchandra told me that because of the extensive damage they had decided they could not be ready. They had actually started construction on a big hall when the earthquake struck and it did so much damage to their existing buildings that construction was put on hold. They do much of the work themselves. So they asked that their hosting be postponed until 2020. At the IDEC meetings, there were some suggestions for 2018 but nothing was decided.

For one of my workshops, I showed a video montage of the first six IDECs. I went to another one about research that has been done on democratic and learner-centered education. There hasn’t been much since the 8 Year Study of progressive education in the 1930’s, but there is a great need for it. What little that has been done clearly shows that students do better by almost every measure with a learner-centered approach.

The last two days consisted mostly of keynotes at the beautiful Mikaeli Congress House. These were given by leaders of the movement such as Yaacov Hecht of Israel (Changing the Paradigm from a Pyramid to a Network), Sugata Mitra (The Future of Education),  Justo Mendez and Ana Yris of Puerto Rico ( Democratizing Education—A Mission of Love),  Henry Readhead of Summerhill, Chloe Duff of EUDEC, Tae Wook Ha from Korea, Derry Hannam and several leaders from Finland. My keynote was a (rare for me) Powerpoint on the History of Alternative Education. These should be available on the Internet at some point.

On the next to last evening, someone came to me to ask me to do an auction to help erase and conference deficit and if costs were covered it would be seed money for the next IDEC. It was a daunting task on two hours notice, but it was a lot of fun and an enthusiastic crowd raised more than 500 Euros.

Overall it was a really wonderful and productive gathering. Now I need to get back home to get ready of the AERO conference in Portland, August 3-7. The AERO conference grew directly out of the IDEC that we co-sponsored in 2003 with Albany Free School. We had the first one the next year, in 2004, so this will be our 13th. I’ve been to 20 IDECs.