Reader’s Corner

While school boards and educrats in Washington and across the country have been wringing their hands over poor-performing public schools, less recognized groups of alternative educators have been offering a variety of approaches to learning that really work.

What are they doing that’s different?

If your idea of education reform is amping up the pressure on schools to focus narrowly on basic skills so kids can do better on tests, you won’t like Dr. Miller’s book. He is a professor of American history at Vermont’s Champlain College, and his book distills a lifetime of looking at the alternatives. It could be immensely useful for people who want serious change. Instead of focusing like an accountant on numbers and test data, he asks instead what kind of people we want our children to become. This leads him away from an industrial schooling model to ones that range from home schooling and democratic schooling, through Montessori, Waldorf, and other alternatives, to holistic education based on the work of Alfred North Whitehead, Parker Palmer, and Douglas Sloan. In a sense all the alternatives he explores are forms of whole child education because they move beyond the classroom to include, for example, nature and community, and they engage not just the left brain but the body and will, the creative and intuitive potentials of children, and their desire to find meaningful connections between self and society. Brain science confirms that the more faculties of the child we can engage, the more likely material will be retained and truly internalized; but you would never guess that from the way most classes are taught.

Miller’s chapters look at the historic challenge to conventional schools, then concisely lay out the alternatives, propose core principles to guide the transition to a more humane and holistic learning, and finally propose specific strategies that could make education the engine that transforms human consciousness. In the process Miller provides an abundance of ideas for nurturing, enlivened learning that can help kids creatively engage with the world.

To buy this book click here.
The Self-Organizing Revolution: Common Principles of the Educational Alternative Movement
By Ron Miller
Psychology Press, 2008

Chris Nye
Member, Orion Society Board of Directors