RE: Agile education and pragmatic schooling

> Presumably, by homeschooling your children, you believe that you can
> resolve these issues as well as others.  If, in fact, you can resolve
> these issues for your own children, why not help others?  I browsed
> through the Greater Portland Homeschoolers website that was previously
> mentioned.  Obviously, you have spent some time organizing people and
> materials.  Why not extend this into an actual school?

It's been tried, and is enjoying some success. The biggest problem is
that homeschooling, and unschooling in particular, tend to be life
processes rather than something that can be bottled up in a school. You
can have a learning center, but I don't think it resembles a school very
much. (My father often remarks that they should close the school here
and put that money into the library -- we're talking an annual budget of
over a million dollars in a town of 800, a district with 3000 people in
it. I agree with him that more education would result.)

I think a comparison could be made to real-life experience programming
versus what you learn in a college: You learn theories in college, data
models, set theory. On the job, and especially with agile methods, you
learn on the spot. You never stop, and you're driven pragmatically by
what works. That's the real learning. The theory can be learned that way
if one just pays attention to "how should this work in theory?" -- and
then you know the exceptions, too.

I think it's more of a revolution happening than an evolution in some
ways.

> Creating new schools would allow greater collaboration of resources.  It
> would also give more public visibility to the performance of your
> alternative education.  It would provide you with a greater ability to
> make observations on the effectiveness of techiniques.  It would also
> give you (I believe) more credibility in the educational world and allow
> you to help remove the "fringe" label that is often associated with
> homeschooling.

I think the fringe label's disappearing anyway. In the last five years,
we've seen entrance policies from major universities do a 180° about-
face, now often preferring homeschooled students to those from public
schools. I no longer get odd looks when I explain my education. It's
rapidly changing.

> Please don't view this as an attack.  I'm honestly curious, because if
> someone were to go this route, I'd be eager to help them.

Feel free to peg me off-list and talk -- there's quite a bit of activity
on such things, so I could probably dig up some interesting resources.

> PS - Perhaps we should be developing a formula for education, instead of
> a formula for hit movies!

I'd pay more attention if we were!



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