Bill
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A COALITION FOR SELF LEARNING
ADDRESS
Dear Friends of Learning,
This letter is to invite you and your [homescool support group, learning community, or other ] to participate in a traveling grassroots research/service project to discover and promote the status of learning communities.
Whether we talk about self learning, self programming, self renewal
or homeschooling. We all seem in accord on these points:
� Everyone has the right to decide what he wants to learn and look for
the opportunity to do it.
� Society and parents must recognize this right and provide young
people and adults alike with the means and oportunity to learn what they want at the speed they want.
� Forcing adult-designed, teachers-designed or government-designed
programs on all young people is not the best way to prepare them for
life.
� Many young people and parents are looking for ways to get out of the
public or academic school-boxes now imposed on people by the
established institutions.
� We need to revise and update our knowledge credential system. It
does not meet our needs.
� All of us who agree on these points want to join forces to move
ahead.
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
�A Coalition for self-learning� is an ad hoc group of individuals and organizations that has been coming together on the Internet for three years to discuss WHY we learn, HOW we learn, WHEN we learn and WHAT we learn. We have tried to think outside the school/teach/educate box, and to go beyond the �fix the schools� syndrome. We have recognized that the way we learn shapes the society in which we live.
With Paulo Friere we are concerned that the current school systems remove young people from their families, communities, society, and nature to prepare them for jobs in the corporate/factory/industrial world. With John Holt we have recognized that we are �Learning all the Time.� With Ivan Illich we have explored �Deschooling Society.� With Peter Drucker we have noted that the future requires life-long learning. With Margaret Mead we have seen that learning in the home and community can provide a superior education to a bureaucratic school system. Following these and other progressive thinkers we have accepted the mantra of �envisioning a world without schools -- creating a world of learning communities.�
As the Coalition discussed these concepts on the Internet one member in Japan suggested that we write a book. Another member in Denmark offered to put individual chapters on his web page. Thirty different members offered to submit chapters for discussion by the whole group. A member in Vermont agreed to edit and publish a final version. In August 2000 the finalized book was publised as �Creating Learning Communities.� It attracted many new members to the discussion, and an award from the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation for an improved web site and a program to go beyond the book and to take actions on creating learning communities.
For the last year the vastly expanded Coalition has been working on a �Guidebook and Directory of Consultants for Creating Learning Communities.� The Guide book, released November 2001 defines �learning Communities� in three modes, communities that learn, communities that provide learning opportunities, and communities of learners. It lists over 75 individuals and organization that provide help to groups of families who want to establish local learning centers, resources or services. The Guidebook, like �Creating Learning Communities,� is being sold by many members of the Coalition to finance further asisstance to community groups working to take charge of their own life-long learning. (The book for $21.95, the Guidebook for $4.00)
The next phase of our project is to visit homeschool support groups, learning communities, youth groups, learning co-ops and other local groups for cooperative self-learning as a research/service project. We will be meeting with organizations and ad hoc get togethers to discuss, learn and exchange views on creating learning communities of all kinds.
Our findings will be written in a journal and put on our web page on the Internet and probably published in book format. We hope the publication itself will help you network with other collaborative learning programs and to meet your own goals for the future of learning in your area.
The three of us who will be doing the travelig and writing are unfunded at this time. We hope that you and other learning groups will provide some support in cash or in kind. This letter is only the introduction we will be pleased to hear from you with suggestion on how you can help us, and how we can help you to better organize non-school learning in your area.
Lindsay
Matt
& Kaye
$ anyone else who might like to discuss learning communities with local groups.
**Folkschool-list archives are at: <http://www.mint.net/folkschool/helpnet/archives.htm> Sponsored by Pine Tree Folk School
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