Martin Rezny
Aug 28, 2017 · 2 min read

Well, since my article was written more like a manifesto than a curriculum, I should clarify it a bit. I of course don’t advocate an absolute free-form education, I in fact find that extreme to be impossible to do in any human society (unless we talk about feral children growing up with wolves in the forest). There’s always structure to human socialization and activities.

The thing is, there hasn’t always been a school and there still isn’t just school, and it wasn’t/isn’t always the standardized model. I tried to list most of the basic alternatives in the article, the more un-school like of which are personal tutoring (a historical favorite of the wealthy) or home schooling (greatly depending in quality on who the parents are — typically a solid option for the children of artists or other intellectual elites).

What I am a proponent of is the version of alternative education that is in fact centered around civics, somewhat in line with the ancient Greek/Roman trivium/quadrivium model. You start with mandatory classes on thinking-related subjects like languages, math, logic, and rhetoric, on which you spend a few years, after which you give students the skills to know themselves and make an informed choice about their future learning trajectory.

The mandatory part after that point is to still keep on learning, naturally, but not in a rigid structure of subjects, not in batches only connected by time of birth, not by a teacher who’s an authority, and not by memorization for testing. You’d learn across topics in interactive ways with teachers as peers/moderators/guides, focusing on those methods that each student prefers the most — some may prefer debating, some creative arts, some computer programs and games, some hard science and math, some sports or crafts, etc. The same subjects can, and should, be taught very differently.

That would still be a school, with the buildings and staff and everything. It’s what’s happening inside of those walls that makes all the difference.

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Martin Rezny

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An independent Czech thinker, speaker, writer, and composer. Listen to my music at https://soundcloud.com/martin-re-n-1 Give me a tip at http://bit.ly/2gRGgMo