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-
- Challenging
the Giant:
- Vol. II ( vol. I also
referred to below -
- and see below for
volumes III and IV reviews):
- The Best of
SKOLE,
- the Journal
of Alternative Education,
- Mary Leue,
editor,
- Down-to-Earth
Books
- P.O. Box
488, Ashfield, MA 01330
-
- Reviewed by Claudia
Berman:
-
- Claudia is an
independent consultant in science education and educational
alternatives for school districts and universities. She received
her Masters in education from Antioch New England Graduate School
and has written a book on the School Around Us, an elementary
alternative school in Kennebunk, Maine, where she taught for 14
years.
-
- The
alternative movement started 25 years ago during the social
revolution of the sixties and seventies. At this time, hundreds of
small schools were created by parent groups or individuals. Many
of the schools were short-lived. Those that have survived continue
to provide an alternative to parents seeking a more holistic
education than that provided by most public
schools.
-
- In 1969,
Mary Leue, editor of Challenging the Giant, gathered a group of
people in Albany, New York, and started The Free School, now one
of the longest running independent alternative schools in the
nation. After committed hard work and 15 years of experience, she
and a small group of other members of the northeast region of the
National Coalition for Alternative Community Schools (NCACS)
founded SKOLE, the Journal of Alternative Education (pronounced
Skolay), dedicated to the documentation of small schools such as
her own. Important lessons were being learned in these small
schools that could benefit educators everywhere, but the schools
had little voice in the larger educational public. The aim of the
Journal is to supply a voice for the alternative education
community with the hope that the small schools could share their
successes and failures with a wider public.
-
- This book is
an anthology from SKOLE. In this collection, the editor draws on
writings from within the alternative educational community and
presents rare views on schools that work. It contains writings
from teachers, students and scholars. Some selections are written
by profes-sional writers, some are not. The tone of the book is
one of casual shar-ing and acquaintance. Some pieces are written
as journal entries while others are academic in nature. To add to
the casual, reader-friendly tone of the book, the editor adds
information or commentary after each article that helps put the
article or author in context.
- The methods,
educators and philosophies addressed in the anthology are as
varied as the people and schools themselves. Each alternative
school has a unique character. Each account of a school's history,
philosophy, or methods could stand alone. The beauty of the
collection is that, in its entirety, along with Volume I, which
was published in 1992, it paints a collage of real people,
situations and educational methods that have been the basis of the
alternative education movement for 25 years. It provides an
invaluable glimpse into the guts of altemative
education.
-
- It is only
recently that people involved with small alternative schools have
found time or energy to write about what they have been creating.
Most of them have been busy keeping the schools going and spending
time with the children they serve. This anthology marks the
beginning of documentation of this historic educational movement
from within the schools themselves by the people who created
them.
-
- The articles
share common elements that reflect the essence of alternative
education: student and parent empowerment through democracy, a
reverence for nature, and attention to the whole person
(intellectual, physical, emotional, spiritual), to new research on
the brain and learning styles, and to human relationships.
Generally these schools embrace the holistic education vision
summarized in the words of Global Alliance for Transforming
Education (GATE) members, a small gem included in the
book:
-
- This
education emphasizes the challenge of creating a sustainable, just
and peaceful society in harmony with the earth and its life.
[It] seeks to transform the way we look at ourselves and
our relationship to the world by emphasizing our innate human
potentials&emdash;the intuitive, emotional, imaginative, creative
and spiritual, as well as the rational logical and verbal. (p.
265)
-
- This book
covers much ground in its casual collage format. The editor has
included excerpts from books and reprints from other educational
joumals by such prominent educators and authors as Sylvia
Ashton-Warner, John Taylor Gatto, Jonathan Kozal, Ted Sizer,
Robert Theobald, and Ron Miller - all of whom have been
instrumental in educational change and supporters of alternative
education in the last 25 years. She has also included a summary of
research from the Hofstra University Center for the Study of
Educational Alternatives, a long-term public altemative school
research project on how to design alternatives for success. This
is a short but important piece that could be beneficial to many
schools looking to create specialized programs or alternatives
within larger schools.
-
- Many
alternative schools are family-based, creating a community of
parents, teachers, and students. The anthology indudes poetry
selections from students, which enhance the character of the
collage and remind us of the impact the students themselves have
had on the altemative education movement. The anthology would not
be complete without this addition. This book, Challenging the
Giant Volume Il, and its partner, Volume I, are valuable additions
to the growing library of materials that document the alternative
education movement and support a holistic world view.
-
- Review:
"RETURN OF THE GIANT"
-
- Challenging
the Giant:
Volumes III and IV
- The Best of
SKOLE, The Journal of Alternative Education
- Down-to-Earth
Books
- Reviewed by
Emanuel Pariser
-
Introduction of the
Reviewer:
Perhaps it would be
most honest of me to reveal who I am before I "critically review"
"Challenging the Giant" so that I can completely get rid of any
shred of "objectivity" which as reader you might bestow upon me or
my words. Let me first say that the editor of this compilation
from SKOLE (which, by the way, is the precursor of the quarterly
"Paths of Learning") is Mary Leue, who was one of the first people
who made me feel like my writing held interest for anyone else.
She published my thoughts and feelings about the work we do at the
Community School in SKOLE for many years, giving me the sense that
we did and what we thought, and what we struggled with mattered -
even to complete strangers. What SKOLE did for me over the years
of its publication was to beckon me to write, to put words to
paper, to get "it" out, so that others could participate with me
in our adventure and so that I could get my thoughts
straight.
-
- Which is all to say
that I came to this review with an extreme predisposition that
this compendium of essays, interviews, surveys, book excerpts,
and, yes , even book reviews, would be a tantalizing assortment of
the thoughts and feelings of people like myself who were
struggling the same struggles, thinking about the same paradoxes,
and coming to a chorus of differing conclusions. I was not
disappointed.
-
-
- Volume III
of Challenging the Giant: The Best of SKOLE: The Journal of
Alternative Education, is now officially out. Weighing in at 492
pages long the wonderfully diverse range of authors sculpting its
pages range from Zöe Readhead, A.S. Neill's daughter, writing
about her father, to home schooler Rebecca Furbush-Bayer, on the
imperiled European wolf, to Ron Miller and John Gatto verbally
duking it out over whether public schools are redeemable or
not.
- Mary Leue,
the editor and founder of SKOLE and the Free School in Albany, has
the knack of inviting people to write - whether they be 5 or 50 -
anyone who has something to say, something they mean sincerely,
can say it in SKOLE. This "Best of" collection is divided up into
ten sections including: profiles of alternative schools around the
country, essays by teachers on learning (several delightful
chapters from Chris Mercogliano's newly released Making it Up As
We Go Along&emdash;The History of (Albany's) Free School), student
writings, some gripping John Gatto polemics, writing as usual like
a butterfly but stinging like a bee, and some pieces on the
"Plight of Our Children."
-
- The voices
and points of view filling this edition are ones not usually heard
from in "mainstream" discussions of education. They are
impassioned, dedicated, disgusted, learned, stimulated voices who
are writing to communicate, to vent, to celebrate, to broaden
their experience and those of their readers beyond the bounds of
their own personal horizons. No one point of view dominates, no
one writer gets top-billing, no particular vision is put on a
pedestal. But there is an urgency to what is said - an urgency
which is evident for those of us working with children and
adolescents in and out of schools, which grows each day; an
urgency which these assembled voices embody. It is an urgency
which begs for action.
- As Mary
exhorts us on the book's back cover: "Don't just sit back and
stew....Take back your power!...Make a start now by deciding what
you really want (for your children), then begin working to figure
out how to get it." Meanwhile order a copy of this book from
Down-to-Earth Books.
Volume
IV:
- Review:
-
- All Content All the
Time:
- You Can hold the Giant
in One hand!
-
- Challenging
the Giant is not about form. In fact one might call it a
conventional format: 8 3/8" by 5 7/16". You can hold the book in
one hand and the pages won't droop over. The photos look like they
never wanted to stop being negatives, but were forced to. There
are no graphs, advertisements, or fancy graphics. It's mostly just
words on a nicely sized page that enjoin you to read them. The
book fits nicely, as did the journal, on almost any
bookshelf.
-
- If the Giant
is not about form, then it is about accessibility. Nobody, at
least of my generation, could get scared away by this book - the
way it looks, its "scholarliness" or "coolness" or "avant
gardness". Regardless of how famous or how unknown a person is ,
The Giant treats them the same way - personal, direct, human.
Nobody gets a bigger typeface, ecstatic introductions by fawning
admirers; we all are given a space to say what we have to say -
and much like school uniforms - it looks all the same between the
covers of the Giant.
-
- What I like
about this is the lack of pretense. Whether you are a
public
- luminary
like Jonathan Kozol, or John Gatto, or Uri Bronfenbrenner, or
a
- dedicated
teacher or college intern like Orin Domenico or Adam Adler,
you
- get the same
treatment. Of course the familiar names attract, but there is a
wonderful leveling effect to the style of The Giant, and there are
many wonderful surprises.
-
- Skole: the "Bread and
Puppet" of Educational Journals
-
- For the past
30 years an unusual spectacle has taken place in Glover, Vermont,
called the Bread and Puppet Circus. Once a summer people from all
over the country were invited to watch puppetry and political
theater in the Circus's outdoors arena. Thousands came and learned
and were entertained and left inspired and invigorated. Sadly the
large weekend show has been canceled for the last couple of years,
but at one point in my life I went annually with my two young
children, partner, and friends in what became almost a pilgrimage
for us.
-
- The very
special thing I always left Bread and Puppet with was the feeling
that "I could do it", that if I wanted, I could start a theater,
make puppets, pull together political dialogue, and teach at the
same time. This is perhaps one of the most important functions of
a political art form - to get the viewer to engage to such a
degree, that he leaves the experience certain that he could create
something of like value. Reviewing the Giant reminded me of how
strongly SKOLE catalyzed that feeling in me. I am inspired to
write, to think, to overcome my petty
- resistances
to being active. It is the opposite of reading "great thoughts" or
"writing" which is deemed such by social consensus, and makes one
feel "less than", and "what's the point of writing - it's all been
said, and better than I can anyhow."
-
- But there's
the point, the point that Mary Leue understands to the very core,
and it is a point which Challenging the Giant embodies in
every article, on every page. The book shouts, " You do have
something valuable to say - don't wait for someone else to sort of
say it, don't hang back for the "Experts" - out with it - rough,
smooth, naive, realistic - say it. We can only save ourselves if
we move out of our passive consumer roles and into an active and
engaged dialogue, trialogue, conversation about what we
passionately believe or feel.
-
- Do you get
the general gist here? Well it might help if I gave you a little
bit more of an idea of the kind of articles that have been
compiled here; I will momentarily succumb to
objectivity.
-
- Content: What's in it
for You?
-
- Challenging
the Giant 4 runs 481 pages with 58 articles, divided into fourteen
sections including interviews, essays, studies, book reviews, and
excerpts from two books. One of the most intriguing aspects of
reading through the Giant, is that you come upon people you
probably would not have a chance to read elsewhere sandwiched in
with people you can read all over the place - there it is that
leveling phenomenon. Take for instance an interview with professor
Dayle Bethel who is [or was - he's now in Hawaii, ed.]
dean and professor of education and anthropology at the
International University center in Kyoto, Japan. Bethel has
translated the important work of Japanese educator, Tsunesaburo
Makiguchi, and in his interview articulates idea upon idea which
delight and intrigue:
-
- We have
failed to understand that in order for a child to develop all
of
- her many
sides, she must grow up an integral part of two systems,
two
- systems upon
which her whole life depends. These are nature, the
natural
- system where
she is, and her family and community, her social
system."
- Do we fail
to understand this when we look at Schools as "preparation
for
- work, or
even the Jeffersonian, "preparation for an active
citizenry"?
-
- He
continues:
-
- ...children
must be integral parts of their natural and social life
support
- systems
during their growth years..very few schools in existence today
can
- qualify in
these respects..
-
- and on the
role of the teacher:
-
- my first
responsibility is to help children and youth discover and
learn
- how to
actualize the unique, irreplaceable potential genius
within
- them...the
lively actualizing learner can and does quickly pick up
factual
- knowledge
when it is needed. My second responsibility is to nurture
in
- each learner
a sense of wonder and respect for life through immersion
in
- the natural
world and in their community...to assist them to enter
into
- dialogue
with their surrounding environment.
-
- Flip through
the pages a little further and you might find out that
the
- reason John
Kozol spends a lot of time in the South Bronx is
that:
-
- "Most of my
best friends are children. If I had my way, I would spend
the
- rest of my
life with people less than three feet high."
-
- A little bit
further on Orin Domenico puts down an angry list of
the
- "primary
lessons taught in school" today which include:'