Children are born full of curiosity, eager to participate in the world. They learn as they live, with enthusiasm and joy. Then we send them to school. We stop them from playing and actively exploring their interests, telling them it's more important to sit still and listen. The result is that for many children, their motivation to learn drops dramatically. The joy of the early years is replaced with apathy and anxiety. This is not inevitable. We are socialised to believe that schooling is synonymous with education, but it's only one approach. Self-directed education puts the child back in control of their learning. This enables children, including those diagnosed with special educational needs, to flourish in their own time and on their own terms. It enables us to put wellbeing at the centre of education. Changing Our Minds brings together research, theory and practice on learning. It includes interviews with influential thinkers in the field of self-directed education and examples from families alongside practical advice. This essential guide will give you an understanding of why self-directed education makes sense, how it works, and what to do to put it into action yourself.

A passionate deconstruction and reconstruction of learning, development, and schooling that urges teachers to explore and create new educational opportunities for themselves and their students, Schools for Growth: Radical Alternatives to Current Educational Models asks the following questions: Can we create ways for people to learn the kinds of things that are necessary for functional adaptation without stifling their capacity to continuously create their growth? Can schools become environments that support children to perform not only as learners but as developers of their lives? This book challenges educators to look at the deeply-rooted assumptions about schooling, learning, and development and urges that the way psychology and education have constructed our conceptions of what it means to teach, to learn, and to grow may be the most serious impediment to the learning and developing of children. Beyond the criticism, the author presents an original methodological reformation of what learning and development are as relational activities and then takes readers on a visit to three radical independent school settings. Arguing that current educational models have been misguided by scientific psychology, the author states that the dominant model of human development actually hinders development. Moreover, as learning theory has become infused with developmental theory over the past 30 years, the overly cognitive manner in which psychologists have come to think about thinking, learning, and development has become further insinuated into education. Both theories--learning and developmental--fail o recognize the human capacity for relational-revolutionary activity and for performance. The prevalent mode of education--acquisitional learning--is grounded in a world view that gives primacy to knowledge and knowing which Holzman believes is inconsistent with ongoing developmental activity. The author focuses on "developmental learning"--a social constructionist, activity-theoretic conception of development which includes a transformation and synthesis of Vygotsky and philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. She also discusses educational projects that are self-conscious attempts to break with key elements of modern epistemology and the dominant psychological paradigm as they are perpetrated in contemporary educational theory and practice. Their specific philosophies and practices highlight important methodological issues raised in the attempt to create "postmodern schools"--schools more concerned with growing than knowing.

A clear, brief, broad-spectrum survey of philosophies and philosophic issues relating to education, highlighting the relationship between philosophic starting points and educational outcomes--between theory and practice. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

World Bank and Education: Book Blurb For more than three decades, the World Bank has been proposing global policies for education. Presented as research-based, validated by experience, and broadly applicable, these policies are ideologically driven, insensitive to local contexts, and treat education as independent of international dynamics and national and local economies and cultures. Target countries, needing resources and unable to generate comparable research, find it difficult to challenge World Bank recommendations. The World Bank and Education: Critiques and Alternatives represents a powerful challenge to World Bank proposals. Probing core issues—equity, quality, finance, privatization, teaching and learning, gender, and human rights—highlights the disabilities of neoliberal globalization. The authors demonstrate the ideological nature of the evidence marshaled by the World Bank and the accompanying policy advice. Addressing key education issues in developing countries, the authors’ analyses provide tools for resisting and rejecting generic policy prescriptions as well as alternative directions to consider. Robert Arnove, in his preface, says, “whether the Bank is responsive to the critiques and alternatives brilliantly offered by the present authors, the book is certain to influence development and education scholars, policymakers, and practitioners around the globe.”

Challenging dominant discourses in neoliberal marketized societies about working with disconnected young people, this book argues that alternative, radical approaches to formal and informal education are necessary to challenge repressive practices, and to help build a more equal, socially-just society.

This state-of-the-art, comprehensive Handbook fully explores the field of alternative education on an international scale. Alternatives to mainstream schooling and education are becoming increasingly recognised as pertinent and urgent for better understanding what really works in successfully educating children and adults today, especially in light of the increased performance driven and managerially organised economic modelling of education that dominates. For too long we have wondered what “exactly” education done otherwise might look like and here we meet individual examples as well as seeing what alternative education is when a collection becomes greater than the sum of parts. The Handbook profiles numerous empirical examples from around the world of education being done in innovative and excitingly democratic and autonomous ways from Forest Schools and Home Education through to new technologies, neuroscience and the importance of solitude. The book also sets out important theoretical perspectives to inform us why seeing education through an alternative lens is useful as well as urgently needed. Global in its perspective and definitive in content, this one-stop volume will be an indispensable reference resource for a wide range of academics, students and researchers in the fields of Education, Education Policy, Sociology and Philosophy as well as educational practitioners.