Demolish schools so public education can improve, says writer

Award-winning journalist recommends drastic action in controversial new book

From: Straight Goods correspondent Wendy Priesnitz

  Student alienation and violence. High levels of unemployment among high school graduates. Thousands of young children on Ritalin. Unhappy teachers. Increasing gaps between rich and poor. Global warming and other ecological disasters.
  Award winning journalist Wendy Priesnitz says that these problems are indications of an education system that has outlived its usefulness. And she says, they will not be solved with more money, more schools, more teachers or even student codes of conduct. Instead, what is required is to dismantle the one-size-fits-all, industrial paradigm that processes and warehouses students, and replace it with a community-based learning society that will accommodate the individuality of learners of all ages, interests, abilities and styles.
  In a controversial new book entitled Challenging Assumptions in Education, she shows how the current education system served admirably for the age of industrial expansion, training laborers to become willing workers in the manufacturing system and helping create unimaginable material wealth. But the industrial age is over, Priesnitz points out. Today, we face a new form of society, and new challenges created by the material consumption that past centuries produced. However, our youngest citizens, during their most formative years, are still locked away in teaching factories, being prepared for the future with the methods of the past.
  Bringing together current knowledge about how people learn, electronic tools for learning, the demand for life-long learning, the two-decade-old deschooling movement, and the new trend toward grassroots democracy, Challenging Assumptions in Education makes a compelling case for formalizing into the mainstream of public education what a variety of futurists and management consultants are already suggesting is happening.
  Challenging Assumptions in Education presents five outdated myths on which our current education system is built: Education is Something That is Done to You, Knowledge Belongs to a Cult of Experts, Others Know Best What Children Should Learn, Schools Provide Effective Training, and Schools Have a Noble Purpose. After thoroughly demonstrating what is wrong with these assumptions, Priesnitz presents a variety of ways that individuals and policy makers can begin to solve the problems created by these assumptions. The book then invites readers to participate in a website-based dialogue to define concrete steps that policy makers and citizens can take to create a true learning society.
  Priesnitz, who is the editor of a 24-year-old Canadian alternative newsmagazine called Natural Life, and has written extensively on the homeschooling/deschooling movement, has watched a variety of new modes of self-learning and grassroots self-organizing develop over the past few years.
  She says, "Our outdated assumptions about how children learn are crippling both our young people and our collective well-being. But every attempt at fixing public education reinforces these assumptions. Only by challenging these assumptions will we be able to take the first steps towards replacing a system that is not relevant to the lives of today's young people. We must give up on the hierarchical, coercive, industrial model of education whether it looks like a public school, a charter school, a private school or a home school because it impedes learning and enslaves children. Then we need to create opportunities and infrastructures that respect children, help them learn, and equip them to meet the immense economic, social and environmental challenges of this century."
  Challenging Assumptions in Education - From Institutionalized Education to a Learning Society (ISBN 0-920118-05-4) by Wendy Priesnitz was published May 1 by The Alternate Press (272 Hwy. 5, St. George ON Canada N0E 1N0). Review copies will be sent on request and the author is available for interviews.

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For further information, interviews, excerpt permission or review copies, contact Wendy Priesnitz at 1-800-215-9574 or email altpress@life.ca.

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