10 Education Alternatives Books
These are 10 past influential books regarding education alternatives & theory (no order) :
School is Dead (read free .pdf)
By: Everett Reimer / Published 1972
“School has become the universal church of a technological society, incorporating and transmitting its ideology, shaping men’s minds to accept this ideology, and conferring social status in proportion to its acceptance.”
By Ivan Illich / Published in 1970
“The result of the curriculum production process looks like any other modern staple. It is a bundle of planned meanings, a package of values, a commodity whose “balanced appeal” makes it marketable to a sufficiently large number to justify the cost of production. Consumer-pupils are taught to make their desires conform to marketable values.”
By R. Buckminster Fuller / 1962
“I would say, then, that your educational planners are going to have your worst headaches because you will have political machines that are less and less visible to the people because the people are more and more mobile. You will have to be serving the children of the mobile people who really, in a sense, don’t have a base, and you will have to justify it with very hard-boiled local political exploitation.”
Credential Society: A Historical Sociology of Education and Stratification
By: Randall Collins / Published 1979
“Credential capitalism is the traditional laissez faire attitiude toward individual competition in the credential marketplace. It naively assumes that one should get as much education as possible in order to cash in on as much career advancement as possible. ”
Accursed Share, Vol. 1: Consumption
By Georges Bataille / Published 1989
“Man’s disregard for the material basis of his life still causes him to err in a serious way. Humanity exploits given material resources, but by restricting them as it does to a resolution of the immediate difficulties it encounters (a resolution which it has hastily had to define as an ideal), it assigns to the forces it employs an end which they cannot have. Beyond our immediate ends, man’s activity in fact pursues the useless and infinite fulfillment of the universe.”
By Siegfried Zielinski / Published 2006
“A task that consists of not – of no longer – treating discourses as groups of signs (signifying elements referring to contents or representations) but as practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak.”
Educational Futures : Dominant and contesting visions
By Ivana Milojevic – Published in 2005
“To contest the given future and create alternative futures, critical futures thinking is crucial as it helps us recognize that every approach to educational change is inherently based on an underlying image of the future (and of time).“
By Nancy Rudolph / Published 1974
“Workyards are more then playgrounds. They are places where children play- in any way they elect. Limitations are set by the space that is available and the always changing and abundant supply of materials: lumber, nails, tools, old machinery, rope, sinks, stoves, pickets from an old fence, barrels, and planks. These are places where children can play as they will: they can be noisy and wild or quiet and contemplative. Each individual can bring his or her own artistry and ingenuity to the workyard.”
Summerhill; a radical approach to child rearing. With a foreword by Erich Fromm
By A. S. Neill / Published in 1960
“The basic principle of such self-determination was the replacement of authority by freedom, to teach the child without the use of force by appealing to his curiousity and spontaneous needs, and thus to get him interested in the world around him.”
The Child in the City (Society Today)
By Colin Ward / Published in 1978
“Nowhere in this myth-making by the memory more evident than in our reconstruction of the physical environments we explored as children. Go back to some unrevisited paradise and see how pathetically ordinary it actually is to your ordinary adult eye.”
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As an ex-teacher, I can agree with the Summerhill book since it is often the resentment of authority that leads children to disrupt the class.
Good day. Thank you for your wonderful blog .. though I have it for some reason not fully visible.