eBook downloads, eBook resources & eBook authors
Holt's most direct and radical challenge to the educational status quo and a clarion call to parents to save their children from schools of all kinds.
This book examines issues in alternative and mainstream education systems. It presents not only alternative forms of education facing actual issues in societies but also legal and administrative features of education. The book, dealing with issues of minority in education system, addresses school development in the 21st century as well as what kind of educational community should be created in the age of globalization.
This book offers a comparative analysis of alternative education in the UK, focusing on learning spaces that cater for children and young people. It constitutes one of the first book-length explorations of alternative learning spaces outside mainstream education - including Steiner, human scale and forest schools, care farms and homeschooling.Based on original research with teachers, parents and young people at over 50 learning spaces, Geographies of alternative education demonstrates the importance of a geographical lens for understanding alternative education. In so doing, it develops contemporary theories of autonomy, emotion/affect, habit, intergenerational relations and life-itself. The book will appeal to academics and postgraduates in the fields of geography, sociology, education and youth studies. Given ongoing concerns about the state's role in providing children's education, and an increase in the number of alternative education providers in the UK and elsewhere, the book also highlights several critical questions for policy makers and practitioners.
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.
The establishment of alternative education, private foundations, and networks linked to socio-political and spiritual advocacies distinguishes the Thai social movement in this research. This research is a qualitative study that has made use of historical accounts to associate with data gathered from extensive interviews and case studies in order to inquire as to whether alternative education represents an historical spiritual tradition of opposition to reform hegemony, and whether it has had an impact on state reform efforts. Also investigated was whether there are some historical patterns associated with the manner in which the state of Thailand has dealt with the forces of globalization and whether the collective action by informal movements of Thai people also has the same predictable pattern of response to the global. Analysis and comparison of these issues contribute in determining the values associated with people in the alternative education movement and the motives and intentions associated with state-initiated reforms. A further related aspect explored is the degree of "Thai-ness" and the embedded historical pattern of both the alternative education movement and education reform. These inquiries were answered through the collection of data from three different trips to Thailand over a four-year period, the last trip a one-year stay that permitted case studies and observations at three alternative schools, and the interview of a host of participants from home-school parents and students to Ministry of Education staff and officers. In examining the data, a clearer notion of what lies underneath the idea of Buddhist education and spirituality became clearer and how educational reform based on Western ideals and notions has not taken into account Buddhism and culture as education. This illumination brings new insight and also raises a new question as to the difference between social movements in a Buddhist nation such as Thailand and social movements in the West.
This book is about viewing alternative education through the lens of being an alternative education student and then being a turnaround leader working with schools to transform alternative education programs. This book celebrates the successful work of many alternative schools, making a difference in the lives of students, and highlights the areas in which additional work is needed.
