An explanation of this blog/website from Judy Breck:
The ideas I am interfacing at handschooling.com represent a lifetime of thinking and working in education — complemented by a degree in political science and a lot of political campaign experience. I learned political ropes by staffing six Texas elections and two national Presidential campaigns. I have also staffed six White House education symposia. Here I am putting ideas out for consideration and urging you to do something about them politically — both locally and nationally. It is also crucial that our citizenry take hold of education in local communities. Education is primarily socialized; it is government education. The effect is locking young people into classes that are divided by how much they know.
The problems and solutions I write about are mostly couched in terms of the United States, but they are equally true across the world. If you are a foreign reader, you will know that is so. Education is socialized, nationalized, state-run — whatever you want to call it — almost everywhere. I will show here that the individual student mobile web browser and the relocation online of the knowledge education is supposed to convey to youngsters has made it possible to individualize learning.
For thirty years I have worked with students in New York City public schools. I can no longer temper my anger at how government education prejudges kids and disqualifies them to race for the top in a free society like America used to be. The hope for free societies across the world is dim indeed when their new generations are educated by their governments.
The Obama administration has begun powerful moves to make state public education into national government education. This will lock in the factors that trap minority kids into an underclass — which, BTW, is a dependency that leads to voting for socialism. The effects will not be limited to the minority students whom Obama is using for an excuse to control the schools from Washington. Federal influence on subject standards is underway as money awarded to states rides on compliance. Are we really going to allow bureaucrats to decide what every American student is taught about our nation’s history — how much and which events? Will we let them limit the study of sciences to standard curricula limited by the bell curve limit of what all can learn — instead of letting individual youngsters follow their gifts with their curiosity among the bountiful networks of authoritative science online? Will we let Washington decide?
Education needs to be reborn like a phoenix, and 5 areas in which you could help it happen:
My enthusiasm for how handschooling can individualize learning and push kids toward their talents is as strong as my anger. There is good news that can squelch the bad news: let’s do it!
I am working on an e-book manifest to describe Liberated Learning: Leaving the bell curve for the long tail in our connected age. Handschooling.com is also a work in progress. Time is short. The Obama education juggernaut must be halted. Stay tune here for more.
This post: outlines the structure I am putting into place on Handschooling.com. Everything is under construction, but a lot of what bloggers call “pillar content” is in growing — content that sets out the big, general ideas for a blog.
SOME HANDSCHOOLING GOALS: Advocate how to make education really better in these 2 ways:
1) See too it that every individual student across the world has a mobile device connected to the internet that he and she can use it to learn from the global online knowledge commons.
2) Bring to the forefront the networking online commons, making this superior knowledge more findable and mobile friendly — so that it pushes learning away from standardized knowledge delivered in disconnected little curriculum boxes via government education.
THE SECTIONS IN WHICH THESE SUBJECTS ARE PRESENTED:
(For each of these five sections, I am developing action points available online and in an ebook.)
Mobiles: Link one mind what is known — instead of homogenizing each kid into a continuously lowering grade standard.
Findability, realizing the commons A global golden age of learning is dawning because networks form the platform of the online knowledge commons, where, as Ted Stevens said “Everything is deeply intertwingled. In an important sense there are no ’subjects’ at all; there is only all knowledge, since the cross-connections among the myriad topics of this world simply cannot be divided up neatly.” The government education that now controls most schools pays billions for curricula, textbooks, and standards that break the cross-connections and dumb down learning. Handschooling lets the student travel the intertwingularity.
Commons achieves equality that schooling never can or will achieve because handschooling is based on the individual student. The commons does not have pre-conceptions of individuals who connect to it to learn, as do teachers to whom are assigned a class of children in failing or marginal schools. The mobile in a student’s pocket has no idea whether it is owned by a prep school student, a slum dog, or a girl whose religion does not permit her to attend school: owning a mobile levels the playing field.
Next: peeks at new cool education This section will showcase exciting learnodes from the global commons, and review ideas from other sectors that could be cool new innovations for education.
Nurture: Keeping upbringing local. Opponents of using internet knowledge wrongly react that teaching and minding our children will somehow move to a distant internet if the internet is used to connect to knowledge. The opposite is true, especially as government education is trying to assume more and more control over what is taught and what local schools are funded.
Politics: Liberty and learning. Citizen demand of their politicians that handschooling be implemented will liberate the future thinking of all children across the planet, and prepare their generation to remake the world toward global liberty and peace.
Handschooling will — at last — break each individual child’s learning free to go beyond the control of education establishments. Sound scary? Nothing scares me more about the future than limiting yet another young generation to the analog, tradition-dominated, doling out of a bit of this knowledge and a bit of that knowledge by some remote priesthood (pedagogical, secular, ideological, political, — yes and/or religious too).
