No school classes, no division into age groups, no subjects, no classrooms, no lessons, no periods, no school bell, no tests, no grades. No instructions as to what or which content they should learn by when. Instead, without exception, young learning people being supported day by day in taking ownership for their own learning and growth.
For this purpose they get all human and personal support from other people in the learning community and from those who are connected from „outside“. It is strictly about the young people discovering and developing their own strengths, interests and potential. The learning environment provides them with everything they need to do this. Including the most important social tool called collaboration, the care for themselves and others, and again: undivided interest in their growth. These are some of the differences that Learning People experience at Learnlife every day.
And this works perfectly. Not only at Learnlife in Barcelona but in many learning communities around the globe, which have radically abandoned a discarded a meaningless school system to focus on the empowerment and future of young people.
And if you want to discuss this with traditional teachers, school principals or education policy makers, you quickly realize: it’s easier to nail a pudding to the wall than to find a trace of imagination inside them, any spark of curiosity that might outshine their immediate concern. They cling to what they are used to see, to think, to do and consider normal. They cannot relate to what exists outside their self-contained frame of reference in terms of development, challenge and excellent solutions.
They insist that all truly innovative and novel models, approaches and practices of learning and education are and remain incompatible with what their system does and has to do – and then they will continue to put all their energy transferring the old, completely dysfunctional school system into digital space – e.g. during the upcoming second corona wave – eagerly dressed up by digital toys.
Joining the resistance
They will never give up the power of control that makes their job what it is – until we stop giving them our kids. Try that. Start a research. Look out for people of all age and background around the world. People who create and have created fascinating learning communities: beyond the inhuman pressure of grades and merit, beyond the reproduction of a culture and an ideology of humankind that alienates even children from themselves and their possibilities on the excuse that they have to be educated.
Start to connect now. Start unschooling yourself and your kids. Every kid. Get out of the position of being talked down to. Start taking ownership of your own learning path. Make that switch from being a passive to an active learner. Unlearn – to be able to engage yourself in learning again. Become an actor instead of a spectator in your own education.
From this moment you start automatically to make all this possible for kids – and we all together start changing this fading world.
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