Education in the Years to Come: What We Can Learn from Alternative Education

I write from the standpoint of one of the ‘leaders’ or ‘organizers’ of a rather loose international coalition of scholars, program developers, and graduate students who are together trying to make good sense of a large group of radically alternative schooling programs. Most of these programs are at the primary and early secondary level, are indeed producing superior learning results among very disadvantaged young people, and happen to fit in well (certainly much better than the standard schooling model) with what we have now come to know from ‘brain science’ and cognitive psychology about how people (young and older) actually learn best. I do three main things in this chapter. First, I outline briefly the problems with schools-as-we-know-them, and the difficulties in changing them –the ‘bad news’. Second, I identify and analyze what we are learning from many cases of success – the ‘good news’. Finally, I suggest how we might proceed over the next years to continue to learn from these successes which may give us some hope as to how we might change the schooling of the future.