Alternative Schooling

To varying degrees these assumptions guided the programs of alternative schooling in America . But, like a candle, the alternative school movement burned brightly, flickered, and then died. The causes were varied but primarily were two: the economics of support and the dilemmas of curriculum-making. While economics played a part, as we shall undoubtedly see it playing a part in severely handicapping the current reform movement, perhaps, had the advocates of the alternative school movement found a way to accommodate the curriculum to the real needs of children in a rapidly changing world, alternative education might have survived.

Unfortunately for the movement, and no doubt for education in general, the concept "free" in the "free" school movement was never well understood. In the absence of conceptual clarity on the part of teachers and parents who hastened the "free" school movement to its disappearance, either as failure or as transformation into college preparatory schools, the notion of freedom was lost as a curriculum structuring idea. A curriculum of "freedom" turned out to be no curriculum at all. Children, left to their own devices to generate activities, either did nothing at all or returned to earlier modes of interest for which the "free" environment provided no challenge. Freedom, it seems, has little value apart from challenge. Rather than emphasize the child's right to do anything he/she wants to do, freedom, in order to structure development, must be the freedom to challenge existing structures and ideas; but in order to challenge, structures must exist and ideas must be presented.

The educational principles associated with the radical humanism of the 1960s and 1970s, rendered moribund by the "back to basics" movement of the 1970s and early 1980s, appear to be surfacing again under the impetus of what can be called a "new age" cultural renaissance. In part social criticism, in part development in the arts, and in part a potpourri of accommodations or reconciliations with opposite beliefs and lifestyles, the "new age" movement appears to be under way. Any major program of school reform for the 1980s and 1990s will have to come to grips with some of the fallout.

Perhaps the reemergence of some of the strains of the earlier cultural humanism as a viable educational alternative can be accounted for by social forces outside the school that impinge upon the current introspective posture we as a society have taken with respect to our problems. The concern for quality products, for example, in order to compete in foreign markets, raises questions about the kinds of skills, commitments, and talents that a society needs to build things better-or, more to the point, more competitively. This kind of concern opens the door for a consideration of the role of creativity in economic development and what the public schools might do to improve their record of ignoring creativity goals in the interest of teaching for minimum competencies.

We might further speculate that humanistic assumptions and influence from the 1960s and 1970s come from the baby boomers who now have school age children. While not committed to radical alternatives, as perhaps many of their parents were, they are sensitive to the need for a balance in the schools between academic and personal development.

Within the educational community itself, it seems the gate that admits this current resurgence of humanistic ideas in education was, ironically, left open by the failure of the minimum competency movement. This movement, already beleaguered by critics from within will now have to be justified from without, from the current climate of concern about mediocrity. One thing we know about schools and students is that when you define the minimum expectations, you may define the norm. Mediocrity is the logical outcome.