Ivan Illich: Radical Learning Broker
Illich is one of the most evocative of the 70′s educational progressive and one of my philosophical heroes. Doug Noon has pointed to some web resources and it seems a happy confluence of events that I have also been reading about “learning brokers”–a British educational expression that is resonating for me in a larger way. Here is a potential framework for an “unschool” taken from an early New York Review of Books article:
A Special Supplement: Education Without School: How It Can Be Done – The New York Review of Books
Educational resources are usually labeled according to educators’ curricular goals. I propose to do the contrary, to label four different approaches which enable the student to gain access to any educational resource which may help him to define and achieve his own goals:1.) Reference Services to Educational Objects—which facilitate access to things or processes used for formal learning. Some of these things can be reserved for this purpose, stored in libraries, rental agencies, laboratories, and showrooms like museums and theaters; others can be in daily use in factories, airports, or on farms, but made available to students as apprentices or on off-hours.
2.) Skill Exchanges—which permit persons to list their skills, the conditions under which they are willing to serve as models for others who want to learn these skills, and the addresses at which they can be reached.
3.) Peer Matching—a communication network which permits persons to describe the learning activity in which they wish to engage, in the hope of finding a partner for the inquiry.
4.) Reference Services to Educators-at-large—who can be listed in a directory giving the addresses and self-descriptions of professionals, para-professionals, and free-lancers, along with conditions of access to their services. Such educators, as we will see, could be chosen by polling or consulting their former clients.
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tellio :: Jul.19.2007 :: Uncategorized :: No Comments »