The following is the Prologue to a paper to be presented at the 2025 Learning Planet Festival and published on January 24th, the International Day of Education. Its full title is: On the Cusp of a Movement: How the Rights-Centric Education Network Offers to Accelerate the Establishment of a Community of Practice.
Prologue
Herman Melville said of Moby Dick[1],
“This whole book is but a draught – nay, but a draught of a draught.
Oh, Time, Strength, Cash, and Patience!”
This document is also but a draught of a draught. Its starting point is the Free School Movement of the 1960s and is a continuing story with no end in sight. An AI overview of the “Movement” describes it as “a grassroots educational reform movement that took place in the United States and Canada in the 1960s and 1970s. The movement sought to change the traditional school system by creating alternative, independent schools that emphasized student freedom, autonomy, and independence.”[2]
A flavour of the times was captured by George Leonard in Education and Ecstasy[3], one of many books about education published at that time. He started it with these words:
“Teachers are overworked and underpaid. True. It is an exacting and exhausting business,
this damning up the flood of human potentialities.”
In the more than half century since he wrote this, the “damning up the flood of human potentiality” continues with students today appearing to be no better off, and some argue worse off, than they were in the 1960s despite all that has been learned about child development and human rights in the intervening years. So why is this still the case?
Jonathan Kozol in his 1972 second printing of Free Schools[4], points to the answer with this George Dennison[5] quote:
“One hears more frequently now of parents banding together, finding teachers, and starting little schools . . . There are no signs that a movement exists, but there are many signs that one might . . .”
Amazingly there are still no signs that a movement exists. The proponents of what is now a clearly defined new social contract for education have failed to create a movement. Ironically, they wonder how it is that people can’t see something so obvious as children needing to be in charge of their learning, while they remain unable to see that they are complicit in things remaining so much the same. They, for whatever reasons, seem to be oblivious to the fact that all their proselytizing without a movement amounts to nothing more than noise from the fringes.
Although public education has remained fundamentally unchanged, research on brain development, multiple intelligences, neurodiversity, and a growing number of exemplary prototypes of what could become a vibrant learning planet are telling us that we must find the capacity to transform the system before it self-destructs. One of the most promising signs that a movement might materialize is the Convention on the Rights of the Child. People in the 1960s did not have this to support their arguments. It was not until November 20th, 1989 that the United Nations General Assembly adopted it. A reading of the Convention leads to the conclusion that conventional schooling is systemically violating the rights of children and youth to the point of being criminal.
Well-meaning people perpetuating the injustices are likely to stop reading this opinion paper at this point. In their minds they are doing what is right for children and it is unfathomable, and just too painful to entertain the thought that what they are doing amounts to crimes against humanity. They are so steeped in adultism that they don’t realize that being kind and caring with children does not equate to helping them thrive. Many have no idea that they too are victims of a system that fails to cultivate human flourishing because it is designed to produce servants of the economy, the latter actually best achieved by achieving the former[6]. This is not to say that all educators are unaware of how traditional schools are failing. Some fully understand it, with many of them leaving public education. Others understand it to varying degrees, but liberating oneself from years of schooling and a deeply entrenched global mindset is a difficult process that does not happen overnight. A good way to accelerate the liberation is to acquire extended lived-experience in mature democratic schools where young people are accustomed to directing their own learning in community with others. A sense of the overall wellbeing of learners in these schools can be a stark contrast to that of learners in conventional schools, and a sense of wellbeing frees a person to learn at full capacity.
There are three other concrete developments that suggest a movement might be hatching. One is the Two Loops Model video[7]. It has been said that it is a bitter person who tries to live outside their time in history. Knowing one’s time enables a person to better manage their emotions and direct their energies in a most positive manner. It produces some of the wisdom necessary to live according to the Serenity Prayer.
“God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage
to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”
In less than fifteen minutes the video presents the nature of a paradigm shift. It shows how paradigms compete, how inadequate dominant ones go into decline and how the scattered voices of a contender come together into a community of practice that constitutes a movement.
The second development is the coining of the term “conscious collaboration” by World Systems Solutions founder John Jones. Well-orchestrated, it can establish a movement and accelerate it once formed. The definition of conscious collaboration provided by WSS amounts to a recipe for how to make change happen.
The creation of the Rights-Centric Education Network is the third concrete development that recently emerged with over 160 founding members. In essence, it is an ally of the United Nations helping to achieve human rights goals. It is not an organization as such, but rather an invitation to everyone who wants to see education pulled into alignments with human rights to help establish a movement. Put in terms of the Two Loops Model, it equates to establishing the critical final stage of the education paradigm shift, the community of practice with human rights as the special something that binds it, the community of practice that gets resources flowing from the old regime to the new. It is driven by more than doing the right thing for children and youth. It is above all about respecting the inherent rights of nature. This paper is based on the belief that the health of the planet in all its forms is dependent upon the full implementation of human rights. If we are disconnected from our own humanity, all that we touch will be at risk, and it is illogical to think that there is anything more important than insuring young people do not become disconnected from themselves. The term “becoming human” is a symptom of something gone wrong. We begin life human.
Contact: Richard Fransham
richardfransham@gmail.com
December 4, 2024
[1] Melville, H. (2022). Moby Dick: The Original 1851 Edition. Printed by Amazon.
[2] Obtained from a Google search using the term “Free School Movement” on November 26, 2024.
[3] Leonard, G. (1968). Education and Ecstasy. Dell Publishing, New York.
[4] Kozol, J. (1972). Free Schools. Houghton Mifflin, Boston.
[5] George Dennison was an American novelist best known for The Lives of Children: The Story of the First Street School. (1970). Internet Archives. Retrieved on November 30, 2024 from https://archive.org/stream/LivesOfChildren-English-GeorgeDennison/LivesofChildren_djvu.txt.
[6] One of the best studies to support this claim is titled, Democratic Schooling: What Happens to Young People Who Have Charge of Their Own Learning. It was published by Peter Gray and David Chanoff in the American Journal of Education, Vol. 94, No. 2, (Feb., 1986), pp. 182-213, The University of Chicago Press,, Retrieved November 26, 2024 from http://www.alternatifokullar.com/files/2014/01/dem_oku_mak_gray_chanoff.pdf
[7] Systems Innovation. (2019). Two Loops Model. [Video], YouTube. Retrieved November 24, 2024 from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQWKmtx8L2s