Being Educated to Alternative Education

Starting early in 1994, I undertook an informal study in depth of alternative education.  I was an active member of the Association for Experiential Education (AEE) since a couple of years before, frequently debating Outward Bound’s slogan, “Challenge by Choice” with Association colleagues, as, in my humble opinion, there is no choice in participation in school challenge programs and in the challenges in Outward Bound programs, and appropriately applying Experiential Education strategies, especially cooperative challenge activities, as the lead trainer and leader of our Boy Scout Troop’s Venture program, which specialized in deep winter/snow camping and trekking. However, I thought to look for other alternative professional associations as AEE was far more involved in outdoor education rather than the customary academics and I needed to network with folks in alternative academics to find a paid teaching position. So, I hooked up with the National Coalition of Alternative Community Schools.  NCACS had a teacher education program through which I thought I could obtain a direct line into a teaching position but it required a cooperating school and, unfortunately, there were no NCACS affiliated schools in NYC at the time.  Still, they had a reading list through which I plowed in earnest.  There is where I discovered Maria Montessori and John Holt, who most informed me on children and the way they learn.

Maria Montessori over one hundred years ago in Italy observed children striving to satisfy their immediate needs as motivating individual learning behavior. She noticed what she called “sensitive periods”, those times when a child’s mind is more in need of acquiring a specific knowledge set than at other moments as constituting their immediate learning needs and the most powerful intrinsic motivation to learning engagement.  However, as she looked at the learning environments of the day, she observed very young children unable to grow mentally or physically healthy, no less competent in the formal learning required of them: These environments were looking to satisfying adult need, not child need.  Indeed, the structured relationship of adult ordered children blocked the powerful intrinsic desire of children to satisfy sensitive period demands.  She also noticed how energetic and irrepressible natural curiosity was for learning spiting the adult attempts to suppress it in favor of adult ordered activities. She understood that when natural curiosity is allowed its expression adults need not force a child to learn, especially during the sensitive periods. The intrinsic motivation of natural curiosity to satisfy the specific sensitive period needs, she thought, was to be the foundations upon which schooling should be ordered.  From these observations and thoughts, she developed her “Method”.

The Method centers itself in adults preparing a learning environment for children to engage filled with material and activity calculated to resonate with each sensitive period and be driven by the child's natural curiosity to satisfy sensitive period needs. In the Method adults do not tell children what to do beyond an initial explanation on how to use the prepared environment. The adults consciously observe how each child interacts with the materials and the activities ascertaining each child’s needs and if required altering the environment-the material and the activity-to put in the way of the child the elements to satisfy his and her needs.

Later, John Holt observed similar intrinsically motivated learning behavior.  He saw youngsters learning through a slow process of inquiry, where, by way of natural intuitive observation, they form extremely tentative hunches which are self-tested against experiences. They continuously and unconsciously survey the consequences of their hunch testing, noticing regularities and patterns. They begin to ask questions, to make deliberate experiments, sharpening their own awareness of the interplay of action, environment and results and in the process cultivate a reflexive and then an intentional self-regulation, within which there is a growing meta-cognitive process propelling intentional knowledge seeking and use.

However, Holt insists that compelled by adults to constantly prove either they know or do not know, youngsters stop trying to self-test, confirm and strengthen their faint hunches and give up. This is also the case when youngsters are compelled by adults to undertake objects of learning in which they have no interest or native inclination. This learned helplessness debilitates during conventional school days and well throughout a life-time.

Considering both Montessori and Holt, it becomes crystal clear that it is necessary for formal learning to be constructed to the youngsters themselves, to the way their brains/minds function and to the behavioral characteristics driving the manner through which they move through the world.  Schooling so founded would be very different than what most currently think of as school.

First, the course of study over a term and over an entire school residency would emerge unique to every child as each engages learning through his and her different intrinsic predispositions. Children possess different neurological constructions-different spectrums of strengths, interests, abilities, temperaments, learning and communication styles and rates of emotional, cognitive and social development. These natural instincts and individual differences drive attraction to differentiated knowledge seeking, acquisition and use and when given the free play to develop according to individual intrinsic motivations will yield quality differentiated outcomes.  

Progression through such a learning system would be according to cognitive, social and emotional development criteria than by satisfaction of content mastery.

Second, schooling constructed to the spectrum of different neurological constructions and individual intrinsic predispositions would require the supportive service of deep mentoring relationships with those thoroughly versed in the social-emotional and cognitive styles of the school’s population, in the negotiation between native inclinations and credentialing decisions and in the culture of the school to assist students in maneuvering through the channels of the academy and to help them help themselves to work through their natural inclinations and individual differences to achieve schooling success and healthy personal growth.  A teacher or an administrator and a youngster would enter a process mutually respectful of the wisdom of each to attain a common understanding of and an agreement on learning goals and the action steps required to reach those goals; this includes a mentor working with children on social-emotional and psycho-dynamic issues. The agreement process on what is undertaken to be learned and when and how learning is to happen is known as a “negotiated learning”.

Third, in a learning environment so much on the side of the child, as recommended by the ideas of Maria Montessori and John Holt, would have as a central assumption that emotional readiness to accept a learning task comes well before the task. Any learning first depends on how a youngster feels about herself, empowered or powerless, competent or stupid. Compelling a task when someone feels powerless or stupid just frightens, discourages and deepens helplessness. Youngsters must be provided time for emotional development first, when youngsters come to feel safe in trusting their native leaning instincts and their unique ways of knowing.

Free and self-organized imaginative play is the activity leading to emotional readiness. Youngsters should engage in whatever play the environment supports for as long as they wish. In early childhood and primary education programs there would be such as Lincoln Logs and blocks, toys and puzzles, sand and water tables, costumes and theatrical makeup, paints and crayons, newsprint and paper, hammers, nails, saws and wood, etc. There would be performance spaces and child friendly kitchens and appliances. There would also be indoor and outdoor playground equipment and open space. Even for the adolescents in a secondary education program play is essential.  It can be in wood or in metal or in performance with acting or music or in the arts with drawing, painting, sculpting. Or they too can take to the kitchen or the indoor/outdoor playground equipment and open space. Or, they can play in the outdoors, camping, hiking, backpacking, canoeing, rafting, skiing, biking, etc. Then, when in their own time they feel ready, each will engage in whatever formal academic learning is chosen.

Fourth, learning engagement within a school built to the spectrum of different neurological constructions and individual intrinsic predispositions would tend to be through the student choice of one or more of three ways: through independent, individual or cooperative small group engagement with the materials and activities open to students, through self-selected small, whole group adult facilitated topic study or activity and/or through self-initiated one-to-one instruction either with another student or with an adult.  The initiation of learning engagement approach would be up to the child, based on a felt need to connect with the knowledge, the materials, the activities, the adults and classmates, rather than the fully adult initiated whole group classroom process of the traditional taking all decisions away from the youngster.

Ultimately, formal learning according to the spectrum of individual neurological difference and intrinsic motivation is required to turn its attention to preparing youngsters for life itself, not for jobs or careers. To have as the goal of formal learning the social utility of a disciplined, trained workforce is to give to education a far too narrow, counter-productive and harmful one. Schooling ought to be looking to the larger function of socialization, of providing the society and the nation with healthy citizens capable of making their own decisions. Or to sum it up: The goals of our intentional learning communities ought to be to cultivate in all youngsters a solid psychological foundation for future growth and a cognitive dexterity for adaptability to life’s vicissitudes. Indeed, schooling should be about the healthy, happy growth in self-awareness, self-regulation and self-actualization. In the end it’s all about taking care of the psychic side of life, for once that is healthy, the rest will follow in good order. The 21st century and beyond need mentally healthy citizens who can leverage their good health in which ever way they discern is in their best interest and in the best interest of family, community, country and civilization.

The biggest problem with all this new knowledge and its insights was that there were no schools in and around Metro NYC for me to apply to use them.   There were a number of Montessori schools, but they were in violation of Montessori's Method:  Rather than employing her Method, founded on the self-selection of learning within an adult prepared environment these "Nonessori" schools were as directing of children's learning and conduct as you would find in any conventional school.

The Christmas season of 1995 found me with quite an array of instructional strategies and grand insights into children, adolescents and young adults and learning but no place to employ them and no prospects of being invited to do so.




I took the hint and began looking elsewhere for paid work.  I was not yet a scuba instructor, not yet getting paid for my contribution to the sport, that would come in less than six months.  I needed as full-time as I could get.  And I found it as a Sales Associate in an Eastern Mountain Sports store in Manhattan.