Archive for the ‘alternative schools’ tag
Open Thread 1: Your Dreams of Alternative Schools?
It’s 12 minutes from 2008 here in Seoul. It’s also 12 minutes from the One Year Anniversary of Beyond School. So it shouldn’t surprise you that I’m spending New Year’s Eve with my beloved B.S. 
(I do have an uncharacteristic glass of wine next to me as I write.)
I want to steal a trick from my favorite political video blog, Crooks and Liars (whose link to my “Truly Critical: Thinking about Science, Religion, and Goodness” post last week opened this blog to readership beyond edubloggers - to the tune of almost 1,000 visits to that post - in what I hope becomes a wedding of educational and political blogging, and another escape, like Students 2.0, from the echo chamber), by creating a regular “Open Thread” feature.
The idea of an Open Thread is to pose an issue, and then let the comments come. The thread - and that means the conversations in the comments - is the thing, not the post. It’s crowd wisdom - it’s blogging - at its best.
The question I propose for this thread comes in response to the following recent posts in the ’sphere:
- The 33-and-counting comments to my “On Leaving Teaching to Become a Teacher“
- Will Richardson’s “Some New Year’s Dreaming” from Weblogg-ed, and its 24-and-counting comments
- Graham Wegner’s “Parable 2.0,” and its 11-and-counting comments
- Jeff Utecht’s “One Door Closes….Where Does That Leave You?” (Jeff announces he’s leaving his job here, without a new one to go to), and its 25 comments
- Taylor the Teacher’s “You Got Punk’d: An Open Letter to American Parents” and its 11-and-counting comments.
And the question is this:
If you dream of starting a new school, what are the reasons you don’t try?
If you’d prefer a positive framing of the question, how about:
How would your dream school look, and how would you make it a reality?
or, to get really outside the box:
If you believe it’s time for schools to end, how would you replace them?
Happy New Year, everybody. Since realities begin in dreams, maybe this thread will make it really happy.
(Stay tuned for the next thread: “What are the biggest obstacles to education reform that you would like to campaign against?” - But again, that’s next time. Just priming the pump.)
Photo credit: …utopiacere… on Flickr
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