A COMMUNITY LIFE-LONG LEARNING SYSTEM
The potential for a new global governance rooted in civil society 9Paart 2) is
only one example of the emergence of spontaneous self-ordered complex
networks. Another interesting example of self organization on the edge of chaos
is the emergence of Cooperative Community Life-Long Leaning Centers (CCL-
LLCs).
Early American schools were strict disciplinary centers in which students sat
stiffly at their desks in abject obedience while stern teachers taught them the three
Rs by rote memory. It’s purpose, at least during this century, has been to prepare
workers for an industrial culture. It worked well. Laborers in American mills and
factories surpassed all others in bringing wealth to our nation.
An increasing number of educational critics, like 1991 New York teacher of the
year, John Taylor Gatto in Dumbing us Down, have decried the schooling system.
They contend that it is the form of schooling that is teaching the wrong lessons.
The monopoly state schools restrict the individual’s natural curiosity and desire to
learn. They teach authoritarianism, self-repression, and strict obedience to the
clock. The teacher, under controls set by the state and now the national
government, determines what is to be learned. The clock and the calendar
determine when and how long a child can learn it. Much of this criticism of
schooling has been reflected in a report to the president, A Nation at Risk.
Well before the current attacks on schooling and educating, John Dewey and
other philosophers assailed this concept of education with their creeds of “learning
by doing” and “child centered education.” Although the philosophy of education
changed the form didn’t. Twenty or more children are still gathered in one school
room, each one trying to do his or her own thing. The result is that neither teaching
nor learning is possible. Many schoolrooms become centers of confusion.
Education is now at the edge of of chaos, ripe for a radical transformation.
The organization of the new learning system is somewhat difference than the
self-organization of local GROs into a Global Civil Society. For the example we
examined above, organization came from moving from chaos, a disordered
conglomeration of disjoint new organiztional cells, through the borderland of the
edge of chaos into order. GlobaL Civil Society, like democracy before it, is self-
organizing itself where nothing, or little, existed before. For the learning system
reorganization is happening, in part at least, from the failure and disintegration of a
too rigidly ordered system.
One element of the reorganization of learning started two decades ago when
some families started taking corrective actions one family at a time. It was called
homeschooling. These actions grew in concert with Paul Goodman’s urging that
schools make more use of community facilities and issues, with Ivan Illich’s seminal
book Deschooling Society, and with John Holt’s Instead of Education (1976), and
Growing Without Schooling (1977) on how children learn.
In the beginning, only a couple of decades ago, homeschools were
autonomous family units, each one setting it own curriculum, and providing its own
supplies and services. As homeschooling grew in the 1970s and 1980s
practitioners began forming associations primarily to exchange information and to
confront state laws that limited their rights. There are now some 700
homeschooling associations in the United States. About 50 of these have a nation-
wide constituency.
Most of the services provided to homeschoolers, like Growing Without
Schooling, or Home Education Press, are primarily publications emphasizing
exchanges among homeschoolers. Others like the Clonlara School Home-Based
Education Center provide a by-mail service with curricula, tests, and diplomas for
homeschoolers. Still others are newsletters written and exchanged by
homeschoolers themselves. A few like Home Schoolers Defense Organization help
homeschoolers with legal and legislative matters. One or two have books,
equipment and other material for loans to homeschoolers. Some like ????? and
Aerogram are publications condemning the authoritarian, monopolistic state school
systems and supporting alternative educational systems.
Closely associated with the home schooling movement are a broad variety of
alternative schools which are moving in the direction of child-centered education.
Jerry Mintz in his Handbook of Alternative Education lists 2500 Montessori schools,
100 Waldorf schools, and 60 Quaker schools as well as the 700 homeschools
programs. 9
In additions to these is a growing number of Folk schools patterned after the
Folk Schools of Denmark, “schools-without walls,” “Open Universities” and learning
centers which do not fall within the province of being substitutes for the K-12
governmental schools. It is this later group of learning facilities with which this
paper is interested.
In the last two or three years local homeschooling networks have started
providing themselves with a new form of learning social institution. They don’t yet
even have a universal name. To start examining them I will cvall call them
“Cooperative Community Life-Long Learning Centers (CCL-LLCs).” These
community centers are cooperatively owned and controlled by the member families
they serve. They provide counseling, mentoring, supplies, facilities, workshops and
classes. They serve everyone in the community regardless of age or past learning.
They use all aspects of the community as learning facilities. Libraries, YMCAs,
churches, museums, local businesses, farms, government offices, the streets, and
the parks are all part of the learning system.
As Gene Lehman put it in one of his Luno broadsheets “life long learning relies
heavily on daily life activities, deep and variend interactions among people, contact
with nature , and a popular culture which is abundant, diverse, profound, and
cheaply accessible to all. Most importantly, a holistic approach to lifelong learning
relies on developing some kind of face-to-face community of friends and
neighhbors who co-operate in order to share the essendital burdens and delights of
life.”10
In 1998 Community Learning Centers became of governmental interest when
the Elementary and Secondary Education Act dedicated $40 million to expand after-
school programs. But this program was limited to school districts, and
administered by U.S. Department of Education. It’s goal was primarily to get the
kids off the streets, rather than to stimulate life-long or community learning. It was
thus directed more at saving a decaying schooling system than experimenting with
new futuristic systems of learning.
Cooperative Community Life-Long Learning Centers may be one of the most
seminal innovations of the past decade. They may be the seed for a deep
fundamental change in the education/learning system of the future. Community
Life-Long Learning Centers are to a large extent an outgrowth of the rapidly
growing homeschooling movement. It is conceivable that CLL-LLCs could
completely replace the state controlled schools.
Civil Society and Learning
The transition to a Community Life-Long Learning System is much more than a
change in educational practices. It is a transformation of the whole mind set of the
value of knowledge and the value of the person. “Teaching,” “educating,” and
“schooling” imply that society, or government, is acting on, controlling,
indoctrinating and forming some amorphous lesser beings. It is an hierarchical
system of control from the top down. It is inherent in the first phase of democracy
which accepted many of the tenets of rule from above, the divine right of kings and
its transition to the divine right of government. It is in harmony with the fading
worldview that the cosmos, and the Earth, are parts of the chain of being in which
man is a semi god controlling the Earth from above, and all lesser forms including
women, children, animals, plants and the Earth’s natural resources are but
resources for the use of man.
Every single word in”Cooperative,” “Community,” “Life-Long,” “Learning,” and
“System” carries a different important connotation. “Learning” is not something a
superior being does to a lesser one. Learning is an act of self-volition. It is a self-
actuated process of creating skills, discovering knowledge, and satisfying one’s
own natural curiosity. It is built on, and it teaches, the inherent right and
responsibility of every individual to set her is his own standards. It honors the
diversity of evolution. It is in harmony with the new Gaian worldview that
everything is interdependent with everything else. It respects the new
understanding that each of us “belongs” equally to Gaia.
“Belonging” in this sense is much more that merely “being a member of.”
Belonging is the scientific fact that we are all interdependent systems within
systems, or holons wthin holons if you wish to use the systems jargon. Each of us is
a whole made up of smaller wholes and imbedded in larger wholes. Gaia and the
Cosmos are among the larger wholes of which each individual is a smaller whole.
“Belonging” implies not only being a whole within wholes, but that we are subject to
downward causation, we are subject to natural laws. “Belonging” to Gaia means
belonging to the Earth and to one another. Belonging is an ethical proto-value
inherent in the New Science/Social paradigm. It says that each individual is an
integral part and responsible for the health and well being of the family, the
community, Gaia, and each of the larger systems of high he or she is a part.
Inherent in this scientific concept of belonging is much of the perennial wisdom of
the sages which have recognized that humanity cannot continue to exist on Earth
without laws of conduct which emphasise our responsibility to and for one another.
This transition from “educating” to “learning” is being recognized by a wide
variety of scholars. Management guru Peter Drucker in his “Post Capitalist Society”
writes of a society based on knowledge. One in which all society is an open life-
long learning system in which every person can enter any level at any time. From
the other end of the spectrum peace scholar Elise Boulding reports that a common
feature of the many “Imagine a World Without Weapons” workshops she has held
with people of all walks of life and all ages, was the vision of a “localist society,”
One in which communities were self-reliant and “Learning appears integrated into
other community activities. … everyone is a learner, and education is life long.” This
theme of the “Learning Community” is fully integrated with the growth of civil
society and all other aspects of the emerging Gaian Cultures.11
(1677 word on learning)
Bill Ellis, of Rangely, ME retired early from his working life
as a science policy consultant in agencies such as the National
Science Foundation, Unesco and The World Bank. For the last
30 years he has work voluntarily to promote the broad range of
social innovations that empower people at the grass roots and
promote community self-reliance. One of these is as General
Coordinator, of ‘A Coalition for Self-Learning. With which he
facilitated the drafting an online book, “Creating Learning
Communities,” and, the White Paper, “Life-Long Self-Learning,”
that promotes the recognition of the vast array of learning
modalities in addition to public schooling — e.g. learning
co-ops, public schools, private schools, unschooling, charter
schools. His mantra is “everyone should have the right, the
freedom, the resources and the opportunity to learn what
they want, when they want and how they want.
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