Thanks to Adam Fletcher and freechild.org I discovered the blog for Peter Levine over at CIRCLE, The Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, I believe I’ll add a link and start checking in on his page.

Anyways, it seems CIRCLE hosted an event about small schools yesterday. The “small schools movement” is something that has hit my radar, but like with most reform movements picking up popular steam I can’t cut through my skepticism to see if this movement actually has any merits worth caring about. From my limited understanding, as originally conceived, the push for small schools, seems like a timid step forward toward more democratic, student-centered places of learning. Rethinking Schools in one place describes small schools as “Teacher-led, student-centered, community-connected school communities shaped by concerns for democracy, social justice, and racial equality.” A positive micro-step in the right direction I suppose.

That same issue of Rethinking Schools however notes that in the recent popularization of “small schools” there seems to be a focus on simply numbers, not the methodology or culture around them. Rewrapping a sufficating, authoritarian, dehumanizing public school as we know it into a smaller package doesn’t seem like it’ll solve anything. So yea, I’m profoundly skeptical of any progress at all on student empowerment and school democratization coming out of this push for small schools.

It’d be great if someone came along with a reason to give me hope, but I am quite doubtful that’ll happen.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 7th, 2005 at 12:52 pm and is filed under Youth Rights. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.