Book Review - Creating Learning Communities

Creating Learning Communitees by Ron Miller
http://www.creatinglearningcommunities.org/

CCL-LLCs@onelist.com
life-long learning centers (CCL-LLCs)
self-organizing without leadership, without planning, without design and without being noticed
from birth the role they will play in society

Moving from Schools to Learning Communities
NOT like traditional school model - hierarchy, self-interest, authoritarianism, patriarchy, competition, materialism, and survival of the fittest
Gaian social paradigm - everything is connected to everything else
moving from industrialist model (Horace Mann, the leading promoter of state school systems in the 1830s - training a then agrarian and self-reliant population to accept the terms and conditions of work that factory owners offered ) into an uncharted post-industrial or post-modern future
Schools = social discipline to enable industrialist to harness young workers to demands of a competitive system of production. Industrialism became an increasingly powerful force in American culture after the Civil War, and its emphasis on expert management was deliberately applied to schooling by policymakers who sought "social efficiency."

The One Best System - David Tyack -
"obedience to bureaucratic norms" was essential to industrial development and social progress so use schools to subordinate society;
personal differences of style, desire, and aspiration are squelched

"to train young people to fulfill their roles in a vast, impersonal social machine, but in traditional (that is, pre-mechanized) cultures, young people were welcomed into the adult culture through apprenticeship and deeply meaningful rites of passage. Modern education equips individuals to compete for success in a system that only cares about their skills and credentials, while traditional cultures inducted (or shall we say conducted) young people into a social fabric where they had an identity that gave their lives meaning. "