Education Book Reviews

Carnie, Fiona (2003) Alternative Approaches to Education: A Guide for Parents and Teachers. London: RoutledgeFalmer.

“What is education for? Is it about lighting a fire or filling a bucket? Is it about personal development or providing fodder for the economic markets? Is it about keeping children off the streets or installing in them the knowledge, skills and attitudes to create a fairer and more sustainable world?” (p.1).

So begins Fiona Carnie’s Alternative Approaches to Education, the subtitle of which pitches itself as “a guide for parents and teachers.” It is to parents, in Great Britain, seeking alternatives to public, religious, and elite preparatory schools that this work most directly speaks. Parents outside of the UK will find this less useful, though many of the formal options described here are present in (say) the cities of North America. It is a descriptive catalog, including personal testimony by students, parents, and teachers, of alternative schools that adhere in significant part to the philosophy of “human scale education.”

The elaborated principles of human scale education are: 1) positive relationships, 2) a holistic approach to learning, 3) democratic participation, 4) partnership with parents and the local community, 5) environmental sustainability, and 6) small structures (which the author defines and explains in pp. 17-21). The core thesis of human scale education is that large comprehensive schools fail to meet the needs of many of their students, and that “a smaller scale,” smaller-sized and more personal environments, is better-suited to accomplish this. Carnie briefly mentions American research that attests to the effectiveness of smaller schools (p. 176). Besides praising American research and experimentation with smaller-scale schools (particularly the Coalition of Essential Schools, pp. 173-185, and see Sizer, 1996) she commends the openness of American curriculum. The British National Curriculum is brought under frequent criticism, and alternative schools are portrayed as an escape from this imposition. With No Child Left Behind and its concomitant craze for testing, however, American students and teachers are facing the prospect of a similar straightjacket.

Carnie is not a disinterested observer. As the back cover of the book notes, “for over ten years she has been working for Human Scale Education” (www.hse.org.uk). This non-profit organization coordinates the efforts of the schools presented in the “Small Alternative Schools” chapter (Chapter 2). Her work gives her a close understanding of, and passion for, alternative schools in the UK. There is, however, no critique in this book. The reader gets little insight into how a particular alternative school may not be ideal for particular children or a particular social context. This lack of critique must be counted as a deficit.

Chapters 3, 4, and 5 talk about older alternative educational philosophies and schools that cleave to them. Here we find Montessori, Steiner Waldorf, and democratic schools (particularly Summerhill). Chapter 6 brings in an international perspective, discussing the Jenaplan schools in the Netherlands, Freinet’s socialist influence in France, the Reggio Emilia phenomenon in Italy, and Dewey-based schools in the United States. Carnie believes that the ideas behind these alternatives offer insights applicable in British schools.

This section (Chapters 2 through 6) forms the core of the catalog of alternatives to state schools. The next (Chapters 7 through 9) discusses homeschooling, but in a refreshingly atypical way. Carnie’s concern is with bringing people—parents, students, teachers, and the community—together, rather than in facilitating their functioning in complete isolation. These chapters contain a great deal of “how-to” insight for those looking to homeschool, to join with several other families to form a small “learning center,” or to have their children attend public school only part-time. Since much of this section concerns navigating the British institutional and legal context in order to accomplish one of these goals, it will be of limited usefulness to parents and students in other countries. It is, however, useful to be aware of a greater range of options than the either-or choice of public schooling versus homeschooling.

Besides parents, this work will be useful to two (not necessarily distinct) groups of scholar-practitioners. One group consists of comparativists who are interested in responses in various countries to the hegemony of state-run schools. The other group consists of philosophers of education, to whom the options described here can suggest different ways of understanding the ways a school can be from the public schools most of us are most familiar with. The hegemony of state-run schools is under attack in the US, the UK, and elsewhere. Carnie’s work provides an inspiring, if unbalanced, picture of what the future may hold. Unlike thoroughgoingly school-critical work such as that of John Gatto (2002), John Holt (1981, 1990, etc.), or Ivan Illich (1971), Carnie presents an affirmative, if transformed, vision of the social learning context called school. Her final chapter calls upon parents to be involved in the lives of school, whether mainstream or alternative, for the betterment of their children and their society.

References

Gatto, J. (2002). Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling. Gabriola Island, BC: New Society Publishers.

Holt, J. (1981). Teach Your Own: A Hopeful Path for Education. New York: Delacorte Press.

Holt, J. (1990). Learning All the Time. Reading, MA: Addison Wesley.

Illich, I. (1971). Deschooling Society. New York: Harper & Row.

Sizer, T. (1996). Horace’s Hope: What Works for the American High-School. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Pages: 197     Price: $32.95     ISBN: 0-415-24817-5

Reviewed by Brian Burtt, a PhD student at the University of Pittsburgh. His primary interests are the role of education in political theory and the philosophy of educational research.

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