Alternative schools and the crisis of education in developed countries

Abstract

One of the growing concerns of educationists is the rigidity of traditional educational systems and their apparent inability to respond to social change, much less to stimulate it. Out of this concern with the inadaptation, in particular of schools, to contemporary demands, have come a number of different responses, from the theoretical to the concrete, both reformist and revolutionary.Prospects has given considerable space to discussion of the inadequacy of formal schooling in many parts of the world; deschooling, ‘conscientization’, alternative models have been discussed in theory and practice in the pages of the journal.

The following article by Dwight Allen describes one type of response to disenchantment with formal school schooling, spontaneous and increasingly widespread, by the clients—pupils and parents—of the school system in one highly developed country. It could be argued that the very existence of ‘alternative’ schools indicates an economic system advanced and healthy enough to absorb the products of a ‘non-traditional’ school, and that therefore the experiences sketched below are irrelevant to developing countries. It seems to us, on the contrary, that the issues raised are fundamental, relating to the very concept of educational systems. The style of the article is not controversial, but the implication of its arguments is very much so: the system and the experiences described by the author, although they are set in a specific social and educational system, are none the less interesting as indicators, reference points, for highly centralized systems and even more so for all those systems which are in the process of moulding themselves in the likeness of one or the other model. We hope our readers will express their opinions and thus carry the discussion farther afield, into the developing world.