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More Information
More Information
Alternative Education is a trend in the larger world that is not only going to stick around, but will increase in its relevance and recognition at all levels of educational instruction and in a widening range of academic contexts and settings. At the same time, there is a sense of tried and true traditional education practices being kept at the center of any curriculum we may endeavor to design, implement or endorse, especially those based upon print media storage systems. I do not believe that electronic media storage systems can ever completely or sufficiently supplant traditional print media, for a number of reasons that have more to do with things than the simple long-term readibilty or legibility of traditional print media over electronic media. At the same time, I do not think we can overestimate the increasing role that electronic media systems will come to play in education and instruction. We can afford to ignore these trends only at our own long-term loss and risk of efficacy and efficiency of our methods.
Alternative Education will mean many different things to many different people, depending upon how it is approached and the personal styles of those who become involved in development. It does imply a new found openness in education to experiment and try out new ways of teaching and learning, and thereby to learn and grow.
All educational curriculums must have as their primary focus the human individual and the requirements of this individual at different levels of adaptive function, but particularly in terms of social and cultural development and their relations in a larger world setting with many different kinds of people. Even any form of group instruction takes second place, and is to be construed in service of this primary function of educating the individual human being.
Requirements of efficiency and economy of effort require forms of diagonal and group horizontal transmission and communication of knowledge versus one on one vertical transmission, and hence there is always a trade-off between achieving effective educational instruction and development in an individual and optimizing instruction and development among a group of individuals in a shared set of behavioral settings.
The links to the primary portals of this framework are found below:
