Alternative Educational Systems targeting individual human development issues.

Amidst the general failure of modern educational systems to stay apace of technological and social changes and to operate effectively and efficiently in a "post-literate" world, there is an increasing call for the role of alternative educational solutions to meet the needs of individual human development. The answer has been decidedly mixed, and often more in name than in deed.

If we are truly concerned with the future of human systems, we must be concerned with the challenges of promoting human development, and if we are to take on the problems of human development, then we must take head on and lock horns first and foremost with the Minotaur of Modern Education.

Education is primarily an individuated and individually differentiated process. Social development and group skills of course are intrinsic to this process, but the process itself remains one of the psychological and cognitive development of the individual personality. The failure to heed this central issue in understanding the requirements for improving educational systems is the key to the failure of all such reform programs to meet targeted goals.

The basis for all education, no matter what age, is the inter-human relationship that is established in the course of learning and the mediation of a person's experience in the larger world. A degree of trust and confidence is presumed and necessary in such a relationship--it involves symbolic transference, modeling and identification in a process of subjectification of knowledge and symbolic understanding. Any structure or social process that tends to mitigate against this process works against the long term and constructive consequences of the educational process.