Thursday, November 01, 2007

Internet schools

There was an interesting piece in the Independent a few days ago about internet schools.

Radicals used to want to deschool society along the lines advocated by Ivan Illich. Maybe technology is giving us the means to move towards that?

2 comments:

Tristan said...

Too radical for today's 'radicals' who seem to want to keep the status quo :(

Dougald Hine said...

Interesting article. Illich's ideas do seem to be on the agenda again, albeit in a rather sanitized form. (He was really quite a wild thinker, though a long way from the typical mould of the 1960s/70s radical.) Charlie Leadbeater wrote a piece for Prospect earlier this year arguing that Illich offered an alternative to the past decade's heavy-spending approach to public services.

InterHigh sounds like a sane alternative version of mainstream schooling which could work for a lot of kids who suffer in schools. The potential of the internet to transform education can go a lot further than creating online versions of existing institutions. This is the starting point for School of Everything, a project a few of us have been working on for the past year (backed by the Young Foundation).