The Echo

Vermont Commons, Number 31, Fall, 2009
from  http://www.pathsoflearning.net/articles_Race_to_the_Top.pdf
by Dr. Ron Miller (see links below for more information on Miller's alternative approach to education.)

I was inspired by Barack Obama’s campaign for the presidency. When I read The Audacity of Hope, I was convinced that he was a genuine visionary, one who might lead us beyond the stale ideologies of our time. I thought my colleagues in the Vermont independence movement were a little too cynical to dismiss him as yet another, more slickly packaged, builder of empire. Sadly, except for a few history-jarring moments, such as his speech in Cairo, I’m coming to believe that their cynicism is justified. Nothing has driven this home to me more than the imperial educational policy that he and his technocrat Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, have unleashed on American youth. They call it “Race to the Top.”

The damage this approach will do to genuine learning and children’s lives is contained in its very name. To conceive education as a “race”—a competition forcing schools, teachers, and students to contend for some sort of victory—is to poison the inherent human striving for understanding and meaning. 

Keep Reading Here:  http://www.pathsoflearning.net/articles_Race_to_the_Top.pdf

Paths of Learning by Dr. Ron Miller offers a holistic approach to education.  The following is from his website, http://www.pathsoflearning.net/.  Learn about Dr. Miller HERE.

Holistic Education: a response to the crisis of our time This website features the work of Dr. Ron Miller, one of the leading pioneers in the field of holistic education, and provides connections to other resources that are available to parents, educators, researchers and policymakers.

Holistic education began to emerge as a coherent philosophy in the mid-1980s and is today becoming recognized in many parts of the world as an inspiring response to the serious challenges of this age of globalization, such as violence, cultural disintegration, and ecological decline.

Bringing together the best theory and practices from diverse educational alternatives, a holistic perspective asserts that education must start by nourishing the unique potentials of every child, within overlapping contexts of family, community, society, humanity, and the natural world. Holistic education is not a fixed ideology but an open-ended attempt to embrace the complexity and wholeness of human life.

Holistic educators reject the current obsession with educational uniformity: rigid standards, relentless testing, and authoritarian control of the learning process. Holistic education is essentially a democratic education, concerned with both individual freedom and social responsibility. It is education for a culture of peace, for sustainability and ecological literacy, and for the development of humanity's inherent morality and spirituality.