OnGoing Alternative Education Group Studies

The teachers and students at the college will participate in a continuous self-study course as a means of reflecting critically and constructively on the social process of education. Much of the eternal course will take place as a reading group, with participants proposing books for reading and focusing the discussion of it.

Disruptive Pedagogies Group
Meeting every other week from 10:00 am-12 noon, the first series of discussions will center on Jacques Ranciere's The Ignorant Schoolmaster. Location, Blue Shirt Cafe, Highland Avenue, Davis Square, Somerville. Next reading, for May 30, through page 99. No cost to join in. Let Eric know that you are participating: ebuck (at) corvidcollege.org.

In addition, the members of the college will visit others' efforts to undo and redo education, and will use their own experiences in the courses and independent studies as raw material. To that end, the following books are offered as possible starting points for study. Add them as you find them.

  • Summerhill: A Radical Approach to Child-Rearing - A.S. Neill
  • Instead of Education - John Holt
  • De-schooling Society, "Schooling: The Ritual of Progress," and ""A Special Supplement: Education Without School: How It Can Be Done" - Ivan Illich
  • The Community of Scholars, Compulsory Miseducation, Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized System, "The Boy Scouts of Westhampton," and "The Present Moment in Education" - Paul Goodman
  • Teaching to Transgress - bell hooks
  • Teaching as Subversive Activity - Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner
  • Pedagogy of the Oppressed - Paulo Freire
  • "Schools no longer" and "Play as an anarchist parable," in Anarchy in Action - Colin Ward
  • The Ignorant Schoolmaster - Jacques Ranciere
  • Experience and Education - John Dewey
  • The Modern School of Stelton - Joseph Cohen and Alexis Ferm
  • A Pedagogy for Liberation - Ira Shor and Paulo Freire
  • To Know as We are Known: Education as Spiritual Journey - Parker Palmer
  • "The New Deweyan Caucus: Teaching on the Edge," in Jobs for Philosophers - Anthony Weston
  • "Education on a Mountain," in Harpers Monthly Magazine - Louis Adamic
  • Black Mountain: An Exploration in Community - Martin Duberman
  • Centering, especially "Pedagogy" - M.C. Richards
  • The Origin and Ideals of the Modern School - Francisco Ferrer
  • The Modern School Movement: Anarchism and Education in the United States - Paul Avrich
  • The Sudbury Valley School Experience and Reflections on the Sudbury School Concept
  • Free at Last: The Sudbury Valley School - Daniel Greenberg
  • Freedom to Learn: A View of What Education Might Become - Carl Rogers
  • A Pattern Language, especially patterns 18, 43-48, 73, 83-86 - Christopher Alexander, et. al.
  • "Dare the Schools Build a New Social Order?" - George Counts
  • Walking on Water: Reading, Writing, and Revolution - Derrick Jensen
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