Educational Alternatives: A Map of the Territory
Published in Paths of Learning # 20 (Spring, 2004)
What type of learning environment is right for your child? Choosing a school, or
choosing to educate your child outside the institution of schooling, is an important
decision — and today, with many educational choices available to families, a
complicated one. There are significant differences among the diverse teaching and
learning approaches that often get lumped together as “alternative education.” One
directory published in 1997, The Parents’ Guide to Alternatives in Education, by Ronald
E. Koetzsch, described over twenty distinct types of alternative schools and six
innovative “trends” in public education. The differences among them reflect diverse
moral and philosophical orientations: Some aim to maximize freedom in learning; others
provide what they consider to be a child-nurturing structure of one sort or another. Some
are rooted in specific religious or cultural understandings; others, in ideals of social
justice or ecological wisdom. As a parent with no training in educational philosophy, you
might find it confusing to try to figure out which approach would best address the needs
of your child and the values of your family.
In sorting through these diverse approaches, I have found it useful to place them
into several broad categories, and, using these categories, I created a conceptual map that
I have presented in workshops and courses. This map enables us to compare apples to
oranges, so to speak. It can help answer numerous basic questions: What makes a
Waldorf school different from a progressive school? In what ways does “unschooling”
work well for some children but not as well for others? How much adult authority is
appropriate or necessary to allow children to achieve specific learning goals? With this
map, we can take the twenty or thirty different educational orientations and group them
into six basic clusters: the transmission model, freedom-based learning, social
co