Third week: School without walls

Utopia is something that all of us have in our minds, but this doesn’t mean utopia can someday be real, that is why we call them like this, it is something idyllic, something we wish will happen someday but it is probably impossible to make it work.

The fact is that we can imagine lots of ways to educate children in a better way, forgetting about the curriculums and focusing on real needs and experiences kids have to live in order to learn how to grow up in a society full of changes, inequalities and lies. But the matter here is how we can make the society forget about these strict plans they have for us, and here it goes the perfect idea of an educational community: a place where children can move freely, with no barriers, no walls and no exigences, just the information that people from different places can show them. But, is it a really

good way of making children learn what they really need for they lives?

I have proved that it is nearly impossible to get an agreement in terms of providing this kind of free-sharing education for people. The idea of avoiding closed spaces is something that has been through before and that could work, but with some regulations to follow or some way to organise it to avoid the chaos that can be created if there is no one responsible of that. The fact is that in our current society a child can not be alone outside, in the streets, as there are many dangerous situations that can happen, and it is not a kind of overprotective thinking, it is the reality Nevertheless, this could be solved by creating some kind of net which will provide the opportunity for people to help this children learn, but not alone in their walking time, which could also make them learn things, because learning can be everywhere, as this theory of the bucolic school pretends to demonstrate. So once we know children have to be always accompanied by someone, there can be a chance to this idea.

Another problem that is emergent is the fact that everybody can be a teacher, and this is not true. Everybody can be an expert in something at that could be a really good starting point, but taking into account that someone who has to be teaching things in a powerful and meaningful way has to be trained for doing it. Then, taking these people interested in showing their abilities to the kids have to learn how to do it, which methods they can use to catch the attention, how they can deal with many kids that are asking questions all the time and want to learn more and more things and also how to provide the most important information they have to be informed of.

By the moment, the proposal has been changed in a bureaucratic way, but still has the main concepts working as they are thought to: free spaces, freedom to learn and freedom for people to show them things. In addition, safety is guaranteed and a training program has been added to train these people who are willing to work with this project.

And now the thing is: who is going to pay these people and how will the “lessons” organised to avoid the chaos? These two things are the most difficult to apply, at least in a capitalist society, where order, power and money have last word for everything. The main idea is to conserve the identity of this free education community, but adapting it to the needs of the current society. So the step here is the creation of a network that connects all the spaces and makes them work efficiently. Having this idea in mind, this network had to guarantee the right to choose and select the contents to work, not repeated, creating a sense of protagonism but guiding the process through the introduction of an online program, where interested students can ask for a vacancy in one of the activities proposed, until the list is full. Then, there would be different sessions talking about the same topic and students could organise themselves to go to one or another, depending on their preferences and their timetable, without forgetting the fact that they need to learn all the things there are proposed.

This is obviously a supposition, neither a near reality nor a change easy to make. But there are many ways to get closed to this kind of freedom education respecting the nowadays thinking and way of working. As this utopia has no limitations, we can just take what we think it is interesting for us as part of the society and try to change the way of learning bit by bit, making this kind of idyllic image, more realistic and suitable, but guaranteeing what I think it is the main objective of this system: a learning free of barriers.