Great writeup of an inaccessible online paper (well, accessible if you pay) on a rhizomatic education model- meaning flexible education tied to dynamic communities and community recognition.
Education
The Unschooling Handbook
From the publisher: "To Unschoolers, Learning Is As Natural As Breathing
Did you know that a growing percentage of home schoolers are becoming unschoolers? The unschooling movement is founded on the principle that children learn best when they pursue their own natural curiosities and interests. Without bells, schedules, and rules about what to do and when, the knowledge they gain through mindful living and exploration is absorbed more easily and enthusiastically. Learning is a natural, inborn impulse, and the world is rich with lessons to be learned and puzzles to be solved."
An Introduction to Vygotsky
Lev Vygostky was a Russian psychologist but we're putting him in the Education section because his greatest influence in the modern Anglophone world has been in learning theory. Vygotsky developed an idea of psychological development in which the child learns by assimilating the social world around them. Rather than learning isolated facts, the child "absorbs" the relationships and models of activity around them, their environment. This is a dialectical approach, and he refers to this sort of generative milieu as the "Zone of Proximal Development"(ZPD). The broader the range of activities a child has access to, the more they learn, the more they internalize cultural artifacts and make them, "their own." This is tied to the importance of imagination and play for children, as they use toys and imaginary objects as "pivots" for internalizing rules of social behavior and tool use. Here's an excerpt from the wikipedia entry, just because it's so damn interesting:
The Aims of Education
by Alfred North Whitehead
Alfred North Whitehead is best know for his collaborative work with Bertrand Russell. He is also perhaps one of the greatest modern metaphysicians in the English language. His book Process and Reality is a groundbreaking tome, that seeks to reorient the entire view of the Western world and Christendom towards a model based on change, variety and creation.
In this short book, Whitehead describes his views on education, and the importance of recentering education on the self-development of the learner, against the model of student as receptacle for data. Here's a quote from the preface: