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At Village Home Education Resource Center www.villagehome.org, education innovation is alive and well!  We have turned traditional schooling on it's head. As a result, learners at Village Home are engaged learners, taking responsibility for their own education, with guidance from their family, at a very early age. If a learner isn't motivated internally to learn, the best teacher in the world, or the most innovative school model won't have much impact.

Our learners are eager to learn, and so it is no surprise that they are shining in the community. Just this year, we have TWO Lego Robotics teams competing nationally or internationally, a Destination Imagination Team going to state, and the latest Scripps-Howard Regional Spelling Bee champ heading to DC this spring (another Village Home student went to DC for two years in a row a couple of years ago).  Last year, Village Home sent competitive teams to national competition in Lego Robotics, Destination Imagination, and Sally Ride's Toy Challenge.

Key reasons we have kids who love to learn and who are succeeding are that (1) parents are honored as the primary educators of their children (2) learners CHOOSE the classes they want to take (3) grades and testing aren't part of the equation  (4) teachers were allowed to develop their own courses,  and are geniuinely personally fascinated by the subject matters they teach (5) the focus is on learning, not on standardized content.

Village Home is a learning community, and doesn't really resemble what we think of as a "school". Perhaps real reform lies in our willingness as a society to really get out-of-the-box and try something very different, like we are doing at Village Home.

I am so happy to hear that Obama is addressing education, and I hope that we are willing to let the learners have a say in the process - if we listen, they will tell us what they need and want. And, it is interesting to note that Village Home has been around for 7 years now, and began as a publicly-funded program, but we are now private because the public-system was unable to support our model for learning, and we were unwilling to conform to the system's requirements. I see that LEP, another truly different  place is also on the chopping block. It's a sad indicator of the education system's resistance to real reform. Hopefully, a new age is dawning.

posted 3 years, 2 months ago
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