Launch of freedom education charter

WHEN the World Freedom Alliance was formed in the Autumn of 2020, we were keen to be more than just a protest movement. We wanted to provide solutions to the problems we were seeing around us. Given my 23 years of experience working in and running schools, I was asked to form a group of interested people to formulate an action plan for transforming education.

- NIGEL UTTON

We recognised early on that everything we thought we knew about education was probably wrong. Our views have been shaped either by, or in opposition to, what we ourselves experienced in our early education. When I was part of the Re-evaluation Counselling community, I organised international workshops on educational change and learned that, in order to develop something new, we had to face up to the harm that was done to us by the education systems to which we were subjected.

Many of us experienced bullying, humiliation, emotional violence - even physical violence. Having said that, many of us also experienced love, kindness, encouragement, supportive challenge and excitement in our schools. We recognised that schools, per se, are not bad institutions. As a school principal, I was aware of many young people for whom my school was a refuge from an abusive home life. My personal view is that it is possible to have a school where people can come together to learn effectively which may resemble what we are used to in some respects. The difference will come from the values that underpin it.

In our charter, we have deliberately avoided the use of the term 'school'. It has too many negative connotations for us and traps us into the old paradigm, making us think of a building, timetables, rules and a hierarchy. Our aim was to provide a set of values and principles which, we believe, should underpin whatever learning approach is taken.

Given that we all have different learning needs, skills and desires, we did not want to provide a curriculum or model for what or even how education should develop.

We felt that should take place at the level of the teacher/learner/community in which the education is taking place.