Our P2P Foundation partner in Argentina, Franco Iacomella, has collaborated to this important documentary which reviews the whole field of alternative education. The YouTube version rapidly gained half a million viewers and is still climbing.
Watch the trailer here:
Here’s the summary:
“The Forbidden Education (original title “La Educación Prohibida”) is an independent documentary released on 2012. The film documents diverse alternative education practices and non convencional schools in Latin America and Spain that includes ideas from Popular Education, Montessori, Progressive education, Waldorf, Homeschooling and other references.
It became the first released movie in Spanish to be funded under a crowdfunding methodology. It was also hightlightened by it’s distributed screening proposal that enabled a synchronized release in 130 cities of 13 countries with a total ammount of 18.000 viewers in a single day.
The film was released under a Copyleft open content license. Subtitles in English, Portuguese, Italian and other languages are available.
The documentary is divided in 10 thematic episodes. Each of them present a different aspect of education in the school context and outside of it. Topics like history of school system; authority and power in schools; evaluation and segregation of students; social function of educative institutions; role of teachers and families and others are covered by the film’s script.
The movie also includes almost 30 minutes of animation and a fiction history that is glues all the episodes.”
The architecture of our schools play a HUGE role for learning and belonging too, like Alexander’s Eishin Campus in Japan!
Here is the Amazon.com description of The Battle for the Life and Beauty of the Earth: A Struggle between Two World-Systems, the new book to be published in October by Christopher Alexander:
“The purpose of all architecture, writes Christopher Alexander, is to encourage and support life-giving activity, dreams, and playfulness. But in recent decades, while our buildings are technically better–more sturdy, more waterproof, more energy efficient– they have also became progressively more sterile, rarely providing the kind of environment in which people are emotionally nourished, genuinely happy, and deeply contented.
Using the example of his building of the Eishin Campus in Japan, Christopher Alexander and his collaborators reveal an ongoing dispute between two fundamentally different ways of shaping our world. One system places emphasis on subtleties, on finesse, on the structure of adaptation that makes each tiny part fit into the larger context. The other system is concerned with efficiency, with money, power and control, stressing the more gross aspects of size, speed, and profit. This second, “business-as-usual” system, Alexander argues, is incapable of creating the kind of environment that is able to genuinely support the emotional, whole-making side of human life. To confront this sterile system, the book presents a new architecture that we–both as a world-wide civilization, and as individual people and cultures–can create, using new processes that allow us to build places of human energy and beauty. The book outlines nine ways of working, each one fully dedicated to wholeness, and able to support day-to-day activities that will make planning, design and construction possible in an entirely new way, and in more humane ways.”