When parents and educators are dismayed by the younger generation's declining skills, future orientation, and interest in success, they should direct their concern to the interplay between "video Valhalla," narcissistic consumerism, and open education in today's enculturative processes. (Author/IRT)

A successful challenge education program at a small private school is described. Students in grades 10 through 12 spend mornings on traditional academic subjects and afternoons on both guided and independent challenge projects. (MJL)

Despite commission reports and journal articles advocating mastery learning and effective instruction, grassroots influence is conspicuously missing from the current reform movement. Creative teachers continue to leave the profession, and top students refuse to enter it. Teachers remain essentially powerless, while open education enthusiasts await…

School reformers have not been too radical, but have been unable to sustain their reforming energy and innovative thinking. Reformers are not "tinkering toward Utopia," but are relapsing into habit, meandering back into mediocrity. A remarkably coherent tradition of rethinking schooling is yielding to the forces of inertia,…

Reviews and evaluates recent research on teaching and instruction. Considers the psychological elements of teaching and discusses simple teaching methods and those requiring special planning, student grouping, and materials. Describes effects unique to particular methods of teaching various subjects and special student populations. Includes 15…

The school described here operates on the principle that play for the sake of play, without unsolicited adult intervention, entails the acquisition of skills and knowledge. Sudbury Valley School promotes cultural acquisition in a manner harmonious with the child's biological self-education system, without age segregation, grading, or academic…

Identifies five factors that appear to have contributed to the survival of several firmly established programs in the alternative school movement. (Author/WD)

Describes the current crisis in public education and proposes a new paradigm of holistic education aimed at increasing students' abilities to direct their own lives and learning. Students would experience directed, assigned, self-directed, and open learning every year, and the twelfth year would be self-designed and managed. (MJL)

Describes an open-format laboratory school housed on the campus of Manakato University in Minnesota that was the antithesis of dominant schooling patterns in 1968. Wilson Campus School practiced early forms of authentic assessment, participative decision making, cooperative learning, nongraded student grouping, multicultural education, and…