Page 20 RAIN December 1979 As the project grew our role became that of providing an initial spark of an idea that change and different futures are possible. We found that most of the children already knew this but that schooling prohibited thoughts about many kinds of change, especia_Jly any change not of a scientific or technological nature. We became not only facilitators but intervened in the school setting. This "intervention" consisted of handing over communica- . tion to~ls to the children, including drawing equipment, slide/tape, audiocassette/radio, video, photocopier and the facilities for printing, binding and mailing their own futures books (all of which cost less than buildings, asphalt, administrators and staff). It has been proposed that doctors cause illness, lawyers crime, architects ghettoes, technologists death, and teachers ign_orance ... It is difficult to describe our process of intervention: it .. does not replace experts with ourselves as "replll:cement experts"· but instead the children are the experts._ This is an . inversion of what we normally know as schooling and has 1m-.. plications for the political basis of future society. It has been proposed that doctors cause illness, lawyers crime, architects ghettoes, technologists death, and teachers ignora~ce, but _we found that we may optimistically propose that children with adults of all ages (instead of "adult expert}" only) can enjoy working in harmony toward creating a better world-nearer utopias than can presently be entertained-and that the inter- _ vention process involves simply approaching human activities • with the future in mind as well as the past. This is an activity in which all can share. By a natural process·the futures project involved children with great freedom compared to ~hat normally provided by schools. For example, greater freedom to ask questions, research, experiment and to play and mix activities of the body and mind that hitherto had been separated. The children . changed the way we thought·: they developed th,eir <?Wn literacies (words and images), standards and aesthetics. Schools normally control the expression of ideas and~accomplish this in three ways: first, rules as to which ideas can be expressed, through a curriculum and one-way communication, "teacher" to child; second, by limiting how these ideas can be expressed, through a marking system and a media hierarchy (e.g., words ·and numbers before images); and third, by defining with whom the ideas can be communicated-closed classrooms, closed schools. • The children's free access to media broke the artificial barriers of classroom and timetabling and ''carried" the futures out to the community. Children organized debates and exhibitions when they wished; they often used the corridors of the school as experiment areas by attaching posters and questions and they decided when to go outside the school to research and discuss ideas (using tape recorders, for example) with people in the community. In most instances there were conflicts with the school structure. The conflicts were positive in that the nature of schooling and the opposing philosophy of the futures project were openly confronted with children as protagonists in the discussions. For example, children refused to take part in a conference exhibit being organized by the Napoli city administration after discovering at a meeting that they could neither participate in the conference nor decide the layout of their work. In the U.K. the children identified as "sub-normal" are largely segregated into "special schools" and taught to be passive and thus find a "place in society." On the first day of the Futures Project in one such school it was realized that after a half-hour no drawing had begun, since packages of crayons and paper had simply been left on the tables: the children were unaccustomed to choosing the colors themselves and ·awaited our distribution of colors. , Change or variety were considered dangerous for these ~----i.--1---+----+---1----1--+ From Forty Futures by Tuuala ( age 15) and Simon Nichola ----+-+--+--+--+--l--l--+--l--+--+--l--i~----J.-+--+--+-!---+---+--+--+-+-+--+-1 n '.·-.,-~~:..:~:::l :~~ t~\;--j : .=-~ -~~~~J~~: J-.~,~ ,:.--~~~:_:-~ ~-+-+-+---H•-• ::.t~~=) ~:;; ·.:..• ••✓ - --~-~- .. ~H--+--+-+11=.I 1!·' 1l t ·l Harrisburg Ancient Monument, Pennsylvania, 1989 Children of the Yukon, Ted Harrison, 1977 Tundra Books of Northern New York Plattsburgh, NY 12901 This book excites me·. I'm not certain if it is the boqk itself or the publisher. Guess it's both. This is a children's book th~t isn't; an art book that is something more. Ted Harrison is a teacher and artist who lives in the Yukon Territory. His paintings that grace the pages of this book are simple, vibrant expressions of Yukon life. There is no swry, as such; just brief captions that add detail to the painting. My first reaction was that kids would be bored with it; since there is no exciting plot to hold their attention. But they were captivated by the pictures of another world, and seemed to thoroughly enjoy the easily understood travelogue: Tundra Books publishes (it seems) a large number of Canadian children's stories. Other books in the series are equally as impressive as this. They are The Solar Bicycle gorgeous books. I'd strongly recommend writing for their catalogue. If only there were more books like this, then ... -FL "One other aspect of nature impressed me more in the Yukon than elsewhere-the skies. They are big and there is always something going on in them: northern lights, midnight suns, strange colored moons, stars that look . handset in the night sky, spectacular dawns and sunsets. ·Even simple things surprise, like 'the way smoke rises straight upward on a very cold winter's day. And the surprises never stop."
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