Minischooling is a concept developed by our own Philip Toogood. It addresses making large impersonal schools human scale, more democratic and settings where learners can have agency and voice.
Education I propose is about self-determination. However, much of what schools do is designed to replace this practice of developing freedom with the practice of perpetuating conformity…
The large schools that we have, the small schools which we could have, and the flexible schools that might usher in a far more humane form of education, could coexist in a new and revitalised system.
In this new educational system the teacher would find a real professionalism far beyond the demeaning and disreputable version paraded at present, as teacher guard their “subjects” and try to deliver them to unwilling students, or try to make their students willing by some slight of hand.
Parents would be able to resume that interest and delight in their children’s education which comes from the assumption of the full responsibility for it.
They would be supported and encouraged by the professional expertise of teachers shorn of their “regimental” identity.
Local people would once more have children in their midst.
Minischooling: Making the large and impersonal into small and human again.
Philip Toogood, 1990.
He developed and implemented his ideas in his own school and the idea spread into other settings. It had significant influence on the development of Human Scale Education.
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Philip documented the minischooling philosophy in an Education Now Manual.
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