Moixaina

= alternative education in Catalonia

Description

by Aviv Kruglanski:

'We compare children to seeds. You can give a seed the best conditions for it to convert into a healthy beautiful and strong plant or a tree (good soil, light and necessary water…) but you can’t direct or program it’s growing process. The seed contains the potential for it to unfold harmonically if the conditions permit it. For that to be possible, liberty is indispensable. It’s the same with children. They contain within them the know-how and the internal impulse that allows them to fully develop. (www.moixaina.org/ translation from Catalan –A.K.)

Moixaina is an association of mothers, fathers and educators, working and developing games with kids from 2 to 6 years of age, with the active collaboration of parents. the children choose and decide what they want to do without being dictated to by adults. the classroom can be the forest, the garden or the beach. it is one of numerous examples of experimental education collectives in the Barcelona area who take pedagogical movements such as unschooling as their inspiration.

Unschoolers commonly believe that curiosity is innate and that children want to learn that which is necessary for them to become competent adults.

Many unschoolers also believe that opportunities for valuable hands-on, community based, spontaneous, and real-world experiences are missed when educational opportunities are largely limited to those which can occur physically inside of a school building. (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unschooling) John Holt, one of the main advocates of unschooling, puts it this way: Since we can’t know what knowledge will be most needed in the future, it is senseless to try to teach it in advance. Instead, we should try to turn out people who love learning so much and learn so well that they will be able to learn whatever needs to be learned.

he also adds: Education…now seems to me perhaps the most authoritarian and dangerous of all the social inventions of mankind. It is the deepest foundation of the modern slave state, in which most people feel themselves to be nothing but producers, consumers, spectators, and ‘fans,’ driven more and more, in all parts of their lives,

by greed, envy, and fear. My concern is not to improve ‘education’ but to do away with it, to end the ugly and anti-human business of people-shaping and to allow and help people to shape themselves.

but while unschooling is usually associated with home-schooling, experiments such as Moixaina are collective efforts, run in collaboration with parents, a parent-assemblea being the decision-making body. many of these projects are really nothing more than a group of parents who got together to respond to the challenge of education collectively.

Moixaina’s list of inspirations is long, among them are: Rebeca and Mauricio Wild, founders of the Pestalozzi school in Ecuador, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Maria Montessori, Ivan Illich, Everett Reimer, A.S.Neill, John Dewey, Jean Piaget, Jiddu Krishnamurti, Edgar Morin, and Acouturier. experimental education has a long tradition in Catalonia and the libertarian pedagogy is heavily associated with the anarchist movement of the late 19th and early 20th century. pedagogue Francesco Ferrer i Guardia was seminal in popularizing a non-authoritative education that rejected the use of punishment and reward. Ferrer i Guardia, founder of the Escuela Moderna, paid with his life for this experiment.

La Pinya is a school held in a squatted house on the outskirts of Barcelona. a high percent of parents involved are activists, some of which live in squats around the city. with kids ranging from ages 3 to 9, it is self-organized by the parents who meet together with the educators to decide on the course the school will take and to resolve the problems and conflicts that arise. the group that decides the curriculum meets every day in the morning. it is the assamblea formed by the children attending, where each one explains the activities she or he is going to engage in during the day.

Pinya in Catalan means pinecone. The expression ‘fer pinya’ means to stick together and help each other out. it is also a structure used in ‘castellets’, a traditional Catalan human-castle, where people have to literally create a strong base-structure in order not to fall and hurt themselves.

schools such as La Pinya are spaces full of learning possibilities. sometimes divided into thematic corners, the rooms contain the information, in the form of books, games and materials, for the kid to play with and discover. obviously a kid simply left to its own devices outside of such a structure would encounter a whole different set of information. our cultural landscape is mainly made out of opportunities to get hypnotized by consumerism. therefore an intellectually nutritious environment is important for this kind of project to work.

just like the seed balls, projects such as Moixaina and La Pinya, use a format they oppose (school) to create a protected space where liberty can do it’s thing. a fertile cocoon, artificially created to nurture curiosity and play, which are the makings of real learning." (http://www.joaap.org/6/lovetowe/aviv.html)