The Free2be website hopes to help challenge current perceptions
about what education is all about. It suggests that the old
systems are no longer relevant to today's technological society
and that education should increasingly be about valuing learning,
thinking and feeling abilities over the simple acquisition
of
knowledge. It brings together the work of people worldwide who
are actively exploring the nature of human consciousness and
potential and it calls for a new way of learning that is about
the freedom and fulfillment of
the individual.
The
function of education, the goal of education - the human goal,
the humanistic goal, the goal so far as human beings are concerned
- is ultimately the 'self-actualization' of a person, the becoming
fully human, the development of the fullest height that the
human species can stand up to or that the particular individual
can come to. In a less technical way, it is helping the person
to become the best that he is able to become'
Abraham
Maslow, The Farther Reaches of Human Nature, 1971
'We
require a shift in our thinking about the fundamental organisational
unit of education, from the school, an institution where learning
is organised, defined and constrained, to the learner,an intelligent
agent with the potential to learn from any and all of her [sic]
encounters with the world around her'
Tom
Bentley, Director of Demos, the UK government think-tank,and
author of Learning Beyond the Classroom, 1999