Should learning be about processes or results?

Should education prepare children for successful jobs or meaningful lives?

Are traditional educational systems still relevant?

How do we nurture human potential in all its diversity?

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