Czy biurokracja oświatowa może wspierać kreatywną alternatywę dla tradycyjnej szkoły?

Abstract

Public, state-funded schools are by definition large bureaucracies. The consequence is that individual schools in the system tend to be rather uniform – in curriculum, pedagogy, evaluation, administration and so on. A structural and organizational framework exists, individual schools must fit into that framework. The result is that educational experiments and innovations are most often found outside the public school sector – in private schools. But, do public school system necessarily have to be conservative institutions? Is it possible to encourage and support a wide variety of innovative schools, different philosophies of education, qualitatively different pedagogies, and so on, within one public, state-funded, government-directed, school system? In other words, is it possible for the bureaucracy and structure of a public school system to be sufficiently open and dynamic that it can encourage and support creative and sometimes radically different education alternatives? The answer is ‘yes’. The administrative and legal structure of schooling in Alberta, Canada, provides a real-life example of the thesis that, at least to some degree, large education bureaucracies can encourage creative opportunities.