Searching for the Ideal School around the World

Through this book, the author shares the nomadology of Alys-we searching for the Ideal School. Fed up with the System, traditional mainstream education directed by neoliberalism and high-stakes testing, Alys travelled to over 180 places of learning/schools in 23 countries that were educating differently. Through performative autoethnographic-we the author shares these embodied experiences in poems, vignettes, journaling and ethnodrama. Alys realised that the Ideal School is an oxymoron and she argues that schools and schooling, even within innovative education, are not the future for learning.

By developing the edge-ucation and sharing stories from the ‘gems’ that currently exist in places of learning/schools, there is the potentiality and hope for a paradigm shift. The book encourages everyone to become School Tourists themselves. Performing School Tourism is a mediation between creativity, arts, learning and teaching, leading to change as it helps shape the identity of those performing School Tourism and allows them to add these new experiences and understandings of the possibilities for education to the Earth-we, the collective consciousness of the world. Read this book to follow Alys’ journey as they share stories and trouble different innovative pedagogies (including Steiner Waldorf, Progressive, Democratic, and Montessori). The reader can choose their own adventure, following the rhizomatic multiple voices of Alys-we.

Alys Mendus, Ph.D. (2017), University of Hull, UK, is an Independent Scholar and Casual Academic at Melbourne Graduate School of Education, University of Melbourne and Southern Cross University, Australia. Alys uses arts-based research, autoethnography and collaborative narrative inquiry to research innovative education, feminism and societal change.

"This is the finest critique of ‘schooling’ that I have come across since Illich’s ‘deschooling society’ blew us all away in the 1970s. The book is written as a buoyant post-colonial, feminist romp through our various education systems in the west, interwoven with autoethnographic passages of fluid writing that touches the souls of readers. This is going to become a ‘classic’ text!" – Jane Speedy, Professor Emeritus of Education, University of Bristol

"Searching for the Ideal School around the World is a must-read and must-use pedagogy for our time. The arts-based performative approach embodies a reflexive and collaborative autoethnographic ‘we’ encouraging the reader to use the book as a transformative and practical guide to efficacious educational adventure. Mendus invites us to ‘educate differently’ through entanglements of COVID, human exceptionalism, and isolationism. Personally and politically compelling, Mendus’ work offers a life affirming pedagogy in these times of great possibility." – Tami Spry, author of Body, Paper, Stage: Writing and Performing Autoethnography