I go to this place with Caroline once a week in the woods, I say to people I am going to Margaret's or to the 17th, or to the woods, I am not really sure how to describe it. When pushed I say it is three things:- a place for schooling, an international education centre/institute in construction, and a nature centre. It is set in about 4800m2 of woodland in Vienna, on the edge of town and a mix of interesting people go there. Its kind of a North Western Vienna version of the ZukunftsHof in the South of Vienna. Kind of but not at all really. This is more woods, they have run wilderness summer camps here, the southern one is more a bunch of farm buildings.
Margaret is interested in different spaces for learning here, for example pottery, woodwork, music, arts, as well as more traditional or rather current school topics, maths, sciences, languages. Today we talked of Handlung Ausbildung, learning by practical touch, which of course is how kids learned things in the village from tradespeople and craftsmen before school was invented and many kids got shipped of under goverment control to be schoooled for many years by a mix of passionate teachers and disillusioned exhausted professional who wish they could be put out to grass but think they cannot afford to be so, and continue a life of drudgery, impacting kids and families and society. The former, the passionate ones ( and I know since I lived with one in a previous "life" ) do their best today and many deliver wonderul education to lucky kids...
We hope the future can be different today for all, that the education promised in UN led strategies can arrive for all, and that generations of kids can have the passion for learning that they are born with nurtured through their lifeling learning experiences.... ( note, the image below is not of Margaret's but of a school in Uganda we are linking to )
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