EDUCATION
The area of education is one of the most important areas of the community. The Los Horcones' environment is highly educational and is designed to promote the learning of communitarian behaviors.* Our educational practice is not limited to the academic instruction of children and adolescents but it also includes the communitarian education of all the members.
* We call "communitarian behaviors" those behaviors that facilitate achieving communitarian goals like cooperating equality, sharing, pacifism,pro-ecological and mutual help behaviors. Those behaviors that interfere with achieving our communitarian goals are called "non-communitarian behaviors."
"A true intentional community functions as a school where all community members are both students and teachers at the same time.As students, members learn to behave in a communitarian fashion, and as teachers, they learn to help others to learn and practice communitarian behaviors. But the most effective communal teaching is not based simply on common sense, on being willing to teach, or in believing that good intentions,by themselves, produce results." (Taken from: Radical Behaviorism in Mexico by Juan Robinson in the book Shared Visions, Shared Lives:Communal living around the globe. B. Metcalf 1996 Find horn Press, p.152).See Bibliography
Academic Education.
At Los Horcones, we provide our children and adolescents the required academic instruction. It involves teaching them subjects matters such as science, math, grammar and the like, as well as technological courses, arts and sports. See Schooling.
Over the years we have developed a teaching model that we call Personalized and Communitarian Behavioral Teaching Model.
Communitarian Education.
Communitarian education involves the design and implementation of programs to teach, promote or maintain communitarian behaviors in all the members. Of course, many of these programs imply the arrangement of environmental conditions, mainly of those in our social and physical environment (personal interactions and things or places).
With help provided by the coordinators of the behavior area, we learn to observe how our behaviors affect that of others. Said in other words, how our way of responding to others in our daily interaction, encourage or discourage their appropriate or inappropriate behaviors. As we are better educated we are better prepared to educate our children.
Personal Education.
Since at Los Horcones we are shaping an alternative culture, it is necessary that all of us who were born and raised in the Western culture, reeducate ourselves and learn communitarian behaviors. For that purpose the community teaches its members to apply behavioral techniques to re-educate ourselves and educate our children. We learn personal skills such as self-knowledge, self-control and personal self-improvement. The coordinators of the area of adult behavior are the ones of teaching members and new members the skills necessary for their behavioral self-management.
Last up-date: 2001*
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