We're not the only people running alternative schools. There are many independent informal learning centres around the world, all working in their own way towards creating a culture of more meaningful and social options in education. Check out the websites of some of those that we have come across. To list them here isn't to necessarily declare our full agreement of their ideas, more than that, we consider them part of the discussion of alternative learning that we ourselves are engaged in and hand you over to them to hear more about it from other points of view.

Mahatma Gandhi International School

"Through our project-based approach, learning is guided not by subjects, but by obstacles and the need to overcome them. Learners construct their projects and confront problems that help them develop creative problem solving a much-needed skill in later professional life. Projects are integrated into the framework of an international education curriculum. The focus of our pedagogy is on how to learn rather than what to learn. Dynamic Pedagogy develops the learners metacognitive awareness, and lets them build their own learning strategies, and life skills."

Adharshila Learning Centre

"Adarshila Learning Centre is an innovative school for Adivasi (tribal) children in Madhya Pradesh, India. Founders Amit and Jayashree Bhatnagar titled it "learning centre" to get away from the rigid, didactic stereotype of mainstream schools in India. Their school is far more flexible, with a curriculum that combines academics, world issues, practical skills, and cultural heritage with a lot of fun."

Shikshantar - The People's Institute to Rethinking Education and Development

"Shikshantar is an applied research institute dedicated to catalysing radical systemic transformation of education in order to develop swaraj-development throughout India.

Shibumi School

"Shibumi is a small school in Bangalore that started in June 2008. The deepest concern of the school is to bring up children who are free, responsible and concerned with the whole of life. At Shibumi, we are exploring a totally different kind of education which creates the freedom to bring about clarity in the mind. From this direct sense of what it means to be free, all else must flow."

Rishi Valley Schools

"The purpose, the aim and drive of these schools, is to equip the child with the most excellent technological proficiency so that the student may function with clarity and efficiency in the modern world. A far more important purpose than this is to create the right climate and environment so that the child may develop fully as a complete human being. This means giving the child the opportunity to flower in goodness so that he or she is rightly related to people, things and ideas, to the whole of life. To live is to be related. There is no right relationship to anything if there is not the right feeling for beauty, a response to nature, to music and art - a highly developed aesthetic sense."

Summerhill Free School

"A.S Neill's Summerhill School, a co-educational boarding school in Suffolk, England, is the original alternative 'free' school. Founded in 1921, it continues to be an influential model for progressive, democratic education around the world."

Brooklyn Free School

"The Brooklyn Free School (BFS) places the highest emphasis on the personal development of each student and seeks to minimize, or if possible eliminate completely, undue influence, pressure and stress that accrue from expectations on students to acquire the accepted wisdom of present day society or meet arbitrary standards, so that each child can become an independent learner and thinker."

Schumacher Institute

"The Schumacher Institute (TSI) is a 'think and do' tank exploring ways to change human activity towards human systems that are viable in the long term and in harmony with the natural world.

It was established to develop the work and ideas of Dr. E.F. Schumacher, the author of Small is Beautiful, a seminal account of the impact of modern human activities on the planet. TSI is a not-for-profit and was created in 2004 by the Schumacher Society UK, which was formed in 1978 after Schumacher's death."