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The Authoritarian View of Education or “You will do it our way”
In authoritarian education, one person, or a small group of people, make and implement the decisions about what to learn, when to learn, how to learn, how to assess learning, and the learning environment. This is often decided before the learners are recruited as individuals or meet as a group. As an exclusive method, it is favoured by totalitarian regimes because it aims to produce the conformist, lockstep mentality.
The Autonomous View of Education or, “I did it my way”
Here, the decisions about learning are made by the individual learners. Each one manages and takes responsibility for his or her learning programmes. Individuals may seek advice or look for ideas about what to learn and how to learn it by research or by consulting others. They do not have to re-invent the culture, but interact with it. As an exclusive method it is favoured by liberal or libertarian regimes.
The Democratic View of Education, or “We did it our way”
In democratic education, the learners as a group have the power to make most, or even all, of the key decisions, since power is shared and not appropriated in advance by a minority of one or more. Democratic countries might be expected to favour this approach, but such educational practices are rare and often meet with sustained, hostile and irrational opposition.
The Interactive View of Education, or “We did it in a variety of ways”
Here, the authoritarian, democratic and autonomous approaches are used in a variety of patterns. They may be alternated, or revolved or used in some order of ranking. Thus in the last case of ranking, a learning co-operative may work with democratic methods as the major approach, but use autonomous methods when individuals are delegated