However, in contrast to these re-schooling proposals has been a countermovement to align the Internet with more radical forms of educational deinstitutionalization. These de-schooling arguments have proven popular with groups outside of the traditional education establishment, framing the Internet as capable of usurping the need for educational institutions altogether. Key concepts here include self-determination, self-organization, self-regulation, and (in a neat twist on the notion of do-it-yourself) the idea of do-it-ourselves. All these ideas align the Internet with a general rejection of institutionalized education—especially what has long been critiqued as the obsolete banking model of accumulating knowledge content. Instead, Internet-based education is conceived along lines of open discussion, open debate, radical questioning, continuous experimentation, and the sharing of knowledge.

ln this sense, many academics, technologists, industrialists and even some practitioners are now beginning to highlight what they see as the fundamental incompatibility between digital technology and what is referred to as the ‘Henry Ford model ofeducation’ or industrial-era’ schooling (e.g. Whitney et al. 2007). Such critiques hark back to Alvin Toffler’s depictions throughout the 1960s and 1970s of the epistemologically and technologically outmoded ‘industrial-era school`. Here Toffler (1970, p.243) decried schooling as an anachronistic by-product of ‘that relic of mass production, the centralised work place' - pointing to factory-like examples such as schools’ reliance on rigid timetables and scheduling, as well as their emphasis on physical presence and ordering of people and knowledge. Forty years on from Toffler’s initial observations, many educational technologists continue to decry the ‘cookie curter’ industrial-era school as a profoundly unsuitable setting for the more advanced forms of learning demanded by the knowledge age and post-industrial society (e.g. Miller 2006; Warner 2006; Kelly et al. 2008).

As will be discussed in more detail throughout this book, a distinct reiectionist line of thinking underpins much discussion and writing about educational technology and school-aged learners. Indeed, authors such as Seymour Papert have long promoted arguments that schools and schooling ‘are relics from an earlier period of knowledge technology’ (Papert 1998, n.p.) and that new technology will ‘overthrow the accepted structure of school, the idea of curriculum, the segregation of children by age and pretty well everything that the education establishment will defend to the bitter end’ (Papert 1998, n.p.). This sense of terminal incompatibility was perhaps best encapsulated in Lewis Perelman’s [1992) early observation that any attempt to integrate computing into schools ‘makes about as much sense as integrating the internal combustion engine into the horse’. Twenty years later polemic ofthis sort can be found throughout mainstream thinking about technology and education, with many commentators willing to denounce the school as an anachronistic relic of the industrial age that has been rendered obsolete by contemporary digital technology.

While these ideas of reschooling and virtual schooling have obvious merit, other academics, educationalists, and technologists have chosen to pursue an even more radical agenda of change – what can be termed the digitally driven “deschooling” of society. From this perspective, digital technology is seen to offer a means of escaping the physical and spatial confines of the school, as well as providing an alternative to the major structures and processes of schooling such as curriculum, assessment, and qualifications. These forms of technology-based deschooling take a variety of guises. For example, a growing number of online institutions now exist that are based on an ethos of using digital technologies to bypass traditional education institutions. This approach is evident in online services such as the School of Everything. This is a prominent online space in the UK designed to put people in the community who wish to “teach” with people who wish to “learn.” This form of teaching and learning exchange has therefore been described as “an eBay for stuff that does not get taught in school” (Leadbeater 2008a, p. 26).
Digital technology has also been used to further support and extend the “home schooling,” “unschooling”, and “self-directed learning” movements where children and young people are educated by family and community members. For example, the “Free World U” has been developed as an online alternative learning community for home-schooled young children – offering online “accelerated learning” resources to be shared between communities of parents and learners. The development of online alternative schooling is an increasingly significant part of the efforts of neoconservative and fundamentalist religious groups in the US to support alternative forms of home-schooling outside of state control of the curriculum (Peters and McDonough 2008). As Michael Apple observed at the beginning of the 2000s, “there are scores of websites available that give advice, that provide technical and emotional support, that tell the stories of successful home schoolers, and that are more than willing to sell material at a profit” (Apple 2000, p. 71).