I love the question (thank you for asking it!) and your thoughts.   You raise the questions/issues I have been confronting since starting to work with three- and four-year-olds many, many years ago.   I have though of several "myths" as well as several seemingly unconsidered facts that, if examined closely, could make make the transformation of school simple.  (But being simple is not necessarily what will make it happen.)   Here they are, in no particular order:

1 -  A human being learns more facts about his/her world from 0 to 4 than from 4 until death.

2 - The most complex skill we ever learn is to understand and then speak a language, also by age 3.

3 - What a child learns is determined by what is occurring in his/her environment and what those things mean to his/her seeking to survive: 1)  to belong, 2) to be self-determined, and 3) to make life work for him/herself and others (strongly related to both 1) and 2)).

4 - The "drives" 1) and 2) are frequently at odds with each other as a child's experimenting and mimicking cause parental upsets, which manifest as a loss of love and support due to "bad" behavior.  Our children learn that we love them conditionally even though I know that every parent loves their children unconditionally.  Thus, we all master a strategy for survival of hiding and pretending: not saying what is on our minds, not showing what we really do know and what we do not know, what we really want to know, how we really feel about what is happening around us, etc.. all to avoid being controlled, manipulated, and potentially losing our relationships.

5 -By age 3 or so, a child already has learned a complex and frequently confounding set of social skills that have worked as best as he/she can make them work for keeping at least the attention if not the emotional support of his/her parents, no matter the quality of the environment in which s/he has been being raised.  New environments requiredgiving up old skills and acquiring new ones - especially when the new environment denigrates the student or the student's family environment (which it will do inadvertently).  

6 - Children are born motivated to learn.  What a child will learn by school age with the least effort and most efficiently is whatever s/he is interested in and has the support and resources to facilitate.  When the information or topic is new and/or can be seen to make something work for oneself or others, the interest will be there.  If a teacher can set up an environment that responds to each child uniquely as well as offers diverse ways and resources for learning any subject material, learning will occur at a rate that will be challenging to for the environment to keep up with.  A teacher's or school's actions and ability to keep up to support student learning also communicates the value the school has for learning.

Your statement about the necessity of the move to peer-to-peer interactions is understandable but unnecessarily focuses on only peer-to-peer.  It seems that peers tend to become the best sources for (suprise!) belonging, acceptance of autonomy, and engaging conversations for improving life, whether for an individual or for a social group. Adults, including parents and teachers, could also be helpful if they could give up some unnecessary control and the teaching role and behave more like partners and mentors, providing access, resources, and support.

I recommend watching the TEDx talk by L. Todd Rose, "The Myth of Average" (attached), and reading Edward Deci's book, Why We Do What We Do. To help parents and teachers explain to their children why school is the way it is, there is Ken Robinson's RSA talk on Changing Educational Paradigms (attached). 

I will look at your resources, and wish you the best in your commitment.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4eBmyttcfU4

One barrier to realising a change in education is the reporting system that is reasonably common to every education system. By this I mean performance reporting, where students are ranked by some system, be it marks or letter grades. Even criteria based assessment is a ranking process. This form of reporting actually drives the structure o the system we have now. I advocate a system where the emphasis is on measurement of 'where a student currently is' in their multivariate learning journey. This changes the whole paradigm. Both teacher and student are seen to be working together to advance that individual child's learning. How the learning happens is quite irrelevant. Lectures, peer learning, flipped learning, individual learning, it doesn't matter. What metters is the collaboration between a learning expert, the teacher, and the learning novice the student. The way I try to overcome what I rgard as a negative paradigm is to do everything I can to subvert the message that the reporting system imposes on students and teachers buy the careful structuring of curriculum, assessment and pedagogy. It isn't enough however. The reporting system dominates the paradigm.

Martin and Mark,

Thank you both for responding. One thing you will note about the BeLonging Projects is that it doesn't touch the formal dimension of the classroom; it is categorised as a 'classroom management' project which means it can be used by the teacher without admin 'approval'. Martin, the beauty of what we observe is that the peer-to-peer dynamic is the beginning of healthy interaction! Once a child builds trust, they quickly extend this to the teacher and then carry their new found personal and social competence home and into the community. Chapter 4 of "The Mereon Matrix: Unity, Perspective and Paradox", Elsevier 2013, and the website focuses on 3-11 year olds; the application for subject based classes, different students/different teachers, is as exciting. At issue is giving all students the opportunity to learn to reason, think and innovate, individually and collectively. 

http://www.thebelongingprojects.org

I like that a teacher can use it without admin approval!  Nice.  My "classroom" experience is with preschool (2.5 or so up to 5 or 6), and I found it helped for me to focus on how life works when it works in the real world.  Example: If you want something, or you want something to happen (and you are a child in a family or classroom), it works to ask (respectfully).  Parents and teachers frequently add "nicely" or "politely" or "say please" as if that was important, and mostly I found that without the respectfulness, none of those words are useful.  That is, they don't work except in an environment that stresses form over substance.  (I'll bet you've heard a child ask demandingly, "Give me another drink!", and the adult says, "Say pleasel"  So the child, in the same tone, demands, "Give me another drink!  Please."  

I found that four-year-olds have a high degree of understanding of the meaning of "respect" without being able to explain it.  They would put it in terms of "don't yell at me", "don't take my stuff", "don't make fun of me (or my work)", "listen to me when I'm talking to you", "answer me when I ask you a question", etc.  Having said that, I wouldn't count on early peer-to-peer dynamics to provide the first healthy interactions.  It seems to depend on the quality (dynamic) of the environment, which is initially determined very early by the parent-caregivers and then by the adults in whatever social environment the child finds him/herself in next.  I am very interested in what you are saying, however.  I don't mind being wrong, and I love learning new things!  My preschoolers most definitely carried their workable social learning home with them, as their parents reported to me.

I am very interested in your project.  Thank you.

Martin, I invite you to follow up with us through The BeLonging Projects and consider becoming a champion in your area by helping us activate our shared interests; making education a powerful experience where all are learners, learning, unlearning and relearning as we constantly innovate to find solutions. 

It's time to revise the word 'hero' and those who engage in the transformation of education are heroic indeed, and in deed.

All the best, Lynnclaire for the entire team

http://www.thebelongingprojects.org