Here is a great article I found online at Creating Learning Communities

I have pasted just one paragraph from the online book here for you to read. But please visit the site, enjoy some of their resources, then come back and share what you have learned in our forums

This is not a polemic for children's rights, but simply a statement that some parents and other concerned adults are working with children in ways that make them view children as people, rather than generic students in need of standardized education. By viewing children as people, as individuals, it becomes harder to classify them as we do in school: A student, B student, and so on down the line. It also becomes harder to teach them subject matter without regard to their emotions and interest in learning it; people usually don't like having their interests dictated to them by others, their time conscripted by outsiders, and their performance in areas they are forced into being judged in public. The community based life-long learning centers that this book proposes are one direction we can take to help humanize education, and grant a degree of respect and autonomy to children in one part of their lives--what they choose to study, to think about. Such centers can probably only come into being on a wide scale with some sort of major funding and legislative approval. However, as the growth of homeschooling and alternative schools demonstrate, one need not wait for the rest of the world to catch up before one can attempt to make the world a better place; the larger scale CCL-LLC concept is based on existing grassroots models that I will draw upon in this chapter.

The source of the article is found here