Differences Between Self-Directed and Progressive Education*
Self-Directed and progressive education are often confused, but are very different in foundational principles and modes of operation.
Dear friends,
As many of you know, I have long been a student of and advocate for Self-Directed Education (SDE). My research and that of others convinces me that Self-Directed Education works, is eminently practical, and is far less trouble to everyone than the coercive, expensive, imprisoning, and trouble-filled educational system that we all call “standard.” I was one of the founders of the Alliance for Self-Directed Education (ASDE), which, largely under new leadership, has become a primary, valuable resource and vehicle of support for families and alternative schools pursuing this educational approach. I have conducted and published research on how children learn when allowed to pursue their own interests (e.g. here, here, and here) and follow-up studies of young adult graduates of SDE (here, here, and here). I also authored a chapter summarizing research into Self-Directed Education published by the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education (here).
Self-Directed Education, with capital letters, is the term that we coined at ASDE and is now commonly used for the educational practice of people who call themselves “unschoolers” or who attend schools or learning centers that are specifically designed to support self-direction, such as Sudbury model democratic schools, and Agile Learning Centers (Gray, 2023).
I’ve found that when I speak or write about Self-Directed Education some people mistakenly believe that I’m speaking or writing about progressive education. Progressive education has many of the same goals as Self-Directed Education, and its advocates use much of the same language, but the foundational philosophy is quite different, and the methodology is very different. In what follows I’ll review the basic tenets of progressive education, then review those of Self-Directed Education, and, finally, explain why I think the latter, not the former, will eventually become the standard mode of education.
Progressive Education
Progressive education is the term generally applied to an educational reform movement that began in the late 18th century and has waxed and waned at least twice since then. The period from about 1890 to about 1940 saw a flowering of progressive ideas in education, the birth of many progressive private schools, and some concerted attempts to bring progressive ideas into mainstream public schools. The leading philosopher of progressive education at that time, at least in the United States, was John Dewey (1859-1952). Other early progressive thinkers in education included Rudolf Steiner (1869-1925) and Maria Montessori (1870-1952), whose traditions live on, respectively, in Waldorf and Montessori schools. Progressive ideas in education tended to fade with World War II and its aftermath, tended to blossom again in the 1960’s and ‘70’s, and have generally been declining ever since about 1980. There is, however, some revival of progressive education in schools that emphasize project-based learning.
Progressive educators typically emphasize learning by doing, contextual learning relevant to students’ real-life experiences, critical thinking, deep understanding rather than rote memory, group work and collaboration rather than competition, evaluation based on products rather than tests, and the fostering of social responsibility, democratic attitudes, and concern for social justice. They commonly talk about “educating the whole person” and about “student-focused” as opposed to simply subject-focused education. Progressive teachers are expected to get to know all their students as individuals and bring out the best in each of them.
The website of the Progressive Education Network (a nonprofit organization formed in 2009 as part of an attempt to revive progressive education) states, as its mission, that: “Education must (a) amplify students’ voice, agency, conscience, and intellect to create a more equitable, just, and sustainable world; (b) encourage the active participation of students in their learning, in their communities, and in the world; (c) respond to the developmental needs of students, and focus on their social, emotional, intellectual, cognitive, cultural, and physical development; (d) honor and nurture students’ natural curiosity and innate desire to learn, fostering internal motivation and the discovery of passion and purpose; (e) emerge from the interests, experiences, goals, and needs of diverse constituents, fostering empathy, communication and collaboration across difference: and (f) foster respectfully collaborative and critical relationships between students, educators, parents/guardians, and the community.”
Alfie Kohn, one of today’s leading advocates for progressive education, has noted (here) that schools can be rated as more or less progressive to the degree that they are committed to (a) attending to the whole child, not just to academics; (b) community; (c) collaboration; (d) social justice; (e) fostering intrinsic motivation; (f) deep understanding; (g) active learning; and (h) taking kids seriously.
Progressive educators tend to view education as a collaborative endeavor between students and their teacher. A good deal of initiative comes from the students, but the teacher is responsible to guide that initiative in productive ways. The child’s intrinsic interests play a large role, but the teacher “nurtures” or even “brings out” those interests in the child. Play is understood to be part of the learning process, but the teacher guides and interprets that play in ways designed to insure certain educative ends.
Self-Directed Education
Advocates of Self-Directed Education, like those of progressive education, emphasize that education is about much more than academic learning. The website of the Alliance for Self-Directed Education defines education as the sum of everything a person learns that enables that person to live a satisfying and meaningful life. That would include knowledge of oneself, skills in planning and directing one’s own activities, skills in how to get along well with other people, and an understanding of the world around oneself sufficient to navigate that world effectively. Most progressive educators would agree, I think, with this kind of definition of education.
The difference between progressive education and Self-Directed Education lies in the understanding of how such whole-person education occurs. To the progressive educator it emerges from a collaboration between the child and a benevolent, extraordinarily competent teacher, who gently guides the child’s energy and shapes the child’s raw ideas in ways that serve the child’s and society’s long-term good. To the advocate of Self-Directed Education, it emerges out of children’s natural drives to understand themselves and the world around them and to use whatever resources are available in their environment, including knowledgeable and skilled others, to achieve that end.
To the advocate of Self-Directed Education, it is the child’s brilliance, not the teacher’s, that enables excellent education. The job of adults who facilitate Self-Directed Education is less onerous than that of teachers in progressive education. In Self-Directed Education adults do not need to have great knowledge of whatever a student might want to learn, do not have to try to understand the workings of every child’s mind (a truly impossible task), and do not have to be masters of pedagogy (whatever that might be).
Rather, they simply must be sure that the child is provided with an environment that allows the child’s natural educative instincts to operate effectively. As I have argued elsewhere (here and here), that is an environment in which the child (a) has unlimited time and freedom to play and explore; (b) has access to the most useful tools of the culture; (c) is embedded in a caring community of people who range widely in age and exemplify a wide variety of skills, knowledge, and ideas; and (d) has access to a number of adults who are willing to answer questions (or try to answer them) and provide help when asked. This is the kind of environment that is established at schools or learning centers designed for Self-Directed Education, and it is also the kind of environment that successful unschooling families provide for their children.
Education, in this view, is not a collaboration of student and a teacher; it is entirely the responsibility of the student. While progressive educators continue to see it as their responsibility to ensure that students acquire certain knowledge, skills, and values, and to evaluate students’ progress, facilitators of Self-Directed Education do not see that as their responsibility. While progressive education is on a continuum with traditional education, Self-Directed Education represents a complete break from traditional education.
I often write of a distinction between, Self-Directed Education, with capital letters, and self-directed education, without capitals. I have proposed that Self-Directed Education be used to refer to the education of children, of K-12 school age, whose families have made a deliberate decision that the children will educate themselves by following their own interests, without being subjected to an imposed curriculum, either in or out of school (Gray, 2023). I have proposed further that self-directed education, without capitals, be used in a more generic sense to refer to something that every human being is engaged in essentially every waking minute of every day. We are all, constantly, educating ourselves as we pursue our interests, make our living, and strive to solve problems in our daily lives. Most of what any of us know—regardless of how much curriculum-based schooling we have attended—has come from self-directed education.
Those who pursue Self-Directed Education are, in effect, saying that self-directed education (small letters) is so powerful and effective that children don’t need imposed education at all, if they are provided with an environment that optimizes their ability to educate themselves. In fact, many are saying that imposed education interferes with self-directed education by consuming so much of children’s time, turning learning into something unpleasant, and planting in children’s minds the idea that they are not capable of controlling their own education. I hasten to add, however, that within Self-Directed Education there is nothing wrong with direct instruction that the learner chooses. If the learner freely chooses to join a course and is free to leave at any time, it is still Self-Directed. But most learning in Self-Directed Education does not occur that way. It comes from everyday playing, exploring, and doing in the course of living.
Why I Think Self-Directed Education, Not Progressive Education, Will Become the Standard Mode of Future Education
I admire progressive educators. Without exception, those I have met are good people, who care deeply about children and want to make children’s lives better. They see the harm of our standard system of education and want to do something about it. Progressive educators are at the forefront, right now, of attempts to reduce homework (so children will have a life outside of school), bring back recess, reduce or eliminate standardized testing, and allow teachers to be more flexible and responsive to children’s needs in the classroom. They are fighting an uphill battle, and I admire them for it. But this is a battle that has been going on for as long as we have had compulsory schooling. It is a battle that helps to modulate the excesses of standard schooling; but it is incapable of defeating it, because it accepts too much of the standard set of beliefs about what education must be.
As long as teachers believe that it is their task to make sure that children learn certain things, at certain times in their development, then no matter how progressive their thinking, they will have to use coercive methods. Children do not, by nature, all develop similar interests at the same time, so it is impossible to operate, in anything like a typical classroom with more than a handful of children, on the assumption that all children will learn the expected curriculum by doing what interests them.
I dare say that most new teachers, emerging from schools of education, enter their job thinking they are going to be progressive educators. They went into teaching, after all, because they love children; and in their education classes much if not most of the educational philosophy they read and heard about was progressive philosophy—about guiding, nurturing, and enabling, not about coercing. But then they entered the real world of the classroom, of maybe thirty children, and to keep order and make it seem like learning was going on, they had to abandon most of their progressive ideals. It’s no surprise that those schools that do operate in most accord with progressive principles are private and very expensive. They require small classes, a high ratio of teachers to students, and extraordinarily competent, dedicated teachers.
Even ardent advocates of progressive education admit that one of the reasons progressive education has not taken off is that it is so demanding of teachers. Here, for example, is what Alfie Kohn has to say about that (here) : “It [progressive education] is much more demanding [than traditional education] of teachers, who have to know their subject matter inside and out if they want their students to ‘make sense of biology or literature’ as opposed to ‘simply memorizing the frog’s anatomy or the sentence’s structure.’ But progressive teachers also have to know a lot about pedagogy because no amount of content knowledge (say, expertise in science or English) can tell you how to facilitate learning.” Add to that the idea that teachers are supposed to get to know all their students as individuals and help them develop their full potential and their own interests, and you can perhaps begin to understand why progressive education has not replaced direct, drill-and-test education as the standard method.
In contrast to progressive education, Self-Directed Education is inexpensive and efficient. Schools and centers for SDE generally operate on per student budgets well below that of the local public schools. A large ratio of adults to students is not needed, because most student learning does not come from interaction with adults. In this age-mixed setting, younger students are continuously learning from older ones, and children of all ages practice essential skills and try out ideas in their play, exploration, conversations, and pursuits of whatever interests they develop. They also, on their own initiative, use books and, in today’s world, internet resources to acquire the knowledge they are seeking at any given time.
The usual criticism of Self-Directed Education is that it can’t work, or can work only for certain, highly self-motivated children. In fact, progressive educators are often quick to draw a distinction between their view of education and that of Self-Directed Education, because they don’t want their view to be confused with ideas that they consider to be “romantic” or (less tactfully) “crazy” and unworkable. For example, I’m pretty sure that Alfie Kohn had Self-Directed Education in mind when he wrote (here again): “In this cartoon version of the tradition, kids are free to do anything they please, the curriculum can consist of whatever is fun (and nothing that isn’t fun). Learning is thought to happen automatically while the teachers just stand by, observing and beaming. I lack the space here to offer examples of this sort of misrepresentation — or a full account of why it’s so profoundly wrong — but trust me: People really do sneer at the idea of progressive education based on an image that has little to do with progressive education.”
Kohn’s “cartoon” characterization of Self-Directed Education is not quite right, because children do, on their own, regularly choose to do things that aren’t fun in an immediate sense and because staff members don’t just stand around observing and beaming, but it is not too far off the mark. And it does work. Don’t trust me on that; read and think skeptically about the evidence. Follow-up studies of graduates of schools for Self-Directed Education and of grown unschoolers have shown that people, who educated themselves by following their own interests, are doing very well in life. You can read much more about this in academic articles to which I’ve already linked and in my book Free to Learn.
Self-Directed Education works because we are biologically designed for it. Throughout essentially all of human history, children educated themselves by exploring, playing, watching and listening to others, and figuring out and pursuing their own goals in life (e.g. here and here). In an extensive review of the anthropological literature on education cross-culturally, anthropologist David Lancy concluded that learning what one needs to know is natural to human beings, but teaching and being taught in a formal way is not. Winston Churchill’s claim, “I always like to learn, but I don’t always like to be taught,” is something that anyone, any time, any place, could have said.
Children’s educative instincts still work beautifully, in our modern society, if we provide the conditions that enable them to work. The same instincts that motivated hunter-gatherer children to learn to hunt, gather, and do all that they had to do to become effective adults motivate children in our society to learn to read, calculate with numbers, operate computers, and do all that they have to do to become effective adults. Self-Directed Education is so natural, so much more pleasant and efficient for everyone than is coercive education, that it seems inevitable that it will once again become the standard educational route.
Coercive schooling has been a blip in human history, designed to serve temporary ends that arose with industrialization and the need to suppress creativity and free will (see here). Coercive schooling is in the process now of burning itself out, in a kind of final flaring up. Once people re-discover that Self-Directed Education works and doesn’t cause the stress and harm that coercive schooling does, and we begin to divert some fraction of the hundreds of billions of dollars currently spent on coercive education to the provision of resources for Self-Directed Education for all children, Self-Directed Education will once again become the standard educational route. Then we’ll be able to drop the capital letters. And then we won’t need progressive education to soften the harsh blows of coercive education.
Concluding Thoughts
Lest any reader over-interpret my statement that facilitators of Self-Directed Education do not impose lessons on children, I must add that, of course, like all responsible people, they see it as an obligation to teach children about true dangers and how to avoid them. Even hunter-gatherer adults, the superstars of trustful interactions with children, will make sure that kids know which mushrooms are poisonous. And, of course, just as adult friends share thoughts and information in daily conversations, so do staff members in friendly conversations with kids. That’s just being human.
And now, what do you think? Do you agree with this analysis of the difference between progressive education and Self-Directed Education? Do you agree, or not, that Self-Directed Education will eventually replace coercive education? Do you see signs that this may already be happening, through very gradually? This substack is, among other things, a forum for discussion, and your views and knowledge are valued and taken seriously be me and other readers. Make your thoughts known in the comments section below.
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With respect and best wishes,
Peter
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*Note: This letter is a somewhat revised, updated version of an essay I originally posted on my Psychology Today blog.
I wholeheartedly agree that SDE works brilliantly. I can’t imagine how worn out and self sacrificing I’d have to be to actuate Progressive education in our house. I get to stay home with my children, and lead a beautiful life together. My eldest is only thirteen and my youngest 10, but they have both been unschooled from day one (also raised in the other ways you espouse which I think equally important). They definitely choose to do hard things in play, every day! They definitely seek out the answers to their never ending questions! They are very curious and such interesting people! It is wonderful watching them grow.
If I ever set out to “teach” them anything it was only the many places you can look for the answers, to pay attention and listen to what their gut tells them, and just for me to be a good example of a curious human who is interested in growing and seeking contentment. We simply live our lives together.
I would even assert that my boys know deeply, like REALLY know, a heck of a lot more than the other traditionally homeschooled kids we know because they have been empowered to follow their passions and interests without pressure while simultaneously growing to believe in their own competence. The only possibly schoolish thing you could say we have ever done is that I read aloud to them constantly, often hours a day. However this is completely at their request.
In short, I believed you when you explained to me how it would work, and it really really has. I have trusted in them and they have flourished. If I hadn’t found my way to the Continuum concept, then Free to Learn and Home Grown, our lives might’ve been very different. So Thank you Peter!
Your description of teacher effort very much matches my experience. Though I’m now homeschooling my sons, I previously taught secondary science in standard schools. In my last job I had the privilege of guiding students through science research projects. It was the most fun part of my job, since I got to learn about new topics outside my expertise and watch the children learn a wide variety of skills while they explored their own interests. BUT I still had to force them to follow a set timeline, still had to grade their research proposals and reports within the standard percentage-based letter grade scale while trying to offer meaningful feedback, still had plenty of students who really didn’t have interest in pursuing their own science projects at that particular time, etc.
It was exhausting! Trying to fit some student-directed projects into the mold of the standard coercive model made the whole thing unnecessarily exhausting and stressful for both students and teacher. It felt unsustainable, so I certainly hope you’re right that the future of education will lie in a completely different model.