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!
On the same path as you Chrisi - The Continuum Concept changed my life and my vision of home education. So glad I read it before my daughter was born. And now I follow Peter's work and it keeps me grounded in my trust for my child.
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.
I, too, tried to be a progressive educator in factory-like schools for many years, and it was exhausting indeed! Being a progressive educator with small groups of children out in nature is, for me and the kids, regenerative rather than exhausting.
We began homeschooling, then unschooling our kids in the 1980s, and now the grandkids are being home educated. Self-directed education is very much a part of our DIY (do-it-yourself) lifestyle, with an emphasis on autonomy. I can't see SDE taking off in schools because mainstream education is based on coercive control - it is evident and entrenched at every level within schools. The amount of trust and respect in other humans required to switch to SDE is possible but highly unlikely.
We live in Spain, and there isn’t any such SDE place here. My two kids goes to Waldorf school, the teachers are not as described in the article, they know they have to follow certain curricula, but kids in primary school have 6 whole years with the same teacher and they can all learn at their own pace. Nobody is pushing the kids to learn something, there is repetition, yes, but there is a lot of play and freedom. The teacher explain the main topics but if kids are not prepared to understand or learn that topic is fine. Also the idea is to create bonds, the teacher is the most important person after the family and that bond of love is very important for the kid. I like a school in which my sons are loved and the teachers take care of their soul and well-being. I’m haven’t read in this article the importance of having a community and love, the word “school staff” seems to me very cold and distant. Our school is a community full of love for the children. What is the emotional aspects of a SDE institution? Learning is not the only important aspect.
I was a straight A student in school but by the time I got to high school I was ready to drop out.
I often found different ways to arrive at the same mathematical answer but was marked “fail” because I didn’t follow the method being taught.
I was frustrated with having to regurgitate the teacher’s conclusions and thoughts back to them in every class or risk a failing grade.
Thankfully I found an alternative high school that was founded on Self-Directed Education - it saved my sanity and re-ignited a love of learning again.
I can only pray you’re correct that our school system is headed towards SDE!
"...it is incapable of defeating it, because it accepts too much of the standard set of beliefs about what education must be."
In the past two years I have really been thinking hard about the question "What even is the United States". It really does seem to be almost exactly what the surface indicates. Many of us do believe in power and all the great things we can do once we have it. Many of us dream of being rich enough so we can actually do what we want.... which is often not to run for office or enter politics and make anything better... it is just to avoid work.
I have often thought of politics from the standpoint of "but how do I do it?", and to me it seems like there are many paths of personal development, social development, and progressive service to existing power structures that eventually cede opportunities. I have considered self-directed education to be a cause which I advocate for as well as write about. In the game of relevance I have decided to edit and post transcripts of the verbal notes from my divergent thinking as I read books on education. Professor Gray, I have been slowly working my way through Free to Learn.
The systems we have are the collective aggregate of all the things we push to get done. School-as-daycare would be more effective if they got rid of the classes, but the desire to make something out of kids, the idea that you can and should "make", in the active sense, I fear is something far too many people choose to believe. It is the same with cycles of abuse where the grown-up abuse-victim's refrain is "I turned out fine"... It is therefore a spiritual quest to take would-be tyrants who force demands upon their kids, or youngsters who can't understand what they are being subjected to, and expose and awaken these people to another way of thinking. In this battle we work against the modern algorithms which often do not reveal much beyond the tip of the ice berg.
I have done my part to elevate Professor Gray's name and work by forwarding his articles and recommending his books whenever I think somebody I know would be receptive to it. I am also hoping to elevate my own name by association with the books I am choosing to react to as I put myself through a self-study course of unique takes on education.
There is much we can do to spread the word and it is easier now than ever. Are we all doing the best we can?
How do we hasten this turn by governments globally? How to shore up public policy to support self directed eduction? How to get those billions in funding to support SDE families and caregivers directly? I’m really interested in the funded public policy side of this, all the details! (Thinking of your section here: “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…”)
I have always been a proponent of play-based curriculums and self-directed learning. When our children were young, I experimented with letting them make decisions. Given a table of healthy food and sweets, would they choose the healthy food? My experience, I am sad to say, was that they went for the sweets, so I learned that there is a time and place for adult-directed learning. Our children went to and I taught at a Waldorf school which fits in the category of progressive schools. But since the bond with teachers is based on love, I suggest that all adult-directed learning is not coercive which by definition involves force or threats. The goal is to have a healthy balance of adult and child-directed activities. Any progress toward integrating play and project-based learning in our schools would be welcomed as long as teachers lead with love.
I remember people saying kids will go for what’s healthy but mine went for the junk food. What I learned through experience is to avoid dogmatism. Forbidding sugar, processed food and screens made them all the more desirable. So I guess I have to take that into account.
I’m wondering how values and beliefs, which ultimately guide our every action, are addressed in Self-Directed education. It’s not always the case that the values and beliefs we pick up from the environment are healthy, effective, and sustainable. It takes deliberate effort and awareness to instill these values and beliefs in a person’s mind so that they become automatic. I could even argue that unhealthy, ineffective, and unsustainable values and beliefs are more easily adopted than those that are truly valuable and necessary — the very ones that Jesus, Buddha, and other spiritual guides have taught us. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.
Hi Peter, I am a big fan of your work. Thanks for all of your writing. I'm very sympathetic to the idea that self-directed education is the most natural way for kids to learn. But I have a concern that I haven't seen addressed in this post which is as follows: In the modern world, we have ubiquitous electronic advices that are designed to attract and hold kid’s attention. If we let them explore on their own, will they spend an unhealthy amount of time in virtual as opposed to physical worlds? Will this make them physically and socially unhealthy? Will these devices create a supernormal stimulus that creates maladaptive behavior? You said that the job of the self-directed educator is to create the right environment for learning. What if doing so requires removing access to electronic devices, and therefore limiting a child's ability to explore the world as they desire? I would be curious to hear your thoughts addressing this concern.
We are experimenting with that freedom in our house. We never had screens until recently. I do feel they spend an unhealthy amount of time on them and lack enough face to face in person and outside being physically active time. We are working openly together to try different solutions. I believe in SDE but the screen stuff and food choices are very hard for me if I’m being completely honest. I’m always in a battle with myself trying to fit theory to practice. I sometimes can’t perfectly reconcile the two. Before screens came into our lives it all made sense.
"I have a concern that I haven't seen addressed in this post which is as follows: In the modern world, we have ubiquitous electronic advices that are designed to attract and hold kid’s attention"
Gray has already addressed this in other posts. Long story short, screens are no big deal.
"If we let them explore on their own, will they spend an unhealthy amount of time in virtual as opposed to physical worlds?"
No, they will not spend an unhealthy amount of time in virtual worlds. I know this because I've volunteered at Sudbury Schools and none of the kids I met ever had an unhealthy screen habit.
I am an avid follower and evangelist of your teachings and SDE. As a mother who watched her AUDHD child suffer in traditional, private and special-ed classes in his early years, I am happy that I had no other choice to make than to pull him and his NT brother out. We have unschooled for the last 5 years.
However, growing up in the ambitious Silicon Valley (where you enroll your child into college-prepatory pre-school before they are born), I am in a constant battle with family and my conditioning that kids need to be nudged (who am I kidding- pushed) in order to reach their potential -so they can have choice of opportunity (read: be successful). I have boys 11 & 14 and experimentation has proven that, if given the choice, they always choose preferred activities (gaming and watching YouTube) to non-preferred (reading books, going for a bike ride or even doing Legos). Some of that is the ND brain seeking safety, predictability and easy dopamine. Yes they taught themselves to read and are exceptionally kind and emotionally literate kids, and maybe one day they will magically love to read novels or find an interest in philosophy/science/history/ fill in the blank with anything other than Roblox - but it feels like a gamble. IF I require daily reading, will that build the neural pathways and habits of a healthy reader? Because it isn't looking good when left to their own devices (pun intended). Sadly we can't A/B test our kids so we will never know until later/too late if we did "right" by them.
I am curious what you think of David Yeager, author of 10 to 25: The Science of Motivating Young People, and his premise that kids actually want us to expect more of them? According to his research, young people crave higher standards. I know you love to unravel research so hopefully you can help a mom out and absolve me of ambition guilt.
I would love if self-directed education is the norm. It is best for children and society. However, the idea of SDE becoming mainstream seems like a pipe dream. Our society is so far down the rabbit hole of believing children to be incompetent, incapable and in need of protection paired with a mighty drive to out-compete other nations that compells adults to force kids to learn more earlier and earlier.
I went to teacher training at Antioch of New England and I think you clearly explained what I learned as a “progressive educator”. Then I taught in public and private conventional schools for 17 years as a teacher and principal- continually trying to bring progressive values and respect for the children’s instinctual abilities to learn. The coerciveness never sat right. After freeing myself from the system and really observing, I opened an SDE forest school and call myself a facilitator!
Thank you for the guidance and research to support my growth and development!
I would love for self-directed education to replace coercive education, as I feel that I learned most of what’s important to me in an informal setting. (Still, I am grateful for the teachers who shared their knowledge and encouraged me as a person, not just for whether I got a good grade, and I do value this from my public school experience.)
For self-directed education to replace coercive education, I think it must have community and social support. I agree with the four points you named as providing an ideal environment. I think that having access to a community with a wide variety of skills and ideas is essential. But currently, community is primarily found in schools.
This doesn’t have to be the case, but changing it would require an entire reworking of society. I feel that the important ingredients of an environment are:
- The ability to see people engaged in meaningful activity that is interesting to them and others.
- The ability to see how people react to what those people are doing.
- The ability, and invitation, to participate in the activity themselves.
- The ability to see a response/reaction to what they do from those around them.
Jane McGonigal once defined a “game” by these four traits:
1) A goal—the outcome that players work to achieve, giving them a sense of purpose.
2) Rules—limitations on how to achieve the goal, encouraging players to be creative and strategic.
3) Feedback—telling players how close they are to achieving the goal, motivating them to keep playing.
4) Voluntary participation—ensuring that everyone accepts the goal and the rules, and that intentionally challenging work is experienced as a fun activity, since they are free to leave at any time.
She wrote that these four traits encompass what makes games engaging, motivating, rewarding, and fun. I think the ingredients of environments where I’ve learned most are similar.
A meaningful activity is one where there’s a goal. To use this space as an example, I would roughly characterize your goal as to foster and promote self-directed education. To do this, you are writing and doing research, which we can see and which is interesting to you and to us.
In the game of life, rules usually are imposed by our own limitations. The limitations in this game, perhaps, are that self-directed education is not currently the societal norm and is not facilitated by society.
People’s responses are the feedback system. This tells us how close and how effective the work is to reaching the goal. We can see each other’s responses, which we learn from and which also encourage us to write our own.
The ability to voluntarily participate ourselves—in this case by putting the principles into practice and/or by writing comments—gives us the opportunity to participate and possibly aid in the goal, which we can learn from and find rewarding. Responses to our participation from others can let us know that what we’re doing has an effect, which motivates us to continue.
This is an environment where learning naturally can take place. I can find many such environments across the internet. I found it far less in school, but school was where I could find access to community. How do we create this in physical space, and make it available and accessible outside of school?
I agree with everything except one sentence: "Coercive schooling is in the process now of burning itself out, in a kind of final flaring up."
I don't see any evidence of that. Sudbury Schools and Agile Learning Centers are just as rare now as they were twenty years ago. A few schools have opened and a few schools have closed, but overall the picture remains unchanged.
History tells us that tyranny can go on for centuries without being corrected. What makes us so confident that SDE will prevail in the near term?
As I read the post I had a suspicion it was written by a university professor who thinks everyone is like him. Upon checking, I was not surprised to find a university professor.
First, you have presented a false dichotomy. A progressive indoctrination and self-directed education are not the only choices. Far from it.
Second, whether it be grade school, grad school or something in between, most schooling has components that should be considered requirements even if preparation for psychology research doesn't. Maybe not as many as what are required but still many remain. I'm glad I was required to learn my times tables, long division, and what grammar that I did. Likewise I'm glad that structural engineers, doctors, nurses, etc. are required to study most of what they are required even if it isn't exactly the right mix.
Third, unlike an academic researcher, most people aren't able to quickly digest the basics, most people aren't able to find topics that interest them, most people aren't able to figure out what basic knowledge they need to pursue more advanced topics that might interest them, and they aren't able to learn the material without guidance, handholding, and a lot of explanation.
"A progressive indoctrination and self-directed education are not the only choices."
Gray never say that those two things were the only choices. If I write a blog post comparing baseball to basketball, I am not implicitly denying the existence of soccer.
"I'm glad I was required to learn my times tables, long division, and what grammar that I did."
I'm not glad that I was required to learn those things. Long division in particular has proven to be completely useless. And even when school forced me to learn something useful (like reading), I would have learned it much more painlessly if I'd been given the freedom to learn in my own way.
"I'm glad that structural engineers, doctors, nurses, etc. are required to study most of what they are required"
If I recall correctly, Gray agrees with you. He's not against required tests for doctors and the like. He's just against it at the school-age level.
"most people aren't able to quickly digest the basics, most people aren't able to find topics that interest them, most people aren't able to figure out what basic knowledge they need to pursue more advanced topics that might interest them"
I work with children and I can attest that most children can do all these things.
"they aren't able to learn the material without guidance, handholding, and a lot of explanation."
Gray is not opposed to guidance so long as it's desired by the learner. It's forced guidance that he opposes (and even then he makes and exception for crucial safety information, like when the hunter-gatherer adults make sure their children know which mushrooms to avoid.)
For the most part I can't tell how much we disagree versus mostly agreeing and saying it differently. Then again, I'm pretty sure I disagree with Gray on the points that I stated. Anyway, there's one issue the two of us definitely disagree.
"I work with children and I can attest that most children can do all these things."
My k-12 education was with mostly blue collar kids. The minority from white collar households could have mostly handled this. I was not one who could have. Of the majority who were blue collar, most could not have.
In high school I was in a class of the more elite kids one quarter that we had to pick an author, read some of their books, and write about the author (more focus on what we learned about the author than the details of the books but I think either was accepted). A large minority struggled to complete a paper and a few did nothing. Maybe if they had been doing things more like this since grade school they would have done better. Probably better but acceptably better? I doubt it.
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!
On the same path as you Chrisi - The Continuum Concept changed my life and my vision of home education. So glad I read it before my daughter was born. And now I follow Peter's work and it keeps me grounded in my trust for my child.
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.
I, too, tried to be a progressive educator in factory-like schools for many years, and it was exhausting indeed! Being a progressive educator with small groups of children out in nature is, for me and the kids, regenerative rather than exhausting.
We began homeschooling, then unschooling our kids in the 1980s, and now the grandkids are being home educated. Self-directed education is very much a part of our DIY (do-it-yourself) lifestyle, with an emphasis on autonomy. I can't see SDE taking off in schools because mainstream education is based on coercive control - it is evident and entrenched at every level within schools. The amount of trust and respect in other humans required to switch to SDE is possible but highly unlikely.
We live in Spain, and there isn’t any such SDE place here. My two kids goes to Waldorf school, the teachers are not as described in the article, they know they have to follow certain curricula, but kids in primary school have 6 whole years with the same teacher and they can all learn at their own pace. Nobody is pushing the kids to learn something, there is repetition, yes, but there is a lot of play and freedom. The teacher explain the main topics but if kids are not prepared to understand or learn that topic is fine. Also the idea is to create bonds, the teacher is the most important person after the family and that bond of love is very important for the kid. I like a school in which my sons are loved and the teachers take care of their soul and well-being. I’m haven’t read in this article the importance of having a community and love, the word “school staff” seems to me very cold and distant. Our school is a community full of love for the children. What is the emotional aspects of a SDE institution? Learning is not the only important aspect.
I was a straight A student in school but by the time I got to high school I was ready to drop out.
I often found different ways to arrive at the same mathematical answer but was marked “fail” because I didn’t follow the method being taught.
I was frustrated with having to regurgitate the teacher’s conclusions and thoughts back to them in every class or risk a failing grade.
Thankfully I found an alternative high school that was founded on Self-Directed Education - it saved my sanity and re-ignited a love of learning again.
I can only pray you’re correct that our school system is headed towards SDE!
"...it is incapable of defeating it, because it accepts too much of the standard set of beliefs about what education must be."
In the past two years I have really been thinking hard about the question "What even is the United States". It really does seem to be almost exactly what the surface indicates. Many of us do believe in power and all the great things we can do once we have it. Many of us dream of being rich enough so we can actually do what we want.... which is often not to run for office or enter politics and make anything better... it is just to avoid work.
I have often thought of politics from the standpoint of "but how do I do it?", and to me it seems like there are many paths of personal development, social development, and progressive service to existing power structures that eventually cede opportunities. I have considered self-directed education to be a cause which I advocate for as well as write about. In the game of relevance I have decided to edit and post transcripts of the verbal notes from my divergent thinking as I read books on education. Professor Gray, I have been slowly working my way through Free to Learn.
The systems we have are the collective aggregate of all the things we push to get done. School-as-daycare would be more effective if they got rid of the classes, but the desire to make something out of kids, the idea that you can and should "make", in the active sense, I fear is something far too many people choose to believe. It is the same with cycles of abuse where the grown-up abuse-victim's refrain is "I turned out fine"... It is therefore a spiritual quest to take would-be tyrants who force demands upon their kids, or youngsters who can't understand what they are being subjected to, and expose and awaken these people to another way of thinking. In this battle we work against the modern algorithms which often do not reveal much beyond the tip of the ice berg.
I have done my part to elevate Professor Gray's name and work by forwarding his articles and recommending his books whenever I think somebody I know would be receptive to it. I am also hoping to elevate my own name by association with the books I am choosing to react to as I put myself through a self-study course of unique takes on education.
There is much we can do to spread the word and it is easier now than ever. Are we all doing the best we can?
How do we hasten this turn by governments globally? How to shore up public policy to support self directed eduction? How to get those billions in funding to support SDE families and caregivers directly? I’m really interested in the funded public policy side of this, all the details! (Thinking of your section here: “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…”)
I have always been a proponent of play-based curriculums and self-directed learning. When our children were young, I experimented with letting them make decisions. Given a table of healthy food and sweets, would they choose the healthy food? My experience, I am sad to say, was that they went for the sweets, so I learned that there is a time and place for adult-directed learning. Our children went to and I taught at a Waldorf school which fits in the category of progressive schools. But since the bond with teachers is based on love, I suggest that all adult-directed learning is not coercive which by definition involves force or threats. The goal is to have a healthy balance of adult and child-directed activities. Any progress toward integrating play and project-based learning in our schools would be welcomed as long as teachers lead with love.
"Given a table of healthy food and sweets, would they choose the healthy food? My experience, I am sad to say, was that they went for the sweets"
My experience in Sudbury Schools is that kids eat real food everyday. They do eat some sweets, but no more than public-school kids.
I remember people saying kids will go for what’s healthy but mine went for the junk food. What I learned through experience is to avoid dogmatism. Forbidding sugar, processed food and screens made them all the more desirable. So I guess I have to take that into account.
Judith, I'm curious what you think of my comment on Peter's post.
I’m wondering how values and beliefs, which ultimately guide our every action, are addressed in Self-Directed education. It’s not always the case that the values and beliefs we pick up from the environment are healthy, effective, and sustainable. It takes deliberate effort and awareness to instill these values and beliefs in a person’s mind so that they become automatic. I could even argue that unhealthy, ineffective, and unsustainable values and beliefs are more easily adopted than those that are truly valuable and necessary — the very ones that Jesus, Buddha, and other spiritual guides have taught us. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.
"It’s not always the case that the values and beliefs we pick up from the environment are healthy, effective, and sustainable."
That's exactly why we need SDE. Anything else would normalize tyranny.
Hi Peter, I am a big fan of your work. Thanks for all of your writing. I'm very sympathetic to the idea that self-directed education is the most natural way for kids to learn. But I have a concern that I haven't seen addressed in this post which is as follows: In the modern world, we have ubiquitous electronic advices that are designed to attract and hold kid’s attention. If we let them explore on their own, will they spend an unhealthy amount of time in virtual as opposed to physical worlds? Will this make them physically and socially unhealthy? Will these devices create a supernormal stimulus that creates maladaptive behavior? You said that the job of the self-directed educator is to create the right environment for learning. What if doing so requires removing access to electronic devices, and therefore limiting a child's ability to explore the world as they desire? I would be curious to hear your thoughts addressing this concern.
We are experimenting with that freedom in our house. We never had screens until recently. I do feel they spend an unhealthy amount of time on them and lack enough face to face in person and outside being physically active time. We are working openly together to try different solutions. I believe in SDE but the screen stuff and food choices are very hard for me if I’m being completely honest. I’m always in a battle with myself trying to fit theory to practice. I sometimes can’t perfectly reconcile the two. Before screens came into our lives it all made sense.
"I have a concern that I haven't seen addressed in this post which is as follows: In the modern world, we have ubiquitous electronic advices that are designed to attract and hold kid’s attention"
Gray has already addressed this in other posts. Long story short, screens are no big deal.
"If we let them explore on their own, will they spend an unhealthy amount of time in virtual as opposed to physical worlds?"
No, they will not spend an unhealthy amount of time in virtual worlds. I know this because I've volunteered at Sudbury Schools and none of the kids I met ever had an unhealthy screen habit.
I am an avid follower and evangelist of your teachings and SDE. As a mother who watched her AUDHD child suffer in traditional, private and special-ed classes in his early years, I am happy that I had no other choice to make than to pull him and his NT brother out. We have unschooled for the last 5 years.
However, growing up in the ambitious Silicon Valley (where you enroll your child into college-prepatory pre-school before they are born), I am in a constant battle with family and my conditioning that kids need to be nudged (who am I kidding- pushed) in order to reach their potential -so they can have choice of opportunity (read: be successful). I have boys 11 & 14 and experimentation has proven that, if given the choice, they always choose preferred activities (gaming and watching YouTube) to non-preferred (reading books, going for a bike ride or even doing Legos). Some of that is the ND brain seeking safety, predictability and easy dopamine. Yes they taught themselves to read and are exceptionally kind and emotionally literate kids, and maybe one day they will magically love to read novels or find an interest in philosophy/science/history/ fill in the blank with anything other than Roblox - but it feels like a gamble. IF I require daily reading, will that build the neural pathways and habits of a healthy reader? Because it isn't looking good when left to their own devices (pun intended). Sadly we can't A/B test our kids so we will never know until later/too late if we did "right" by them.
I am curious what you think of David Yeager, author of 10 to 25: The Science of Motivating Young People, and his premise that kids actually want us to expect more of them? According to his research, young people crave higher standards. I know you love to unravel research so hopefully you can help a mom out and absolve me of ambition guilt.
I would love if self-directed education is the norm. It is best for children and society. However, the idea of SDE becoming mainstream seems like a pipe dream. Our society is so far down the rabbit hole of believing children to be incompetent, incapable and in need of protection paired with a mighty drive to out-compete other nations that compells adults to force kids to learn more earlier and earlier.
I went to teacher training at Antioch of New England and I think you clearly explained what I learned as a “progressive educator”. Then I taught in public and private conventional schools for 17 years as a teacher and principal- continually trying to bring progressive values and respect for the children’s instinctual abilities to learn. The coerciveness never sat right. After freeing myself from the system and really observing, I opened an SDE forest school and call myself a facilitator!
Thank you for the guidance and research to support my growth and development!
I would love for self-directed education to replace coercive education, as I feel that I learned most of what’s important to me in an informal setting. (Still, I am grateful for the teachers who shared their knowledge and encouraged me as a person, not just for whether I got a good grade, and I do value this from my public school experience.)
For self-directed education to replace coercive education, I think it must have community and social support. I agree with the four points you named as providing an ideal environment. I think that having access to a community with a wide variety of skills and ideas is essential. But currently, community is primarily found in schools.
This doesn’t have to be the case, but changing it would require an entire reworking of society. I feel that the important ingredients of an environment are:
- The ability to see people engaged in meaningful activity that is interesting to them and others.
- The ability to see how people react to what those people are doing.
- The ability, and invitation, to participate in the activity themselves.
- The ability to see a response/reaction to what they do from those around them.
Jane McGonigal once defined a “game” by these four traits:
1) A goal—the outcome that players work to achieve, giving them a sense of purpose.
2) Rules—limitations on how to achieve the goal, encouraging players to be creative and strategic.
3) Feedback—telling players how close they are to achieving the goal, motivating them to keep playing.
4) Voluntary participation—ensuring that everyone accepts the goal and the rules, and that intentionally challenging work is experienced as a fun activity, since they are free to leave at any time.
She wrote that these four traits encompass what makes games engaging, motivating, rewarding, and fun. I think the ingredients of environments where I’ve learned most are similar.
A meaningful activity is one where there’s a goal. To use this space as an example, I would roughly characterize your goal as to foster and promote self-directed education. To do this, you are writing and doing research, which we can see and which is interesting to you and to us.
In the game of life, rules usually are imposed by our own limitations. The limitations in this game, perhaps, are that self-directed education is not currently the societal norm and is not facilitated by society.
People’s responses are the feedback system. This tells us how close and how effective the work is to reaching the goal. We can see each other’s responses, which we learn from and which also encourage us to write our own.
The ability to voluntarily participate ourselves—in this case by putting the principles into practice and/or by writing comments—gives us the opportunity to participate and possibly aid in the goal, which we can learn from and find rewarding. Responses to our participation from others can let us know that what we’re doing has an effect, which motivates us to continue.
This is an environment where learning naturally can take place. I can find many such environments across the internet. I found it far less in school, but school was where I could find access to community. How do we create this in physical space, and make it available and accessible outside of school?
I agree with everything except one sentence: "Coercive schooling is in the process now of burning itself out, in a kind of final flaring up."
I don't see any evidence of that. Sudbury Schools and Agile Learning Centers are just as rare now as they were twenty years ago. A few schools have opened and a few schools have closed, but overall the picture remains unchanged.
History tells us that tyranny can go on for centuries without being corrected. What makes us so confident that SDE will prevail in the near term?
Sadly I must reference this post from 2016: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/freedom-learn/201612/why-our-coercive-system-schooling-should-topple
Here Gray wrote "I believe [conventional schooling] going to collapse—slowly at first and then more rapidly—over the next 10 years or so"
It has been nine years and thus far I haven't seen any sign of a general collapse. Even the pandemic was only a temporary blip.
As I read the post I had a suspicion it was written by a university professor who thinks everyone is like him. Upon checking, I was not surprised to find a university professor.
First, you have presented a false dichotomy. A progressive indoctrination and self-directed education are not the only choices. Far from it.
Second, whether it be grade school, grad school or something in between, most schooling has components that should be considered requirements even if preparation for psychology research doesn't. Maybe not as many as what are required but still many remain. I'm glad I was required to learn my times tables, long division, and what grammar that I did. Likewise I'm glad that structural engineers, doctors, nurses, etc. are required to study most of what they are required even if it isn't exactly the right mix.
Third, unlike an academic researcher, most people aren't able to quickly digest the basics, most people aren't able to find topics that interest them, most people aren't able to figure out what basic knowledge they need to pursue more advanced topics that might interest them, and they aren't able to learn the material without guidance, handholding, and a lot of explanation.
"A progressive indoctrination and self-directed education are not the only choices."
Gray never say that those two things were the only choices. If I write a blog post comparing baseball to basketball, I am not implicitly denying the existence of soccer.
"I'm glad I was required to learn my times tables, long division, and what grammar that I did."
I'm not glad that I was required to learn those things. Long division in particular has proven to be completely useless. And even when school forced me to learn something useful (like reading), I would have learned it much more painlessly if I'd been given the freedom to learn in my own way.
"I'm glad that structural engineers, doctors, nurses, etc. are required to study most of what they are required"
If I recall correctly, Gray agrees with you. He's not against required tests for doctors and the like. He's just against it at the school-age level.
"most people aren't able to quickly digest the basics, most people aren't able to find topics that interest them, most people aren't able to figure out what basic knowledge they need to pursue more advanced topics that might interest them"
I work with children and I can attest that most children can do all these things.
"they aren't able to learn the material without guidance, handholding, and a lot of explanation."
Gray is not opposed to guidance so long as it's desired by the learner. It's forced guidance that he opposes (and even then he makes and exception for crucial safety information, like when the hunter-gatherer adults make sure their children know which mushrooms to avoid.)
For the most part I can't tell how much we disagree versus mostly agreeing and saying it differently. Then again, I'm pretty sure I disagree with Gray on the points that I stated. Anyway, there's one issue the two of us definitely disagree.
"I work with children and I can attest that most children can do all these things."
My k-12 education was with mostly blue collar kids. The minority from white collar households could have mostly handled this. I was not one who could have. Of the majority who were blue collar, most could not have.
In high school I was in a class of the more elite kids one quarter that we had to pick an author, read some of their books, and write about the author (more focus on what we learned about the author than the details of the books but I think either was accepted). A large minority struggled to complete a paper and a few did nothing. Maybe if they had been doing things more like this since grade school they would have done better. Probably better but acceptably better? I doubt it.