#83. Self-Directed Education: What Is It and How Does It Work?
Here I introduce the topic of our July 12, 2025 Zoom meeting for paid subscribers.
Dear friends,
In the poll to which I invited paid subscribers a week ago, the top choice of topic for our next online meeting was: Self-Directed Education. What is it? How does it work? For whom does it work? We will hold that meeting on Saturday, July 12, 2:00 pm U.S. Eastern time. This will be an “ask me anything about…” meeting. I will give a brief introduction to the topic and then open it up to your questions and thoughts. To register you will need the link that is available at the bottom of this letter, in the portion available only to paid subscribers.
As an introduction to the topic, I am pasting in an essay I wrote about Self-Directed Education for a special issue of the open-access journal On the Horizon devoted to Self-Directed Education.
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What is self-directed education and why is now the time for it to take wings?
I am honored to have been invited to write a brief opening essay on Self-Directed Education, as part of an introduction to this special issue. I have for many years been studying this approach to education and have published articles about its success in hunter-gatherer bands, at democratic schools and in homeschooling families that adopt this approach (e.g. Gray and Chanoff, 1986; Gray, 2012; Gray and Riley, 2013; Gray and Riley, 2015; Riley and Gray, 2015; Gray, 2016; Gray, Riley and Curry-Knight, 2021; Gray, 2023a). Here I will limit myself to offering a definition of SDE, a brief description of its biological basis and reasons why I believe it is the educational wave of the future.
Definition
To define Self-Directed Education, we must start with a definition of education. In common parlance, people often equate education with schooling, but that is a rather shallow way to think of education. Here is a more meaningful definition: Education is everything a person learns that enables that person to live a satisfying, meaningful and moral life.
Is that not what we all want from any educational system? Is that not what every parent wants (or should want) for their children and what every nation wants (or should want) for their citizenry? It is easy to look around and see that this definition of education is not captured by equating education with schooling. We all know people who have had lots of schooling and are not well educated by this definition, and we also know people who have had little schooling and are beautifully educated.
Given this definition of education, I and the Alliance for Self-Directed Education define self-directed education (with small letters) as education that derives from the self-chosen activities and life experiences of the person being educated, whether or not those activities were chosen deliberately for the purpose of education. Self-directed education can include organized classes or lessons if freely chosen by the learner, but most self-directed education does not occur that way. Most of it comes from everyday life as people pursue their own interests and learn along the way. Self-directed education can be contrasted to imposed schooling, which is forced upon individuals regardless of their desire for it and is motivated by systems of rewards and punishments as occurs in conventional schools.
Everyone is involved every day in self-directed education. It can’t be helped. We are all natural learners, always learning as we are doing. We learn because we are curious, because we need to know, and as a side effect of everything we do. Some of that learning contributes to our education, as defined above.
Now, finally, what is Self-Directed Education (capitalized)? I and the Alliance for Self-Directed Education define it as the educational approach that deliberately avoids imposed education and thereby relies entirely on self-directed education. Children of school age who are not engaged in imposed schooling and for whom all their education is of the self-directed variety are said to be pursuing Self-Directed Education (SDE).
In the United States and many other countries, there are two legal means to pursue SDE. One is through a certified school designed specifically for SDE, where there is no imposed curriculum or testing but ample opportunity to find and pursue one’s own interests. You will read about such schools in the articles to follow in this special issue. The other is through the homeschooling approach commonly called unschooling, where parents help their child to discover and pursue the child’s own interests. For more on this distinction and a review of research pertaining to each of these approaches, see Gray (2023a).
Biological foundations for self-directed education
Proponents of SDE come to it from various perspectives. Many come from a perspective focusing on democratic values. Imposed education always involves a violation of what most democratic thinkers regard as basic human rights – the rights of self-determination, free assembly and free speech, among others. If children can become well educated without coercion, then it would seem to be immoral to subject them to coercive methods.
I come to SDE partly from that perspective but even more from the perspective of evolutionary biology. I see imposed education as not only morally wrong but ineffective because it ignores and overrides children’s biologically natural ways of educating themselves and, in many, develops a distaste for learning that can interfere with a child’s natural zest for life and the learning that comes with life. My research into child development and SDE has led me to identify at least five basic drives or instincts in children, shaped by natural selection to serve the function of education (Gray, 2016). These are:
Curiosity. Children are naturally curious and as they grow from infancy to toddlerhood, to middle childhood, to adolescence, they naturally explore ever broader ranges of their world.
Playfulness. While curiosity motivates children to seek new knowledge and understanding, the drive to play motivates them to practice new skills and use those skills creatively. Children everywhere, when they are free to do so and have plenty of playmates, spend enormous amounts of time every day playing. They play to have fun and not deliberately to educate themselves, but education is the side effect. They play at the full range of skills that are crucial to their long-term survival and well-being. They play with language, with imagination, with building things and they play games with rules. In this way, they become skilled in language, hypothetical reasoning, construction and creating and following rules. Above all, they play with other children and that is how they learn to negotiate, compromise, cooperate, make friends and, in general, live well as social beings. Children are also primed by natural selection to look around and play at the activities that are most valued by the culture in which they are developing.
Communicativeness. Children instinctively connect with other people of all ages and learn from them. They watch what others do and when they acquire language, they listen to what others say. The ability to learn from others and share information and ideas with others linguistically is the characteristic that most distinguishes us from other animals. Everyday conversation is a major highway of SDE.
Willfulness. Children come into the world with a drive to take charge of their own lives. Their drive to connect with others is balanced by their corresponding drive for independence. This healthy drive, when allowed to develop appropriately, creates a continuing sense of personal responsibility and capacity for self-direction.
Planfulness (not in the dictionary, but you know what it means). We, far more than any other species, have the capacity to think ahead. We do not just react to immediate conditions; we make plans and follow through on them. Even little children in their play make plans. They think about what they will do and then they do it. As children grow older, their plans become larger and they think further ahead. This is the drive that leads self-directed learners to think about their life goals and to deliberately seek out the knowledge and practice the skills needed to achieve those goals.
Forced education runs counter to and suppresses these biological self-educative drives. In school, children’s natural curiosity, playfulness, communicativeness, willfulness and self-directed planning are necessarily suppressed, all for the sake of class order and the pursuit of the imposed curriculum. Many children learn in school that their own questions, interests and plans do not count and that learning is tedious, not play. They learn for the test, not for life, so most of the learning is shallow and lost within months if not days.
Four reasons for predicting an acceleration of SDE over coming years
From an evolutionary perspective, the era of forced schooling is an unfortunate blip in human history. Throughout almost all human biological history all education was self-directed. It was only about 350 years ago (mid to late 17th century) that any significant number of children anywhere were required to go to school. Those early schools were Protestant-run, designed for biblical indoctrination and obedience training. As states and nations took over the schools and as agrarian economies became industrial economies, the schools persisted and expanded, with secular indoctrination and the continuation of the sort of obedience training and suppression of will demanded by factory work. Now we are in the information age, but we are still stuck with a model of schooling focusing on memorization of dogma and obedience to authority.
It is frustrating to know that deep thinkers and innovators have, throughout the era of coercive schooling, been writing about its harm and demonstrating the success of SDE, yet most people continue with coercion. You may think I am overoptimistic (I have been accused of that), but here are four reasons why I think things are beginning to change and that the change will accelerate.
1. Increased toxicity of standard schooling
Recent decades have seen increases in the amount of time children are required to spend at school, increases in homework, increases in pressure for high grades, declines in what used to be the more enjoyable aspects of school and ever more focus on one-right-answer tests, with consequent loss of opportunities for thought, creativity, and fun. More than ever before, at least in the USA, children are suffering psychologically because of school pressures (see Gray, 2023b, 2024). Ever more parents are removing their children from school for homeschooling because of the school-induced suffering they see in their children. Homeschooling is the major gateway to SDE.
2. Increased evidence that SDE works
As ever more families are adopting SDE for their children, or something approximating it in what is often called “relaxed homeschooling,” ever more families are becoming aware of it and its success. Also, with time, an increasing amount of systematic research has documented the success of SDE. As these trends continue, SDE will continue to become better known and understood and will no longer seem strange or particularly risky.
3. Increased ease of pursuing SDE
The Internet has brought the world’s knowledge to everyone who has a computer and an Internet connection. The days when people had to go to some special building or campus to seek knowledge are gone. Self-directed learners can readily pursue any questions that interest them. They can hear from the world’s experts and engage in online discussions worldwide with others who share their interests. Moreover, as more people pursue SDE, it becomes easier in any given community to find other SDE families and to bring learners together for all sorts of play and exploration. Learning centers to facilitate SDE are already popping up all over the world where they are allowed (and in some places where they are not allowed).
4. Fit of SDE with the modern economy
Robots, search engines and now AI have replaced the need for people to do routine, tedious tasks or to memorize and regurgitate lots of information. The economy needs people who think critically and creatively, innovate, have social skills and bring a passionate sense of purpose to the workplace. These are the skills continuously honed by SDE and suppressed by coercive schooling. An increasing percentage of the population are beginning to realize this.
One line of evidence that SDE is maturing, beyond a seemingly radical idea to an accepted practice with various ways and reasons for its pursuit, is found in this special issue of On the Horizon. Read on and enjoy!
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If you would like to see and even download any of my academic articles on SDE and other topics, you can find them at my personal website.
The rest of this letter, which includes the link necessary to register for the Zoom meeting, is open to paid subscribers only. You can unlock the rest and join the meeting by becoming a paid subscriber now.
With respect and best wishes,
Peter