In high school, one of my gifted friends rejected coercive, formal schooling to take back the freedom to pursue his interests while playing. Observing him over several years, I formed a hypothesis while still in high school: that we humans learn best, and perhaps learn only, when we playfully follow our interests, whatever they are.

 

Despite his voracious reading and variety of passions (ranging from motocross bicycling to science fiction and design), none of the typical school subjects were offered in a way that held his attention. He still attended school and went through the motions all the way through graduation, pretending to be a student, even a good one at times, but emotionally and imaginatively he was absent.

 

A few decades later I found myself teaching at a small, private school. Preparing for an upcoming school year, my mind was swimming in ideas: ways to teach not only Euclidean geometry but immerse this teaching in its rich history as it culminated in the non-Euclidean geometries of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; to teach not only the contemporary concept of a function or how to find the zeros of a polynomial, but to immerse this teaching in how the idea of a function has changed over time or how the centuries of difficulties in finding zeros of polynomials led to the development of group theory and modern algebra.

 

And it was a waste: my students learned and retained little, even those who obediently worked hard. It was a waste because my student’s interests and aptitudes were different from mine. What business did I have, in any case, stealing their time and energy to impose my interests on them? Little I tried inspired them to learn what I was interested in and I see now that I was a fool to think much would work. I remembered the hypothesis I had formed in my apparently wiser youth.

 

Any school (or tutor or homeschool) with a curriculum imposed on its students must resort to coercion if the students are to exhibit the desired, conformist behavior required to display adequate understanding of the curriculum. And, so far as I can tell, that behavior – when it is there, as it often wasn’t for my high school friend – will display and only display superficial effects: for the majority of students, little genuine understanding of any subject occurs, only enough and long enough to, let’s say, get through a few exams, meaningless hurdles on the way to other stations in life.

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Take the case of mathematics specifically. In most high school mathematics courses and in much of college undergraduate mathematics, there is a lot of blind, formal rule following with little attention to the meanings, often multiple, underlying the formal notation and manipulation of symbols. There are at most shallow allusions to the multiple philosophies of mathematical activity or to mathematics’ rich, ambiguous, long histories among many cultures. There is little of the frustrating but, with persistence and resilience, meaningful and rewarding creative problem solving that characterizes authentic mathematical effort (or related efforts in engineering, urban planning, artistic work, architecture, you name it).

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And so, after finding myself teaching at a small, private school, I find myself a proponent of self-directed education (SDE), a mode of education in which students of all ages and aptitudes. playing together, are granted the responsibility to set their own goals and pursue them, individually as well as collectively. If we give them a chance from a young age, they can handle these responsibilities; in fact, how to handle these responsibilities is among the most important though difficult lessons they learn from a self-directed education.

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I encourage all people interested in education but who are unfamiliar with self-directed education to explore it. There are several organizations and professionals dedicated to providing information about it and support those pursuing it in some way. Below are links to a select few of them:

A helpful organization is the Alliance for Self-Directed Education (ASDE)

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I also appreciate much of the material on this website: Unschooling School

This organization supports more independence in childhood: Let Grow

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There is an extensive literature related to self-directed education (much of it relating schooling to broader social and political contexts), starting with Ivan Illich and John Holt in the twentieth century.

 

Here are more recent works I have found helpful:

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Peter Gray’s book Free to Learn as well as his Substack writings. Dr. Gray’s thinking and writing is rooted in his work as an evolutionary psychologist. I especially appreciate his emphasis on the value of free play for children (play that is not arranged or organized by adults) and its importance for all ages (yes that includes people aged 18 to 120).

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And here is a link to a type of school that has successfully implemented self-directed education for decades (starting in the late 1960s): Sudbury International: Sudbury International