Self-directed learning: How ‘unschoolers’ control their education | Kerry McDonald

The industrial style of conventional mass schooling that we have might have fit in the rot with the rise of the Industrial Revolution as we were training workers to work in factories and to be a part of this industrial workspace. But now in the 21st century, we don't need robots; we have robots. What we need are those human differentiators. What is it that makes humans different from robots? Those are things like curiosity, ingenuity, entrepreneurial spirit, and creativity. Those are the things that separate humans from robots, and those are the kinds of skills and qualities that we need to cultivate.

The good news is that we don't have to create a curriculum to teach kids to be curious or creative. We don't have to make this an objective and a lesson plan. We simply have to stop crushing the creativity out of children with a coercive system of schooling and instead embrace unschooling. This will facilitate these natural human qualities and enable people to grow up and be very successful in what is a very ambiguous, volatile, and uncertain world.

In fact, the World Economic Forum recently reported that some of the most in-demand skill sets and occupations today didn't exist five or ten years ago. So how can we think that this kind of factory model of schooling, which originated in the nineteenth century, is capable of meeting this uncertain future of the 21st century innovation era?

Unschooling really begins with this premise that humans are naturally curious and that we have these inner drives to explore, discover, and synthesize our world. As my colleague Peter Gray, who wrote the foreword to my book "Unschooled," says—he's a psychology professor at Boston College—these drives turn themselves off when a child turns five or six years old. We turn them off with a coercive system of schooling.

The idea with unschooling and self-directed education, more broadly, is let's just not turn off those natural drives for learning and curiosity that all humans naturally possess. Let's facilitate the expansion of that curiosity and that discovery by supporting a child's inner drive to learn, discover, and do.

There's no typical day for a self-directed learner; it really depends on the child's interests, the family's needs and realities, and the setting in which unschooling is occurring. It could be a version of homeschooling that focuses on freedom, autonomy, and self-direction, in which the child will be taking classes or participating in activities that are meaningful to that child on any given day, using the abundant resources of the community around them.

Some unschoolers attend a self-directed learning center or self-directed school, like the Sudbury model of education, where they attend a setting that's outside of their home and, again, are able to do the same kinds of things: take classes if they want to, participate in activities that are meaningful to them, receive mentoring, and be able to shadow other adults and peers, learning from the environment.

The role of the adults in unschooling is to provide these resources and opportunities and to facilitate a child's self-directed learning, but to do that without coercion. So nothing is required of the child. It's not that now we're going to sit down and do math for 45 minutes or that we're going to read this particular history book for 45 minutes. It's really about supporting those natural drives.

In that process, the research shows that young people, again because they're naturally curious, are eager to explore these other topics and ideas and become well-rounded, highly educated individuals. Young people will brainstorm different topics for classes that they'd like to take or hands-on experimentation that they'd like to do in collaboration with peers and mentors. Then the mentors, the adults in the space, will often put together classes based on where those interests lie, and those classes will be offered.

A key feature of unschooling is, again, this idea that you're not required; you're not mandated to do those classes. Typically, in most of these spaces, there may be classes being offered again, tied to suggestions made by the young people. But you also have a welcoming space for young people who don't want to do those classes. So you might have kids building a fort or working in a kind of makerspace environment, or you might have a group working on creating a play. There will be adult mentors there to help and facilitate but not necessarily to direct the actions of those young people.

So it may, at first glance, seem like how could you possibly organize all of these young people who are not in a kind of standard classroom setting? Yet the reality is when you give people freedom and autonomy, they will respect that and sort of take responsibility for that and kind of find their own way in that space.