Children come into the world with an instinctive drive to play, explore and learn. These drives are shaped by our evolutionary past to make us who we are. Schooling in contrast, suppress these drives through one-size fits all curricula and a pre-determined age-constrained progression. This begs the question, what would learning look like if the emphasis were on students driving the learning, setting their own goals, and working towards achieving them. This is the idea of self-directed learning.
As the Alliance for Self-Directed Learning states on their website:
Children, by nature, are intensely curious, playful, and sociable, beginning at birth or shortly after. A fourth drive, which we might call call planfulness — the drive to think about and make plans for the future — emerges in the early months and strengthens as children grow older. It is reasonable to refer to these drives as the educative drives. The biological foundations of these drives have been shaped by natural selection, over our evolutionary history, to serve the purpose of education.
Conventional, coercive schools quite deliberately suppress these drives, especially the first three of them, in the interest of promoting conformity and keeping children fixed to the school’s curriculum. Self-Directed Education, in contrast, operates by allowing these natural drives to flourish.
In this episode we will speak with Peter Gray and Bria Bloom, leaders in the area of self-directed education, (more about them below) working both at the level of theory and practice. We will explore the theories of human nature and evolution that drive this approach, and how schools often work counter to these impulses. We will discuss whether self-directed learning can work for all learners; what unschooling looks like and how it can function in the world we live in today. More about our guests below the video.
Our guests
Peter Gray is a research professor of psychology at Boston College who has conducted and published research in neuro-endocrinology, developmental psychology, anthropology, and education. He is author of an internationally acclaimed introductory psychology textbook, which brings an evolutionary perspective to the entire field. His recent research focuses on the roles of play in human evolution and how children educate themselves, through play and exploration, when they are free to do so. He has expanded on these ideas in his book, Free to Learn as well as in a regular blog called Freedom to Learn, for Psychology Today. He has written extensively about the biological foundations of self-directed education, as well as the harmful consequences of our current standard educational practices. He is a founding member of the Alliance for Self-Directed Education. Apart from his academic work, he enjoys long-distance bicycling, kayaking, back-woods skiing, and vegetable gardening.
Bria Bloom is a born and raised unschooler and has the daily joy of parenting a self-directed learner. She did not attend conventional schooling until she was 16, when she started attending community college, and then went on to design her own baccalaureate program. She also has an M.S. in early childhood education from Portland State University. Bria is a passionate advocate for Self-Directed Education (SDE), youth liberation, and partnership parenting, and channels this passion through her work with various communities. She is also the Executive Director of the Alliance for Self-Directed Education; a writer; a facilitator and founder of PDX Flying Squads, a community for self-directed young people in Portland, OR; co-founder of the Flying Squads Network; a parent support coach; and a co-organizer of the Deschooling Issa Thing meetup, a meetup for parents committed to liberation-minded education and parenting. Finally, she is a lover of dance, plant-based cooking, and bicycling. To check out more of her work and what she is involved in visit briabloom.com.