Helping The Butterfly Hatch: Book One - How Does Self-Directed Education Work, and Why?

By Je'anna L Clements

A must-read for parents, educators and education policy-makers. Education is transforming rapidly at this time and Self-Directed Education is one of the fastest growing alternatives - for good reason.

If you have wondered why so many young people lose their love of learning, develop math/s or reading 'allergies', suffer from school stress, exam anxiety or learning difficulties, and wished for a way to bring learning back to its place as one of the great joys of life - this book is the AHA you have been waiting for.

Je'anna L Clements helps readers understand exactly what this kind of education involves, why it works so well, and what is needed in order to optimise it. This is the first book in the Helping The Butterfly Hatch series, and acts as a primary text for the HtBH international Self-Directed Education facilitator development program.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Je'anna L Clements
• Release date: Jun 23, 2020
• ISBN: 9780463712375

Je'anna L Clements

Je'anna L Clements is an advocate for young people's rights, a writer, a mother of a teen and a tween who have both self-educated since birth, and a founding member of Riverstone Village, Africa's first Sudbury-inspired learning community. She writes articles and e-books on alternative education including Help! My Kid Hates School! and the Helping The Butterfly Hatch series of books on Self-Directed Education facilitation. Book One - How Does Self-Directed Education Work, and Why? and Book Two - How Can We Best Support Young People In SDE are available as e-books, and more volumes in the series as well as print versions are forthcoming .

Book preview

Helping The Butterfly Hatch BOOK 1

How Does Self-Directed Education Work, and Why?

By Je’anna L Clements

Copyright 2020 Je’anna L Clements

Published by Je’anna L Clements at Smashwords

In association with ALLI asbl (www.alliasbl.lu) and FHREE (www.fhree.org)

Cover illustration by Béo

Smashwords License Statement

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each reader. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please visit your favorite ebook retailer to purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Acknowledgements

My biggest thanks goes to Katy Zago at ALLI asbl for braving the technical things that daunt me, and making it possible to publish these as e-books, and to Max Sauber for making it possible to go to print! Of course there are also many others who helped to bring these books into being. I am grateful for good-hearted company on this publishing road from Derry Hannam, and all of my FHREE collaborators including the Phoenix Education trust folks, as well as his-eloquence Bertrand Stern, Tasha Gosset, Peter Hartkamp, Derek Sheppard, Bria Bloom, Jimmy Trevor. To Joel for the computer used to write it. To Celani for the time. To all of the Helping The Butterfly Hatch facilitators for whom this material was created – thank you ALL for helping to shape this series – too many names to list, but you know who you are. Thanks to Peter Gray for conceptual foundations, feedback and encouragement; and to Sidney Morris for making sure the book bus kept on rolling. To Jill Kruger and Andrew Swart, thank you for my Being, and thanks to Pam Roux and Kevin Heydenrych for my Becoming. To my darling André Clements for keeping me afloat and for this cover design.To the young people who call me mother and all of the other Riverstone kids who trained me in the first place, and Thalia Prigge without whom much of this journey might not have happened. To Daniel Greenberg and A.S. Neill for the ancestral DNA and maps for these roads less travelled. Finally, to the memory of my radical Uncle Bob who suggested to me that I start a children's revolution, back when I was far too young and oppressed to have any idea what he meant.

"Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth learning can be taught." - Oscar Wilde

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"Marginalized groups have been learning the world for a long time, and without school. Before and throughout this colonialist era, it is the way we learned to manage our food systems and organize communities. It is the way we learned to predict weather and navigate seas. It is the way we learned transportation routes and our stories. It is the way we learned ourselves and others. It is the way we learned who the oppressors really were, despite what they told us about themselves in their schools.

It is the way we learned to survive under Western colonialism and imperialism. And it is the way we will thrive beyond it." - Dr. Kelly Limes-Taylor Henderson, Ours First.

***

"Learning is natural, school is optional." - Kenneth Danford, North Star

***

About the Author

Mother, writer, and rights advocate Je'anna Clements (Psych.Hons) stepped away from completing her conventional M.Ed when she realised that no existing institution could support her in what she needed to learn. The young people who call her mother (aged 10 and 15 at the time of writing) have self-educated since birth. From 2007-2016 she initiated a series of experimental alternative education startups, culminating in the founding of Riverstone Village, South Africa's first Sudbury-inspired SDE community, in 2017. For over a decade she has explored, curated and distilled Self-Directed Education literature, live discourse and practice, more recently sharing her insights with other adults intent on becoming SDE facilitators. The Helping The Butterfly Hatch series of books has grown out of material she created to support the learning journeys of more than 50 SDE facilitators hailing from 5 continents. Her work has been published by Save The Children (Sweden), the Children,Youth and Environments (CYE) journal (Univ. Colorado, USA), and Tipping Points magazine (Alliance for Self-Directed Education) as well as a variety of online and print newspapers and magazines. She is also the author of Help! My Kid Hates School (2017) also available through most e-book retailers, and What if School Creates Dyslexia? (forthcoming).

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface

INTRODUCTION

The Evidence

Exploring FHREE

Part 1 – What FHREE SDE Is and Is Not

1.1 The learning cycle

1.2 The Boundaries of SDE

1.2.1 What is the definition of SDE?

1.2.2 How Does SDE Fit into the Educational Landscape?

1.3 What Else Sets SDE Apart?

No Ageism

Product and Process

Meta Skills vs Content

"Structure" in SDE

A) Intrinsic Structure

B) Emergent Structure

C) Self-Generated Structure

D) Co-created Structure

E) Adopted Structure

F) Imported Structure

G) Imposed Structure

A Note On ‘Quitting’

A Final Note on Structure vs Resources

1.4 Some Other Common Distinguishing Characteristics of SDE Environments

1.4.1 Life Learning vs Subjects

1.4.2 Protagonist vs Recipient - the Banking model

1.4.3 Empowerment vs Indoctrination

1.4.4 Intentions vs Goals

1.4.5 Organic learning patterns vs Synthetic learning patterns

1.4.6 Conscious and unconscious (holistic) vs conscious only (shallow) learning

1.4.7 Play vs Work

1.4.8 Cultural innovation vs cultural perpetuation

1.4.9 Exploratory Application vs Evaluation

1.4.10 Self-Directed vs Other Directed

1.4.11 Self Actualisation vs Academia

1.4.12 Intuition and Emotion vs only Logic and Thought

1.4.13 Freedom and Responsibility vs Obedience and License

1.4.14 Age integration/mixing vs Age segregation

1.4.15 Social interaction vs Social restriction

1.4.16 Conflict resolution vs dealing with ‘Bullying’

1.4.17 Participatory democracy vs Hierarchy

1.4.18 Social Justice, diversity, equity

1.4.19 Screen Time

1.4.20 Basic Education

1.4.21 Supervision

1.4.22 Special Needs, Mental Health, and Medicating Children

1.4.23 A Meta-Approach vs Just Another Alternative Approach

1.4.24 FHREE - Full Human Rights Experience Education

Immersion vs Coercion: (My) Final Word on What SDE Is, and Is Not

Part 2 – What does SDE need in order to Work and Why?

2.1 Original Human Education Also Fulfils Human Rights

2.2 - Feeling Safe Enough to Learn: Porges and Polyvagal theory

2.3 Motivation: Deci and Ryan and Self Determination Theory

Fundamental Needs That Impact Motivation

Different Kinds of Motivation

Control is No Longer an Option

Autonomy Support Not Neglect

Freedom Not License

2.4 Peak Experiences and Happiness: Csikszentmihalyi and Flow

2.5 Horizontal vs Vertical Culture

No, it’s not just your heritage!

Part 3 – Consent

3.1 Coercive Education (CE) vs Self-Directed Education (SDE): The Difference Is Consent

A) SDE Default - Child Takes, Facilitator (and Community) Allows

Ai) Shadow Taking - Giving Children License Instead of Freedom

B) SDE Secondary position: Facilitator Serves, Child Accepts

Bi) Shadow Service - Rescuer / Do-Gooder

Bii) Shadow Taking - Perpetrator / Thief

Biii) Some common adult needs that get met through Taking without Consent, disguised as Service, in Education

C) SDE Tertiary position: Child Serves, Facilitator (or Community) Accepts

D) SDE Fourth position: Facilitator (or Community) Takes, Child Allows

3.2 Conditions that void ‘consent’

3.3 Consent, not the label, makes the difference between CE and SDE

Not Final Word

Part 4 – Play

4.1 The Role Of Play in SDE

The Decline of Play, by Dr. Peter Gray

PDep-20: The Scariest Emerging Side-Effect of Covid-19 is Not What You Might Think

The Animal Hospital, by Wendy Lement

The Results of Freedom, by Mimsy Sadolfsky

Daniel Greenberg on Play from Worlds in Creation

4.2 Play as a Language

Original Play with O. Fred Donaldson

Attachment Play by Aletha Solter

Playful Parenting by Lawrence Cohen

4.3 Play Outdoors and In Nature

Part 5 – In Closing

Cognitive Dissonance

What you can do

Appendix

Appendix 1: SDE and the UNCRC

The Child’s Right To Education - Exploring the Relationship between SDE and the UNCRC: Part 1: The Good News

SDE and the UNCRC Part 2: Education as 'Compulsory'

Three Different Agendas for Making Education Compulsory

Different Interpretations of ‘Compulsory’

The Result of Misinterpreting the Word Compulsory

Misinterpreting The Word Compulsory Unravels Children’s Rights

We Need to Raise Awareness of SDE

Appendix 2: Further Reading

Appendix 3: Glossary

Preface

"In 50 years, I predict, today's approach to education will be seen by many if not most educators as a barbaric remnant of the past. People will wonder why the world took so long to come to grips with such a simple and self-evident idea as that upon which the Sudbury Valley School is founded: Children educate themselves; we don't have to do it for them." - Dr. Peter Gray

In this book, we will explore what Self-Directed Education (SDE) is and is not, some understanding of how it works, and some explanations of why. In Part 1 we will first look at what is meant by Self-Directed Education and distinguish it from other educational approaches. In Parts 2, 3 and 4 we will look at what underpins SDE in terms of human nature, motivation, and culture - what is needed in order to make it work.

Before we begin, it is important to disambiguate the term ‘self-directed learning’ from Self-Directed Education (SDE), and FHREE.

The phrase 'self-directed learning' has been used to mean anything from forcing kids to do homework without help, to letting them choose their own projects through which to tackle compulsory learning goals.

The second term, Self-Directed Education (SDE), was chosen by Dr. Peter Gray to distinguish what humans naturally do, from the token freedoms of ‘self-directed learning’. SDE is consent-based education, and involves learning through life experience and self-chosen activities that may or may not have been chosen for their 'educational' value.

Unfortunately there are also people now using the phrase 'self-directed education' to mean giving young people choices between pre-defined options in the classroom. As a 14 year old who is part of the Riverstone Village community recently pointed out, 'Choice is not the same as Freedom.'

The third term, FHREE is an acronym some of our young people and staff at Riverstone Village in South Africa work-shopped to differentiate what we do even further – it stands for Full Human Rights-Experience Education.

It means that young people get a full lived experience of all their human rights including the rights to freedom of association and expression, play, etc – all of the rights that get compromised in Coercive Education (CE, the current global norm for under 18s). It also means they get to make all their own educational decisions including decisions that shape the educational environments they access. In some FHREE SDE this even means being decision-makers at the administrative level of the project such as staff hire-and-fire, spending, etc. It is education by young people for themselves with adult assistance on young people's terms.

Young people in FHREE SDE have the same amount of power and responsibility as adults have in their adult education. (You need a court order relating to violence towards other people to force an adult to learn something against their will.)

They are 100% in charge of their own educational choices and how they spend their time, energy and attention. This leads to relatively little 'course' and 'instruction' type learning, and this is always and only at the young person's request. No adult tries to get kids to learn stuff 'for their own good'. Most learning takes place through life experience and activities chosen from innate curiosity, intrinsic motivation, and choices rooted in personally meaningful self-development strategies.

This means, for example, that young people spend a lot of time playing, and many learn to read later than expected in CE (the average appears to be 8.5yrs with a span from 2yrs into the mid teens), however it also appears to lead to zero ultimate illiteracy including zero reading problems for 'dyslexic' kids (although spelling issues seem to remain for some, regardless of whether they go the CE and remedial route or SDE).

In many FHREE communities even rules and processes are collaboratively decided in a dynamic way, so the governance and running of the community in itself is a major learning area.

So in practice, on any given day, young people arrive when they arrive and leave when they leave (within the open hours) with attendance governed only by whatever rules that particular community has currently agreed on (and in many communities, these can be changed.)

They then live their day in a natural way, governed only by the rules as above. So, they can sleep all day, climb trees all day, have stimulating conversations all day, watch YouTube or play computer games all day, organise activities with others, do activities on their own, do independent research on topics of interest, ask for staff help as needed, or arrange coaching, mentoring, or formal instruction on anything. The only time their choices are challenged are when safety is an issue, when they impact other people or the space (including animals and the natural environment) or equipment, or the sustainability of the community.

Remembering that every FHREE SDE environment will look unique, and there is no typical day, here are a couple of contrasting snapshots from Riverstone Village to offer a glimpse of what this can look like in practice:

We have one fifteen year old boy who spends the bulk of his time doing woodwork and metalwork, (designing and building bellows etc himself) making stop motion movies with hundreds of photos involved, creating miniature as well as full-sized props and costumes, and composing original piano music. His wooden swords go for good prices on our in-house markets - many are accurate replicas of real historical designs that he researches; he also makes and sells delicious oat crunchies. His fourteen year old best friend spends most of his time studying game design, screenwriting and story construction, learning 3D digital modelling, coding, advanced physics and maths (such as, recently, calculating the relative force of gravity at various turns of a rollercoaster ride). At our markets he sells home-made sweets. He used to do sleight-of-hand magic shows and played with crypto-currency trading, but currently has lost interest in both. Together, they do a bit of parkour, discuss books and movies, and play poker, chess, and online games like Rocket League and Mordhau. They're both 'lifers' (never set foot in a CE school) and so neither was formally 'taught' to read (though of course they had access to literate adults to ask questions as needed) and neither did any 'primary school' level maths but both now read adult-level fantasy and sci-fi series, and can (with help from staff and You Tube tutorials as needed) manage all the calculations necessary for their relative pursuits.

We have an