Empowered Kids, Liberated Parents: Why Children Are Healthier, Happier, and Achieve More When in Control of Their Own Lives and Educations

By Cassi Clausen and Aaron Browder

More than ever before, schools are training children to do little other than follow directions, conform to standards, and memorize facts they can now look up anytime. Meanwhile, the phenomena of helicopter parenting, packing resumes for college, and mountains of homework mean that children have less time than ever before in history to play and explore, resulting in record high levels of anxiety and depression for kids.

 

To be successful in the 21st century, our children will need to be independent, creative, and able to learn new things all the time. What if instead of piloting them, we allowed children to make choices and learn from their mistakes? What if we allowed them to follow their own passions? What if increasing independence is the way nature intended children to grow up?

 

Empowered Kids, Liberated Parents draws on contemporary research as well as the experiences of self-directed schools, like the one the authors founded in 2015, to persuade parents to grant their children more freedom. Along the way, it tackles many of the most important issues of our time, including safety, screen time, mental health, literacy and math, and character education.

 

About the Authors

 

Cassi Clausen is a mother of three with a Master's of Education from University of Missouri St. Louis and a Master's of Arts from University of London, Goldsmith's College. She taught at a private college prep high school for 3 years, and tutored in Spanish and English for about 8 years. Her introduction to the Summerhill school, the oldest democratic school in the world, in a college course led her to begin questioning conventional education. This culminated in her founding The Open School in Orange County, California.

 

Aaron joined The Open School's staff in its second year, bringing a Bachelor's degree in engineering physics and a professional background in software development. Having grown up in conventional schooling, Aaron came around to Self-Directed Education by reading almost every book on the subject, chronicling his process of discovery in his writing.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wonderfall Books
• Release date: Aug 17, 2022
• ISBN: 9798986124919

Book preview

EMPOWERED KIDS

LIBERATED PARENTS

Why Children Are Healthier, Happier, and Achieve More When in Control of Their Own Lives and Educations

Cassi Clausen and Aaron Browder

Copyright © 2022 by Cassi Clausen and Aaron Browder

Foreword copyright © 2022 by Peter Gray

Published by Wonderfall Books

2227 E Walnut Ave

Orange, CA 92867

ISBN: 979-8-9861249-0-2 (paperback)

ISBN: 979-8-9861249-1-9 (e-book)

To Daniel Greenberg, who taught us that there was a better way to educate children. You will be deeply missed.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Foreword

Introduction: What Is Autonomy?

1. Autonomy Was Made for Children

2. The Open School

3. Freedom, Not License

4. Six Building Blocks of Autonomy

5. Risk, Struggle, and Failure

6. Independence and Adventure

7. Technology

8. Mental Health and Learning

9. Environment Matters

10. Reading, Writing, and 'Rithmetic

11. Self-Actualization

Notes

Acknowledgments

Foreword

If you are starting to read this book, you are almost certainly interested in education. You may be a parent or guardian wondering about the best possible educational route for your child, or a teacher curious about alternatives to standard educational practices, or a concerned citizen wondering how young people might best prepare themselves for the independence, self-initiative, resilience, and creativity required for success in our rapidly changing world.

The first question to address in any discussion of education is: What is education? What are we talking about here?

For me, and for the authors of this book, education is not tests passed, courses completed, hoops leaped or crawled through, or diplomas obtained. It is something much bigger and more wonderful than that. Here’s the definition I favor: Education is everything a person learns that enables that person to live a satisfying, meaningful, and moral life. Isn’t that what we all want for our children? Isn’t that what governments should want for their citizens? Isn’t it clear that our standard schools fail to educate by this definition? How many people have higher diplomas but do not live satisfying, meaningful, or moral lives? Notice that by this definition, education is not simply a synonym for learning. It is that portion of what we learn that makes our life better and helps us make life better for those around us.

People think of our compulsory schools—with their forced curricula, age-segregated classrooms, tests, and judgments of passing and failing—as institutions for education, but they are not. If you examine the history of mass schooling, you will find that the schools that led to our schools today were started primarily to promote conformity and obedience.¹ Schools have evolved in some ways since their 17th-century origins, but in basic format they have remained the same. Today, as was true when mass schooling began, the only way you can pass in a standard school is to do what you are told to do, whether it makes sense to you or not, and almost the only way you can fail is by refraining from doing what you are told to do. Schools try to push everyone, regardless of the shape of their personality and interests, through the same narrow curricular tunnel. It doesn’t work. Everyone gets distorted, wounded, in the process.²

Education, by the definition used here, is different for every person. We aren’t all on the same life path. What is satisfying and meaningful to you may be quite different from what is satisfying and meaningful to me. That is wonderful. That’s what makes life interesting and makes an economy hum. We need people with different goals, tastes, insights, and skills. We should celebrate such diversity, not try to squeeze it out of people.

There are certain things that everyone, no matter where they are growing up, will want to learn to live a satisfying, meaningful, and moral life: how to walk on two legs and use their bodies in effective ways, speak their native language, get along with other people, regulate negative emotions (fear and anger) so as not to get swallowed up by them, make plans and follow through on them, take responsibility for themselves, and contribute to the community in which they live. There are also certain things that most people in the literate, numerate, and digital society that you and I inhabit will want to learn: how to read, write (or type), use numbers effectively, and manage the digital world. My research, and that of others, indicates that nearly everyone who grows up free to play, explore, and follow their own interests in our world learns all these things—in their own ways, at their own time—if they are growing up in an environment where all these are present and valued.³ But beyond these basics, people who are free diverge.

The metaphors used in support of government-promoted school reforms in recent decades—No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top—imply that education is like a race, with everyone on the same track, some ahead and some behind. But real education is not a race, and we are not all on the same track. I think of the paths of education as more like a tree or bush than a track. Some are on one branch, others on another. Even when on the same branch, some like to sprint while others like to take their time and absorb what they might miss if they hurried.

I’ve been studying Self-Directed Education for several decades. I use this term—Self-Directed Education (or SDE), capitalized—to refer to the deliberate choice of families to allow their children to educate themselves by following their own interests rather than an imposed, forced curriculum.⁴ In the United States there are two legal routes for SDE. One is that commonly called unschooling, in which the parents register the child for homeschooling and then allow the child to make their own educational choices rather than submit to an imposed curriculum. The other route is to enroll the child in a school—such as The Open School described in this book—that has been deliberately designed to support SDE. In either of these routes, the role of adults is not to tell children what they must or should learn but instead is to provide an environment that enables children to discover and pursue their own interests and, at the same time, learn to live harmoniously with others.

My research—including studies of grown unschoolers and the graduates of schools for SDE—shows that Self-Directed Education works.⁵ People who have taken this route are thriving as adults. They are in careers they enjoy. Those who have chosen to pursue formal higher education have had no particular difficulty getting into colleges and graduate programs. They take responsibility for themselves and contribute to their community. They are living satisfying, meaningful, and moral lives. If you are interested in the data supporting these contentions, you can find them in the references I’ve cited here.

But now, dig in and enjoy the tour that Cassi Clausen and Aaron Browder have laid out for you. They have anticipated well the questions that you most likely have if you are new to Self-Directed Education, and they have done a great job of addressing them.

Peter Gray, PhD

Research Professor, Department of Psychology, Boston College

Introduction

What Is Autonomy?

To say that children should have true autonomy, that they should be able to make decisions for themselves, is not a popular idea in our culture. To let children spend their time how they want? To dress how they want? To have privacy from their parents and teachers? To chart their own educational courses? Despite these practices having roots that go back decades, centuries, and even to the beginning of human history, it seems harder than ever today, in the 21st century, to find people who are willing to grant such simple freedoms to children. That’s why this book is more important today than it’s ever been, and hopefully ever will be again.

The authors of this book founded a school called The Open School, where students aged 5 to 18 have complete autonomy—they can do whatever they like with their time. In fact, students have the right to decide what to do with themselves, and this right is enshrined in our Law Book, which forbids students and even staff members from infringing on that right.

At The Open School, there are no bells, no homework, and no mandatory lessons. Learning comes from curiosity and desire. We believe this is the way children are biologically built to grow up, and we see that it works—autonomy was made for children. We wrote this book to show you that it works, so you don’t have to take our word for it. But first, what is autonomy?

Autonomy is made up of these six building blocks:

1. Bodily autonomy. Children should be able to decide what happens to their own bodies. This means physical punishment is out of the question, but also that children should get to decide how to dress, what to put in their bodies, and when to go outside, inside, onto the couch, or into the bathroom.

2. Autonomy of time. Children shouldn’t have to spend five hours a day in classrooms just because we want them to. They should be allowed to play, even if that means they do nothing else.

3. Autonomy of education. Children should be allowed to ask their own questions, and follow their curiosity where it leads them, even if it never leads them to trigonometry or Shakespeare.

4. Autonomy of thought. Children should be allowed to think, learn, and believe things that their parents and teachers don’t want them to. They should be allowed to hear all sides of a controversy and make their own judgments.

5. Privacy. Children should be able to think, say, and do things without their parents or teachers knowing. They should be allowed to have their secrets.

6. Property. Children should be allowed to own things, and to do what they like with those things, even if the things end up destroyed.

All of the above rights are granted, utterly without controversy, to all adults in our society. Now, you could argue that adults don’t really have autonomy of time, because they have to work. However, children don’t have to work, and in fact child labor has been outlawed. In a sense, the work of childhood is play, because play is how children are wired to learn.

Why, then, do we find it so unpalatable to grant these rights to children?

Children are not like adults. That much is true. Children are less knowledgeable, less worldwise, and more present-oriented than future-oriented. But we are a lot more alike than we are different. Here are a few ways, rarely acknowledged, that children are like adults:

Children have brains in their heads. They want what’s best for themselves. They want to be successful in life.* They want to be healthy and strong and live a long time. They may not have the experience and wisdom to know how their actions affect their future, but they can follow the advice of adults they trust. They can also follow their own senses and instincts, which are, for the most part, very reliable.

Children want to learn. They are always striving to understand what’s going on around them. They want to achieve mastery over their environment. They want to be able to do the things they see older people doing. They want to become competent, skilled, and knowledgeable.

Children want to have control over their lives. They want to be able to make decisions about which places they go, which people they see, and what they spend their time doing. They hate to be micromanaged. They especially want to have control over their own bodies. They feel anxious when they sense that matters are out of their control.

Children want to be safe. If they don’t trust someone, they’ll avoid them. If something dangerous is in their environment, they’ll try to stay away. They prefer to avoid serious injuries, though they’re usually not too worried about bumps and scrapes. They might howl like they’re dying when they get a minor scrape, but they feel better after a minute and then they’re right back to the behavior that got them hurt. This is not an expression of idiocy, but an acceptance that momentary pain is often a part of the learning process. Kids want to stay alive just as much as we want them to stay alive.

Children have their own values. Should I be a doctor or an artist? A conservative or a liberal? A Christian or a Buddhist? Which should I prioritize: family or career? Exercise or study? Making money or making the world a better place? These are all questions that each person must answer. We can’t answer any of them for our children, much as we would like to.

Before moving on, we’d like to offer a disclaimer: Much of the guidance in this book does not apply to children with severe disabilities. While all children can benefit from autonomy, it may look a little different in practice for children with different abilities.

∗

Even if children are less worldwise than adults, they still deserve, need, and can make good use of autonomy. They might need to ask for directions every once in a while, but we can count on them to listen to adults they trust—that is, if those adults are not full of hot air, which adults often are.

Autonomy was made for children. Now, let’s get to that proof we promised you.

1

Autonomy Was Made for Children

Marc had always been a good kid. He loved learning, and couldn’t wait to get to school in the morning. Outgoing and friendly, he would introduce himself to every neighbor in the neighborhood each time his family moved. He enjoyed pleasing others, and this made him an ideal student.

Things began to change for Marc when he started middle school. His spark for learning seemed to fade as classwork became more focused on preparation for college and homework piled up in mountains. He became withdrawn, avoiding other kids at school and disengaging from his family at home. By the end of his middle school years, he was miserable. From the outside you may not have known