Raising self-responsible learners

“All men who have turned out worth anything have had the chief hand in their own education.”

—Sir Walter Scott

Note: I do not consider myself an education “expert”. I have my own personal experiences (along with some reading and study), and my comments reflect these experiences. And while I’m certainly not an expert on the topic of education in general, I believe I am an expert on my own family, just as you are on yours. 🙂

Here in our home, we recently returned to our “school year” schedule. (We still take a summer break, just as we did before we discovered the delights of homeschooling and our older child was a public school student.) Our children resumed the daily routines that define ‘school’ for us, and I also returned to a more structured daily routine in order to continue my own education and growth. My husband’s ongoing dedication to his twin missions of building a strong family and building the strength of his vocation enable us to pursue this lifestyle together. (Thank you, hubby! I love you.)

One of our intentional home education goals is to raise self-responsible learners. In this post, I’ll share how we are creating an environment designed to help our children love learning and grow into students who are invested in the idea that their education is their own responsibility. I am suggesting that building self-responsible learners is a valuable goal worth the considerable effort it takes to create this kind of environment. In a future blog post, I’ll do my best to unpack this notion of environment and explain what it means in this context.

In 2011, we chose to opt out of the public school system. And in the current educational environment of common core standards and intense academic testing for even the youngest school students, my perspective may seem radical. I’m aware. I don’t really think of myself or our family as ‘radical’ but I do think we are choosing to live in ways that are counter-cultural. It works for us.

Please understand: I’m not suggesting anyone is doing it wrong. I’m just sharing what we do, because it seems to be right for us. And when things start to feel “off” or like they aren’t working, we will evaluate again, as we have done in the past, and look for missing pieces or areas we need to learn about as parents. We’ll educate ourselves, listen for guidance and promptings, and attempt to make improvements. The process will continue as long as we are willing to participate in it.

So, back to the start. I believe we have forgotten, as a society, the true nature of a child. We have chosen to devalue the foundational, developmental needs of children in favor of an emphasis on a set of arbitrary and narrowly-defined definitions of “success” and “achievement” and a belief (which seems quite radical to me) that children should conform themselves to these adult definitions of achievement, which seem to be at odds with their true nature.

In our home, we work to embrace the idea that building self-responsible learners is a valid, long-term goal that can inform our choices in the here and now. Given the time and space, and coupled with a big picture view of the goals and purpose of self-responsible learning, a young person can find meaning in their pursuit of education, rather than feeling it is meaningless. (“When will I ever use this in real life?”) They can feel motivated by their own interest, which can be allowed to naturally come about when the time is right, rather than feeling it has been foisted upon them without any concern for whether they are interested in it, or not. Can a child, who is developing naturally and on the timeline that is unique and specific to that particular individual human being ever actually be “behind”?

Learning how to learn

Self-responsible learners are often referred to as “self-educated” people. The New Oxford American Dictionary defines “self-educated” as “educated largely through one’s own efforts, rather than by formal instruction.” I would take this a step further, for our purposes, and say that I tend to agree with lifelong learners like Louis L’Amour and Isaac Asimov, who suggest that all education is actually self-education. In other words, no one can “educate” another person in a meaningful, lasting way, unless that person decides to be educated and to participate in the process. 

So, the “self” aspect of self-education relates to the idea of a person taking responsibility for their own educational choices and activities. It doesn’t necessarily mean a person does it all by him or herself, without using materials created by others or without receiving any instruction or guidance from other people. The self-educator may take a course or use a video or read a book someone else has written. They may talk to others about what they are learning to discover what others know. They may even do assignments requested by a mentor or prepare a presentation to share with others. What makes all of this “self-education” is that the student has had the opportunity to exercise agency in his or her educational choices.

“Do not train a child to learn by force or harshness; but direct them to it by what amuses their minds, so that you may be better able to discover with accuracy the peculiar bent of the genius of each.”

—Plato

Freedom and responsibility

The truly beautiful thing about raising self-responsible learners is that the pursuit of it can be such a blessing to an entire family. In our home, a desire to nurture each person’s love for learning has led us to the realization that each one of us must have the ability to choose for ourselves. Having the ability to choose for ourselves builds the character of each family member and teaches us all to appreciate our freedom and take responsibility for our own learning. When a family is committed to the ideal of self-education, and each member—regardless of age—is permitted to have preferences that are taken seriously by the other members of the family, children and adults alike can experience the freedom to take on the responsibility of getting an education.

Creating an environment that fosters self-education also releases home educating parents from acting as academic task-masters. Relationships feel better. Hearts are opened as parents let go of external pressures and simply go about the business of loving their children and creating an environment that helps them to know they are safe, secure and free to participate in the educational process. It makes learning come alive and helps children thrive right where they are, by allowing them to personalize their learning opportunities (with mom and dad’s help) so that they can engage and grow.

Of course, this process of choosing will look quite different from one child to another. It will also be different for children of different ages. And, it has been of primary importance in our family to ask ourselves some questions along the way, and evaluate our answers, looking for clues in the underlying emotions or subconscious, unexamined beliefs informing them. Questions like, “What is the work of young children?” and “What is the parent’s role in a child’s education?” and “How do parents influence the child’s choices without removing his or her ability to exercise agency?” and “Is the child’s agency really more important than what a curriculum or school or state says a child should learn by certain ages?”

We weren’t ready to consider questions like these when we first began homeschooling. In our early days of home education, we focused on things like curriculum and mom-created daily checklists. (But that’s a story for another post…) If someone had expressed the ideas I’m sharing here today, I don’t think I would have been ready to hear them. Maybe this is where you are right now. You may not be ready to consider these kinds of questions. You may be thinking this all sounds very nice, but there’s something bothering you about it. It just doesn’t sound real. Perhaps if we were having a face to face conversation right now, you might say:

“But children won’t voluntarily work at learning things on a regular basis. Parents and teachers have to make them do it, or else it just won’t happen.”

While I’m certainly no expert in child development, or even in the broad topic of educational methodologies, I do have a significant amount of personal experience in testing the validity of this theory. Isn’t there a need to require children to learn the things that adults believe they should learn? I believed in this idea in the early days of our homeschooling journey. But since then, as I labored under this belief at first and then began considering the possibility that this statement isn’t actually as true as I once assumed, I started acting as if it might not be true. When I did that, remarkable things began to happen.

Seeing more clearly

The process of unlearning old ideas (about the need for parent-directed or teacher-directed learning choices and timelines), and learning new ideas (about the possibility and actual necessity of learner-directed choices and timelines) has helped me to see my children more clearly. I have learned to recognize truths of the way we develop over time and see the stages of child development unfolding as we practice together. Children are not mini-adults. Young children have fundamentally important things to learn that aren’t found in textbooks or workbooks. These foundations are difficult (even impossible, in some cases) to discover in a classroom.

Would you participate with me in a little exercise? Can you recall a time in the past or present when you set out to learn something new and you had an internal motivation to do it? In other words, you decided you really wanted to be able to do something or know something, so you were willing to put the work into it because you really wanted it. Maybe you wanted to have a certain skill or perhaps you decided to take up a new career or you began learning about your faith or healthy lifestyles or [insert your interest here]. Why did you spend your time and energy (and money) to pursue it? Who set the goal to do it? What was your motivation? How did that process feel? What did you learn?

To continue the exercise, compare this feeling to a time in your life when you found yourself in the situation of being told to learn something you didn’t care about. Maybe you were going to be tested on the information, or for some other reason you “had to” learn something, and that reason didn’t feel important or useful to you. Did you learn it? How well? Were you driven to do more than what was required, or did you do just the minimum amount of work in order to meet the requirement?

If we are reluctant learners when the requirement to learn is externally imposed and not meaningful to us, why would our children feel differently? If our goal is to raise self-responsible learners who have a lifelong thirst for learning and growing, we are working against ourselves when we impose our will and remove their opportunity to learn how to become self-motivated learners who recognize the need and value of taking responsibility for what they know, and what they want to know.

It isn’t easy, in my experience, to raise children in this way. But it’s so worth it. And there’s much more to the story: other factors that play a key role, like the way I focus on my own education in order to set the example for what I hope they will emulate in their own lives. At the same time that I’m setting the example to inspire them, I am resisting the urge to impose my desires on them as requirements. I stop short of that, otherwise they don’t have the opportunity to own their own goals. The process of learning how to inspire my children without feeling I must require them to do what I hope they will do is perhaps the most difficult and uncomfortable part of this whole business of raising self-responsible learners. I am still learning. 🙂

Allowing room for a child to exercise agency in their education takes some discipline on the part of parents. Discipline in their own choices so that parent activities and attitudes are worthy of emulation. Discipline in managing hopes and fears, so the parents’ hopes and fears don’t overwhelm the child’s opportunity to learn how to become self-responsible in their pursuit of education, or in their ability to learn how to learn. (In other words, sometimes we don’t see the learning activities we, as parents, feel are needed at a particular time, so we revert back to requiring certain learning activities to take place in order to feel that everything is going the way it “should” be going, from our perspective. When this happens, the child no longer has agency and the opportunity to become a self-responsible learner is removed.) We have been through this cycle several times, and each time we have been blessed by it, as we have deepened our understanding of the process and the deep truths involved in giving children this opportunity.

Our most recent cycle has helped us learn more deeply about the importance of our home environment. We’ve been intentionally crafting our home environment for several years, but recognized there were more steps we needed to take. The right environment helps to create self-responsible learners. Conversely, the wrong environment and influences can make it quite difficult for children to find the motivation to invest in their learning and discovery. Creating the environment for self-education to occur is similar to the act of preparing the place where you hope to one day see a beautiful garden flourishing.

Crafting a home environment to help learning grow, blossom, and bloom is the focus of an upcoming blog post.

Thank you for reading. Please post your comments and questions. What resonates with you? What do you think about these ideas? I look forward to discussing with you!