Activity > Youth Project > Explanation

contents

• introduction (previous page)
• a cultural shift
• education
• direct evidence
• related evidence
• mainstream lessons and comparison
• our principles
• role for adults
• how we’re different
• is this for everyone?
• transitioning from the mainstream
• potential societal effects
• join us

a cultural shift

We can improve the education, quality of life, and mental health of young people while at the same time reducing the cost of education (as compared to government schools), and we’re inviting you to join us in making this happen.

This improvement doesn’t have to do with using new technologies or teaching methodologies but, rather, making a cultural shift back to what has worked in the past, likely for tens of thousands of years, and to what is proven to work today when it is implemented properly. As we’ll discuss below, these claims are supported by empirical research and the experiences of many people across the world, including our own experience.

To enable this shift, we must spread the knowledge and experience that, given the appropriate physical and social environment, children are in fact fit to choose for themselves how to live, and their self-directed choices generally yield better outcomes than trying to direct their lives for their benefit.

More specifically, this cultural shift is to develop a respectful and responsible environment, where young people are given freedom and responsibility again to live life as they choose; where support and help are available when wanted or needed but not imposed otherwise; where sharing of ideas, passions, interests, inspiration, and useful knowledge among all ages is allowed to happen and flourish without coercion or manipulation; where the environment is rich and contains the important tools of our culture; and where young people are integral, full members of the community they find themselves in and can participate in the community’s decision-making processes.

In such an environment, we find in practice that children learn reading, writing, and arithmetic, and anything else they need in life, on their own, as a part of their socialization and self-directed pursuits. This may seem incredible to most people, but this is really just a continuation of the self-directed processes that allow children to learn how to walk, talk, and interact socially. Ironically, school generally interrupts and hampers this process, but examining the history and politics of schooling can shed light on why schools are designed the way they are. (Also, ironically, many of parents’ efforts, for example, to help their children learn to sit, stand, and walk can also delay and disrupt their natural development, in this case the development of their muscles and coordination.) Although self-directed children sometimes learn some of these skills later than their schooled counterparts, they generally learn them faster and develop a self-confidence that cannot be learned through coercive teaching. They also maintain a sense of joy and do not acquire an aversion for, say, reading or math, that is often acquired by people who are instructed with coercion or manipulation.

In such an environment, we also find that a young person who may have been frustrated or floundering or miserable or depressed or even suicidal in a mainstream school, can find support and relief and healing and their own path toward wellness and satisfaction as they take control over their life. Having an option other than school (or other than a mainstream school) can literally be life-saving.

education

A major concern of parents is that their children get a good education. Ultimately and ideally, the goal of education is the same as the mission of Spectrum: to enable people to live satisfying lives and to create a healthy world, facilitating the acquisition of knowledge and skills that empower people to reach their goals and engage productively in the activities and organization of the wider society.

We believe that, even with the very good intentions of great teachers, mainstream schools and most alternative schools are not good learning environments, nor are they the best means of achieving the goals of education. Even more to the point, they are not good living environments. Instead of changing the schools to suit children, many children are drugged and manipulated to fit better into the school structure. This is backwards and detrimental to children. The rates of mental health issues and suicide for children and teens has been increasing over the past several decades, not due to better awareness but due to actual increases in incidents, as schooling and adult-directed activities have encroached on children’s lives more and more. Correlation is not causation, but a good argument can be made that this relationship is causal.⁽¹⁾See the book Free to Learn by Peter Gray.

There is good evidence that many mainstream practices in education and child-raising that are antithetical to the self-directed approach, although well-intentioned, often harm rather than help improve learning, development, quality of life, and mental health.⁽²⁾See, for example these two articles by Peter Gray: Early Academic Training Produces Long-Term Harm and How Early Academic Training Retards … Continue reading So this cultural shift back toward freedom and responsibility is not only possible and beneficial, it may also be considered pragmatically and ethically imperative.

This isn’t to say that a relatively mainstream school is *always* worse than the available alternatives. The particulars of any case should be examined to make an informed decision. Decisions will inevitably depend on the personalities, needs, and relationships of the people involved. And, of course, intelligent people can disagree on matters as large, complex, and culturally entangled as education and child development, so we respect that some will not want to pursue our recommended course of action. However, we’d like to engage in conversation with those who are open to alternative approaches and, for those who come to see the value in these ideas, we’d like to provide an opportunity to take advantage of these real-world experiences and insights.

The good news for us is that the principles for living and learning well are becoming more well known across the world in practice and by scientific research. This is leading to a growing movement advocating for self-directed education, following these principles. When completely absorbed, these ideas lead to the realization that education is not some big undertaking that adults need to be overly concerned about; education is largely a natural individual and social process that occurs best when people are living their lives in tune with their desires and ambitions and with connection to their local and wider communities. In short, great learning is a natural part of great living.

That is not to say that classes, for instance, are never useful. They are. Voluntarily-attended courses of study, curricula, training programs, and boot camps of various sorts have their place in an environment of self-directed exploration and empowerment, as do tutoring, mentoring, apprenticeships, internships, and jobs. But classes are generally not the most important sources for learning.

The most important sources of learning are both more mundane and more extraordinary than classes. They are the experiences of everyday life and social interaction, and they are the experiences that engage us at a deep emotional level, that speak to what is relevant and important and meaningful to us, that develop our character and motivation and sense of agency. They are what motivate the desire to even consider taking a class.

Before we adults can become less obsessed with education, we must come to understand the principles of living and learning well, create the environments that embody these principles, and see the principles in action for ourselves. To make the cultural shift will take some effort, but it will be worth it.

direct evidence

Much of the evidence that supports the claims above is laid out exceptionally well in a book by the title Free to Learn, written by Peter Gray, a research professor of psychology at Boston College. He is also the author of a widely-used college textbook titled Psychology, now in its 7th edition, and is a blog writer for Psychology Today. The book Free to Learn contains material that Peter has written in his blog, but it is presented in a very organized and coherent way that makes the book worthwhile in addition to his blog. This book is one of the highly recommended books in our book club. But before you read the book or his blog, we can sketch the evidence here.

So, where has this approach to education been shown to work? This approach works for unschoolers⁽³⁾”Unschoolers” are self-directed learners who don’t go to a school to learn. that follow these principles, for students in Sudbury schools around the world, for participants of the North Star teen learning center in Sunderland, Massachusetts, and possibly for many others whom we haven’t become familiar with yet. This approach is spreading and seems to be working for participants of Agile Learning Centers and people within the Liberated Learners network. (Some potential further examples include Summerhill School, running since 1921 in Suffolk, England, and the Children’s Community Workshop or Werkplaats Kindergemeenschap, running since 1926 in Bilthoven, Netherlands.) This approach has also worked consistently for modern hunter-gatherer communities across the world that anthropologists have studied and found to have surprisingly uniform cultures, and presumably for our ancestors before the agricultural revolution, who probably had the same sort of cultures for tens of thousands of years.

Dr. Peter Gray and his colleagues and students have done survey studies of unschooling families and grown unschoolers as well as graduates of the original Sudbury school: the Sudbury Valley School, running since 1968 in Framingham, Massachusetts. They have also done direct observation over years within the Sudbury Valley School, which currently has 140 young people (aged 4 to 19 years old) enrolled. What they found defies mainstream thinking and “common sense” on education. Just to scratch the surface:

• Children teach themselves to read. (Article link)
• Kids learn math easily when they control their own learning. (Article link)
• Upon becoming an adult, people with this sort of education go on to the whole range of careers that are valued by our society: skilled craft-workers, entrepreneurs, artists, musicians, scientists, mathematicians, social workers, nurses, doctors, and so on. And those who choose to pursue higher education have no particular difficulties getting into colleges and universities, including highly selective ones, or performing well there once admitted. (Article link)

The Sudbury Valley School is not some expensive, elite school that accepts only unusually gifted or self-motivated students; it is cheaper than the nearby government schools (approximately half as expensive for a single student)⁽⁴⁾The current tuition listed on the Sudbury Valley School website in 2017 is $9,500. The Massachusetts government listing of the expenditure per pupil … Continue reading, and it accepts essentially anyone. This is something that can work for any young person.

Dr. Gray and a graduate student of his also did a survey study of ten prominent anthropologists who studied and observed hunter-gatherer bands or communities. Although these communities are not technologically advanced, the skills and knowledge they must acquire to survive in nature is by no means simple. Since there is little or no specialization besides the common gender-based division of labor, they all must learn to become experts in nearly everything. They must have vast and intricate knowledge of the plants and animals of their area, making and using tools, tracking, hunting, trapping, harvesting and preparing food, and more.

How do hunter-gatherer parents ensure that their children learn all of this information critical for survival? They give them freedom and allow them to play all day long, well into their teen years, while including them in their community and its decision-making processes. They allow their children’s natural educative drives to function, and the children can’t help but strive to become excellent members of the community. The anthropologists who visited these communities consistently said that these children were like what every parent dreams for: children who are sunny, cooperative, unanxious, intelligent, likable, confident, and stoic in the face of pain and challenge.

In our modern society, we may have certain challenges as parents that the hunter-gatherers never had, and some of these modern challenges may alter what we can hope to expect from our children. But we should realize that the baseline that we are deviating away from is a way of life and being that is profoundly healthy and happy. Our greatest modern challenge may simply be to figure out how to shed and recover from the poisonous cultural baggage that we carry with us.

Peter Gray’s observations and research have lead him inevitably to become an advocate for the principles discovered in his research and have driven him to become a co-founder of the Alliance for Self-Directed Education. But Peter is only one out of many parents, educators, authors, and researchers who have discovered in their own paths that we can do much better with a well-supported and integrated self-directed approach. To gain a fuller view of these topics we can read from other authors, including John Holt, Daniel Greenberg, Kenneth Danford, John Taylor Gatto, Dayna Martin, and many others. Ever more evidence is constantly being generated, and can be generated by us now, to reap the benefits of living in a more satisfying, successful, healthy, and happy way.

related evidence

It’s all well and good to know that this is possible and it can work, but to know how to start within ourselves, to change our habits engrained by our culture, is another tricky thing. Besides finding others who have the same intention, and (most-helpfully) finding a community that already embodies these principles, it is good to find as much practical, concrete advice as possible. One resource out of many that can help with this process is the book Nonviolent Communication by Marshall Rosenberg, another high recommendation in our book club.

Marshall Rosenberg helps to break down many of the unconscious assumptions in our culture that warp our view of freedom, responsibility, empathy, and problem-solving. His advice is actually quite simple, yet it’s often difficult in practice since it so different from how we have been trained to think, speak, and act. Once his advice is absorbed and utilized more consistently, problems that once seemed impossible-to-solve become much simpler, and one’s attitude and sense of possibility changes. With this new perspective, the self-directed approach to children and education does not seem strange at all but a part of a consistent whole approach for engaging with others without coercion and manipulation, with more compassion and for mutual benefit.

mainstream lessons and comparison

The quality of schools can vary a lot, and as we noted above, a school that doesn’t follow self-directed principles is not necessarily worse than the alternatives available. In fact, a young person may prefer a mainstream school to an available self-directed option, and that can be okay. But it would be good to consider the pros and cons of a non-self-directed school in general (as well as the particular options available).

The potential pros of a mainstream school are generally well-advertised and well-known. Most of us have gone through such a school and we survived and were able to manage to get where we are now. Some of us even had a good time and learned some great stuff and had some great, influential teachers. There are lots of good, caring teachers doing their best in a system that doesn’t allow them to really achieve their full potential as mentors and educators. And although the rates of functional illiteracy are shockingly, incredibly high among U.S. high school students and adults who graduated from high school (~15% to 20% have a “below basic” literacy, being functionally illiterate or fully illiterate), these rates cannot *completely* be blamed on mainstream schools.⁽⁵⁾See this 2002 report on Adult Literacy in America from the National Center for Education Statistics, and this presentation by Statistic Brain of 2016 … Continue reading It would take more investigation to find all the causal links.

Examining the cons of mainstream schools, we can say broadly that they prevent young people from exercising their own judgement of how to organize and run their own lives, preventing the development of that judgement. This is done, of course, with the assumption that this will protect the young person from their own bad judgement, but we now know that this can actually do just the opposite.

The structure of school, even without specific influence from teachers or the content of the curriculum, communicates lessons. To a large degree, the medium itself is the message. These lessons can sound quite harsh and extreme when verbalized, but they can feel even more harsh to the sensitive children who are most affected by them. The common institutional structure of schools is benevolently authoritarian, coercive, highly regimented, highly segregated, contrived, and mostly irrelevant to life. This structure teaches surrender and obedience and conformity. It teaches that a strong authority knows best, and that resistance is futile. It teaches a self-dissociation and self-unawareness to prioritize the following of orders. It teaches an external self-consciousness and potentially an anxiety with respect to constant evaluation and judgement. It teaches that one’s own interests are not as important as what the authority deems to be important. It teaches external motivation through reward and punishment, praise and shame. It teaches intellectual and emotional dependency. It teaches a false hierarchy of merit based on an arbitrary curriculum, instilling hubris and shame, false competition and division. It teaches that resolving disputes is largely a matter of appealing to a higher authority. It teaches that the way to get people to do what you want is through force, threat, and manipulation. It teaches that learning is work and often boring or painful. It teaches that learning requires an expert, an authority. It teaches that learning is rigidly sequential. It teaches that strong interests and progress will be interrupted by bells to keep the assembly line of learning going. It teaches, through its own irrelevance and coercion, that cheating is an effective means of coping or getting ahead. All these lessons and more come merely with the common structure of school.

Teachers can and do often greatly soften these institutional lessons with their own lessons and behaviors and relationships with their students. However, we should quote Daniel Greenberg here regarding merely partially self-directed schools: [The non-self-directed but relatively free and personalized schools are] “still patronizing. As a matter of fact [they’re] worse than the most traditional and rigid of the other schools. Traditional schools that are rigid… at least ninety percent of the people who go there hate them and they know the enemy. A school that is allowing you to have a little bit of freedom seduces you into thinking that the little bit of freedom — where you’re really being manipulated — is the real thing. And that opens you up to being manipulated all your life.”

That being said, despite all the forces against learning, character development, and mental health, positive learning and living experiences can and do happen at traditional schools, especially for the more academically oriented. People are generally pretty resilient. And if a student knows that there are other options available, many of these institutional lessons lose their force. But it is also true that many students endure a miserable existence while in school and are worse off for the whole experience, given the alternative that most people are unaware of. To these young people, the experience of school *is* the experience of a part-time forced-labor prison camp, without pay. It is part-time torture and slavery, for many years or what seem like life-times, with apparently no way out. Then maybe throw on top some bullying and maybe drugs to numb you. It’s no wonder that some end up killing themselves.

Parents can rationalize this treatment by imagining that it is necessary and essential for children’s preparation for adulthood, and moreover, perhaps, that this is part of how children earn their keep — earn their food and accommodations — in addition to household chores. It’s their job. But this “necessity” has never been established empirically or scientifically. And many children feel that this treatment is going against their nature and does not promote a feeling of thriving. When a superior alternative is known, this rationalization falls apart.

Well, shouldn’t we teach children to get used to facing challenges, because that’s what’s in store for them when they finally have to take care of themselves? Actually, children are exceedingly capable and desiring of confronting challenges that are just at the boundary of their abilities. Adults can try to provide these sorts of challenges for children, but children are often better situated to be able to tell whether the challenge is suitable or not. When a challenge is appropriately pitched and experience has been gained with surmounting previous challenges, it will generally be an attractive offer, and no force or manipulation is necessary. Still, an adult has to be careful not to monopolize the thought processes of children, which could weaken the children’s intellectual independence and creativity.

Again, to quote Daniel Greenberg: “[The Sudbury school] is the hardest school to be in. And you ask the kids and they’ll tell you it’s the hardest school to be in. Why? Because if you’re told what to do all day, it’s like taking care of you all day, right? You don’t have to make decisions. Here, a kid has to make decisions. Kids aren’t happy here all day. The kids are thriving all day and they’re active all day. But they go through all the ups and downs of mistakes, and learning from mistakes, and falling on their faces and picking themselves up again. It’s a very, very hard existence, and they have to prioritize their time, and they have to sit and say, ‘what is it that I really want to do?’ They have to really find out who they are.”

In extreme form, this is the challenge of existential crisis, to confront the responsibility of freedom and of choice — to face boredom and meaninglessness and then create one’s own view or meaning or purpose. This sort of challenge and pain is ultimately satisfying and brings a sense of thriving because the gain is felt to be worth the pain.

our principles

As we mentioned in the introduction, we aim to create and maintain the six optimizing conditions for learning, as described by the Alliance for Self-Directed Education:

• Responsibility — The social expectation (and reality) that education is children’s responsibility.
• Unlimited Time to Play — Unlimited time to play, explore, and pursue one’s own interests.
• Tools of the Culture — Opportunity to play with the tools of the culture.
• Helpers not Judges — Access to a variety of caring adults, who are helpers, not judges.
• Free Age Mixing — Free age mixing among children and adolescents.
• Community — Immersion in a stable, supportive, respectful community.

You can read the Alliance description of these principles here.

We can set these principles within a broader set of qualities that interplay with each other, sometimes conflict with each other, and may require some balancing. Here is a list of these qualities, followed by some explanation:

• Safety & Risk
• Support & Respect
• Freedom & Responsibility
• Richness & Space
• Acceptance & Rejection (Community “Immune System”)

safety & risk

We want to create a space that is physically and psychologically safe but that doesn’t take the concept of safety to such an extreme that it eliminates all risk. Some danger and risk is necessary for learning and growth, to acquire the skills and judgement to be safe in actually dangerous situations, and to simply learn how to use important tools such as knives. Being too “safe” actually makes people unsafe when they are finally exposed to a fuller reality in an ignorant, unexperienced, and unskilled state. Children do seek out a certain amount of danger to push the limits of their experience and skill, and when the physical and social environment is tuned well for those present, this is a critical part of how children develop into safe, responsible adults. We want to balance safety and risk, with the knowledge that children are much more capable of being skilled and safe than mainstream culture tends to imagine, as evidenced by the skills of children in hunter-gatherer societies. Where and how to draw the line and strike the balance will be determined by the specific people who join the community, their capabilities for responsibility, and how we respectfully negotiate meeting our needs for safety and autonomy with each other.

support & respect

We want to develop a culture of respectful mutual support and friendship, and we believe we can do that by embodying that spirit and practice ourselves as participants in the community and as organizers of the community. All of us — young, old, and in-between — can benefit from offers of help, but, as you might imagine for yourself, being incessantly offered (or forcibly given) help when you don’t want it can be insulting and annoying and interfere with your own efforts to accomplish a goal for yourself. It can also lead to a learned dependency. Furthermore, being constantly judged, assessed, rewarded or punished, and praised or shamed, as is done in most schools (and even in most families), can rob a person of the internal, intrinsic motivation and reasoning for engaging in the activities being judged. Or it can simply make the activities distasteful and unattractive. It can also result in a general dependency on external motivations and a self-dissociation that disconnects a person with their own deepest desires and needs. Even worse, it can lead to a lifetime of self-shaming that prevents a person from being able to see things clearly and change behavior. For all people, but for young people in particular, we want to be respectfully supportive — not overbearing helpers or judges. We want to offer friendship as equals in terms of fundamental respect, even if one or the other of us has less experience, knowledge, skill, or ability. We want to give people the space that they often need to process and learn to handle things on their own. We will be willing to occasionally use force for protection and safety, but we recognize that this strategy can sometimes damage relationships, temporarily or permanently, yet can still be worth it.

freedom & responsibility

We want to allow each other as much freedom as possible while still meeting our needs and responsibilities for safety and without obstructing each others’ other needs. Freedom, however, can inspire anxiety in people, because it leaves room for both success and failure; it leaves room for a person to be right or to be wrong, to be knowledgable or ignorant. And, for parents who feel a sense of obligation to make sure their children succeed and don’t go wrong, this freedom opens the imagination to many scary possibilities. But true learning requires feedback of both success and failure, and not the artificial feedback of an authoritarian judgement of whether an action is “right” or “wrong”, but the real feedback of how the action functions in reality — physically or mentally or socially with other autonomous actors and thinkers. Failing early and failing often can be a great gift for gaining real, practical knowledge and confidence not only in the knowledge gained but in the process and the ability to discover new knowledge. Protecting children from this real learning process can actually be setting them up for failure later on.

Given the appropriate sort of environment, children have the power and the drive to learn what is important for them, and they can be trusted to do so, in their own unique ways. They are, in these senses, responsible for their education. Interrupting the natural learning process takes that responsibility away from them and trains them to be less responsible.

By distributing the decision-making power of the organization to all members, we will be distributing the responsibilities of the community, adding to everyone’s personal responsibilities and giving everyone a reason to take their responsibility even more seriously. As Sudbury schools have shown, this can help the organization to function for the benefit of everyone and allow everyone to learn how to problem-solve together in extremely relevant ways. It can motivate deep, nuanced, and context-rich critical analysis and debate. And our open-ness to political experimentation widens the debate to include improvement of our political structure.

There are many understandable reasons that people fear freedom and responsibility. For those of us who realize the critical importance of freedom and responsibility, it is our responsibility (not in terms of duty or obligation but causal power and accountability) to make a strong case for their importance and to attempt to create the conditions that will allow people to be receptive to and benefit from the message. Simply demanding freedom and responsibility is not likely to fully achieve the goal. We must also show the way compassionately and with understanding. Freedom is not a given, and it is contingent upon the acceptance of this responsibility.

richness & space

To have a satisfying life and to learn a lot requires a certain amount of richness in the environment: a richness in the sorts of activities going on, the types of people present, the ideas and emotions being exchanged and considered, the kinds of objects and tools available, etc. We have a need for stimulation, novelty, discovery, learning, challenge, and growth. However, we also have a need for peace, solitude, and mental rest and relaxation. Becoming overstimulated can lead to becoming burned out and having a dimmed receptivity to the value that presents itself. Constant external stimulation and distraction can lead to a dependence on external stimulation, and a dearth of creativity and productivity that would ultimately be more satisfying than constant consumption. Mental rest and rejuvenation are necessary for reflection, analysis, creativity, and self-discovery. We want to create spaces that allow for seeking of richness and seeking of space whenever desired, whether it’s physical, social, or mental.

Richness will be provided partly with a continuum of ages, and the varieties that come with differences in age. We will also attempt to have a variety of objects and tools available, especially tools that are critical in our culture, such as computers. We will have a variety of activities, based on what people want to do and what we find to be interesting, important, or inspirational. We will also try to have calming places that people can retreat to and rest, hopefully including natural and scenic environments. Activities will range from resting and playing games, to hobbies and projects, to studying and debating, to writing and making multimedia programs, to building businesses and organizations, to seeking self-knowledge and self-actualization of any kind.

acceptance & rejection (community “immune system”)

Although we will try to build and share tools and practices for resolving conflicts and alleviating friction within the community so that everyone gets their needs met, there may be times when the community does not have the time, energy, or skill to deal with certain individuals. For a community to maintain its values, it may need to have a kind of immune system, with processes to limit the rate of entry and ensure that entrants agree with the values, and processes to disassociate with or eject people who are continually harming people in the community or disrupting the community too much. For this immune system to function properly, there must be a clear vision of the community values or principles, and there must be means of addressing problems that arise. Some problems may simply be due to natural human tendencies and biases that counter the values, and those will have to be countered by re-examination of the reasoning behind the principles or demonstration of the principles’ value or experimentation. This will be part of the effort in building the political and social structure of the organization.

role for adults

Beyond providing young people what they need and cannot provide for themselves, the best thing adults can do for young people is to live their own adult lives as fully and satisfactorily as possible. Part of that fullness and satisfaction will come from sharing, with anyone of any age, what is valuable and meaningful, part will come from working in groups on certain projects, and part will come from more solitary pursuits. But attempting to live vicariously through young people or to direct their lives will subvert young people’s autonomy and agency and ultimately make their lives worse.

Much of what will help young people is the same as what will help anyone of any age. After all, age does not fully determine one’s abilities or maturity. Helping to create a more diverse and vibrant community will help everyone.

Here are some suggested do’s and don’t’s (or attempt-not-to’s). Do share with others what is important and interesting to you, but don’t become overbearing, annoying, aggressive, or manipulative about your sharing. Do share thought, inspiration, emotion, and so forth in a manner that is an invitation, that another person can always turn down without resentment on your part. Do feel free to invite people of any age to join you, when you’d like company or help, and when you think others might be interested to join and gain from what you’re doing.

Do actively and continuously combat your own biases, fallacious thinking, bad habits, and character flaws. Question your culture and change it when it makes sense. Don’t project your preferences on other people, particularly children. Do project a present and a future of possibilities and choices for children, where their own preferences and decisions will determine their lives. You can discuss probabilities of what you might expect them to like, but always with the implicit or explicit acknowledgement that individuals are unique and may (sometimes often) defy expectations. For example, gender stereotypes and roles are often imposed unconsciously by adults, so some effort is required to be aware of these subtle and not-so-subtle ways that we restrict the freedom and choice and preferences of young people. But don’t impose an overbearing anti-bias bias either.

Do choose wisely the people you spend your time with, as we all become more like the people we spend our time with. And pay attention to who your friends, family, and children are spending their time with — you may want to introduce them to some new people. You may want to see if you can attract more excellent people into the community.

If you are inspired and can manage to do so, be engaged in solving the problems of your community, your city, your society, and your world. You may have to get your own life in order before this becomes at all feasible or attractive.

Try to be the change that you want to see in the world. Try to be the person that you want your children to see as a role model. Try to be your own hero. Your attempts and successes will inspire yourself and others, feeding a virtuous circle of inspiration.

Tame your anxiety about how your children will turn out. Yield responsibility to your children for their learning. That responsibility itself is one of the most important parts of their learning. That doesn’t mean you play no part: you help maintain the environment conducive for learning and living well, and you can add specific opportunities for experiences of value. Again, the greatest thing you can do is live and learn well yourself.

how we’re different

By now it should be fairly obvious how we’re different from mainstream schools, but we can spell out more clearly how we’re different from Sudbury schools or the North Star teen learning center. (We’ll also mention another inspiration below.)

The main difference is that we aim to be open and relevant to all ages. We take the age-mixing idea to it’s logical conclusion: that all ages benefit from exposure to and interaction with the other ages, even if there will very often be natural self-segregation based on differing interests, responsibilities, and abilities. There is a tremendous amount of segregation and atomization in our society and a lot of loneliness and feelings of a lack of community. We can help alleviate those feelings by creating a welcoming space for everyone. One of the trickier aspects of getting this to work is that, today, adults have grown up in a culture that treats children in a very authoritarian and patronizing way, so making sure that the adults who participate in the community become acculturated to a more respectful and free environment will have its challenges.

The North Star center is a bit like a mix of a traditional community center and a school (in terms of creating an academic plan), but run for teens in a way that respects their autonomy. The North Star center does not have an unusual political structure, whereas Sudbury schools are politically unusual since they are run democratically by everyone participating. While mainstream schools accustomize people for authoritarian living, Sudbury schools accustomize people for democratic living. Our community will be more politically flexible than Sudbury schools, looking to experiment on smaller and larger scales with different political organizational strategies. One concern is that in Sudbury schools, people can become overly reliant upon democratic and bureaucratic processes, when other methods may be superior in certain circumstances. We are interested in examining other strategies, including person-to-person problem-solving, private mediation, communal mediation and restorative justice, as well as sociocracy and independent interacting political entities.

One difference between the Sudbury model and the North Star model is that Sudbury schools are legally schools, whereas North Star (or Liberated Learner) centers are not schools. We plan to operate more like the North Star center, in that respect. We plan to take the same strategy, proven to work for over 20 years, to make sure families are not defying any laws by allowing their children to have the best education possible.

We’re also inspired by hackerspaces and makerspaces, and the creativity, productivity, and joy that occur in these spaces. We’d like to be a “holistic hackerspace”, with activities spanning interests from very fundamental personal and interpersonal skills to hobbies of various kinds to big social projects.

is this for everyone?

Ultimately, this community and this project itself is for everyone whose values align closely enough with our values and who is capable of participating without disrupting the community too much. This is not just a “youth project”; this is a cultural project and an intergenerational community-building project. Our youth project is an integral part of the Spectrum Community project, to build a community that liberates and empowers everyone and connects everyone respectfully and supportively, no matter what age.

We will set a lower age-limit of independent participation at 4 to 5 years of age. The parents of children who participate in the community will have to be ready to learn to trust their children and to adjust to a new perspective on life and education.

transitioning from the mainstream

Parents and children alike may feel a hesitance to move from the familiar mainstream to the unfamiliar territory of self-direction. The transition can inspire apprehension not just because it is toward the unknown but because it’s also toward a less structured and unique way of life. To further complicate the transition, children who have been to a mainstream school may go through a kind of “detox-ing” (“detoxification”), where all the coping mechanisms and anxieties left over from school take time to dissolve and leave space for new behavior and outlooks to arise. This is often called “de-schooling”. This, of course, is a positive thing, even if it’s challenging. The most difficult part of the transition, however, may simply be the discomfort due to defying dominant social norms and receiving negative judgment from family, friends, and acquaintances who are not familiar with the benefits of self-directed education.

How can you prepare for the transition? Feel free to ask for help and guidance from those of us already in the community. If we can’t help directly, we may be able to put you in contact with more people who can. We’ll also try to put as many resources as possible here on this website to help. Becoming more and more familiar with people’s reported experiences with self-directed education and trustful parenting will inspire more confidence. You can read articles and books and watch documentaries and videos online. Talking with experienced people in person can be particularly powerful and reassuring, as you can ask them questions and get immediate and personal feedback. Visiting a Sudbury school or Agile Learning Center, if possible, could help a lot. Even visiting a variety of non-self-directed alternative schools can widen one’s perspective and make the idea of “alternative” less strange. Also, it could help to find other people who are curious about or actively investigating the possibility of moving toward self-directed education. Searching online forums, mailing lists, and meetup groups might be the best bet. And you could try talking with friends and acquaintances to find who might be interested. You might be lucky enough to find or convince people who will transition with you at the same time.

potential societal effects

If this cultural shift spreads to the wider society, as we hope it will, the benefits to society could be tremendous. We hope that this approach to education, along with our approach to other community issues, will support a blooming of creativity and vision for solving bigger societal-level problems, inspired by our success at smaller scales. We also look forward to more variety in solutions, finding solutions that fit each situation and context.

As we noted in the “vision” section of the About page, we want to build healthy cultures from the ground up, transforming ourselves and our families and relationships, creating social and cultural hubs of activity, and turning our neighborhoods and cities into safe, clean, beautiful, and prosperous places where we cooperatively and entrepreneurially create community and societal solutions.

join us

If you’d like to join the conversation or join our community, please feel free to join via

• our Meetup group for activities and in-person conversation, or
• our public chat group on Facebook for online conversation.

There are multiple ways you can contact us. We’d love to hear your thoughts, advice, critiques, and questions. Please let us know if you’d like to get involved and we can figure out how we each can do our part to grow this community and make our vision a reality.