A major role of adults is to provide the environmental conditions that maximize children’s abilities to assert and learn from their natural educative drives.
SOCIAL EXPECTATION (AND REALITY) THAT EDUCATION IS CHILDREN’S RESPONSIBILITY
UNLIMITED TIME TO PLAY, EXPLORE, AND PURSUE ONE’S OWN INTERESTS
But the crucial lesson that children must learn is how to take control of their own life, and for that to happen we must back off. Our greatest gift to children, concerning their education, is free time to discover and pursue their own interests.
OPPORTUNITY TO PLAY WITH THE TOOLS OF THE CULTURE
ACCESS TO A VARIETY OF CARING ADULTS, WHO ARE HELPERS, NOT JUDGES
None of us, regardless of age, can be fully honest with–fully willing to show our vulnerability to and ask for help from–people whose business it is to evaluate us. When we think we are being evaluated, we go into impression-management mode, in which we show off what we know and can do well and avoid what we don’t know or can’t do well. Evaluation also induces anxiety, which interferes with learning. Impression management and anxiety are antithetical to education, yet they are characteristics that our standard schools are well designed to promote.
FREE AGE MIXING AMONG CHILDREN AND ADOLESCENTS
IMMERSION IN A STABLE, SUPPORTIVE, RESPECTFUL COMMUNITY
Children attending a school or learning center for Self-Directed Education are integral, full members of the school community. They learn to care for one another within the community and for the community itself. They are involved, democratically, in making and upholding the community rules. In that process they hear all sides of every disagreement and the moral and logical arguments related to it. Their own views are taken seriously by others and influence the community’s decisions, which motivates them to think more deeply about those views than they otherwise might.
Families, in successful home-based Self-Directed Education, likewise respect and value their children’s ideas and concerns and allow those to play a role in family decisions.
2020-11-10T02:58:39.000Z · This note was created with LINER By Vince Imbat
Highlighted Source : https://share.getliner.com/mftWx
Original Source : https://www.self-directed.org/sde/conditions/