I want to tell you about a girl I think you might recognize.

She is seven years old, and she loves school. She loves the smell of fresh ditto paper and the squeak of her chair and the particular silence of a classroom during a spelling test, a silence she knows how to win. Her hand goes up before the teacher finishes the question. She carries her award certificates home and pins them to the bulletin board in her bedroom, the one her parents hung for exactly this purpose. When the teacher needs someone to take the attendance folder to the office, she is chosen, and she walks the empty hallway feeling like a small ambassador of a country she adores.

She grows. The gold stars become honor rolls, then scholarships, then a degree. When adults ask what she wants to be, the answer arrives without effort, because school is where she shines, and she never wants to leave. She becomes a teacher. She is a good one, conscientious and warm. In time she becomes a principal, maybe a superintendent, because the system recognizes its own and lifts them.

Then one August morning, a mother sits across the desk from her and says, “We’re withdrawing him. School is destroying my son.”

The principal is baffled. She looks at this mother with genuine confusion, because the sentence makes no sense to her. Destroying him? School is where children are safe and known and given every chance. School is gold stars and kind teachers and the smell of fresh paper. She knows this the way she knows her own name. So she reaches for the explanations that keep her world intact. The boy must be struggling socially. The parents must be overreacting. Perhaps they read something alarmist. She offers accommodations, a schedule change, a counselor. The mother shakes her head, gathers her purse, and leaves. Walking to her car, this mom wonders why the one person in the building with the power to see what is happening seems to be the one person who cannot.

If you recognized yourself in that girl, this letter is for you, and I want you to know it is written with affection. I was a classroom teacher for years, across multiple countries and grade levels, before I founded the Spokane Learning Co-op, Washington State’s only outdoor, consent-based, sociocratic Self-Directed Education center. I loved school too. What I have to tell you is hard to hear precisely because your experience was real. Your gold stars were real. Your love was real. Here is what else is real: your experience was never the common one, and the very success that carried you into leadership is what makes the harm so difficult for you to see.

Why School Worked for You and Fails So Many Others

During the Second World War, the statistician Abraham Wald was asked where to add armor on bombers, based on the bullet holes riddling the planes that returned. Reinforce the damaged areas, the military assumed. Wald saw the trap. The planes that returned could survive those hits. The planes shot down over Europe, the ones nobody could examine, held the answer, and their damage was invisible only because they never came home (Wald, 1943; Ellenberg, 2014).

Education has the same problem, with one twist. We staff the airfield almost entirely with returning pilots. People who thrived in conventional school become teachers at extraordinary rates, and the teachers who thrive as institutional players become principals and superintendents. The sociologist Dan Lortie named part of this dynamic the “apprenticeship of observation”: by graduation, every future teacher has already spent roughly 13,000 hours watching teaching from a desk, absorbing the system’s logic as simply the way things are (Lortie, 1975). The people most harmed by school, the ones who disengaged, dropped out, or barely survived it, almost never return to run it. Their testimony is missing from every faculty meeting, every leadership retreat, every strategic plan. The system staffs its leadership entirely with people who believe it never harmed them, then treats their confidence as proof. The belief is the deepest cut of all.

There is a comic by Nathan W. Pyle that I think about often, in which two eagles sip their morning coffee and discuss whether the owl is really a predator. One eagle scoffs at the idea, because the owl has never bothered him. The other agrees completely. Meanwhile, somewhere out of frame, a mouse who tried to warn them has given up. The eagles are not lying. They really were safe from owls. However, their personal experience tells them nothing about what the owl does to mice.

When a parent, a student, or a burned-out teacher tells you the system is hurting them, and you find yourself reaching for the thought “that was never my experience,” notice what your mind is doing. Psychologists call it identity-protective cognition, our tendency to evaluate evidence in whatever way protects the story we hold about ourselves (Kahan, 2017; Jost, 2020). If school harmed enormous numbers of children, and you flourished there and now lead there, then some part of your success starts to feel implicated. Dismissing the testimony is easier than reexamining the self. This is a human reflex, not a character flaw, and the only remedy is deliberately seeking the evidence your position hides from you.

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What Student Disengagement and Teacher Demoralization Actually Look Like

Gallup has surveyed millions of American students, and the pattern is so consistent that researchers call it the school engagement cliff. Roughly three quarters of fifth graders report being engaged in school. By eleventh and twelfth grade, that figure falls to about one third (Gallup, 2016). Human beings are born learning machines, as Peter Gray documents in Free to Learn (Gray, 2013). A curiosity that survives infancy, toddlerhood, and the wildness of early childhood should survive fifth grade. Something in the environment extinguishes it.

The distress data is harder to read. In the most recent Youth Risk Behavior Survey, four in ten high school students reported persistent sadness or hopelessness, including more than half of teenage girls (CDC, 2023). Peter Gray and his colleagues have documented a finding that should stop every administrator cold: children’s psychiatric emergency visits and youth suicides drop sharply every summer and rise when school resumes, a seasonal pattern that tracks the school calendar itself (Gray, 2018; Plemmons et al., 2018).

Families are responding with their feet. Chronic absenteeism has roughly doubled since before the pandemic, reaching about one in four American students (U.S. Department of Education, 2024). Homeschooling has grown by more than half in many states since 2017, making it among the fastest-growing forms of education in the country (Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy / Washington Post analysis, 2023). In England, well over one hundred thousand children are now classified as severely absent, missing more than half of their schooling (UK Department for Education, 2024).

Your teachers are telling you the same story in a different dialect. RAND found that teachers report job-related stress at roughly twice the rate of other working adults (RAND, 2022). The majority of educators surveyed by the National Education Association said they were considering leaving the profession earlier than planned (NEA, 2022). The philosopher Doris Santoro has shown that what we casually call burnout is often demoralization, the moral injury of being unable to do good work inside a system that prevents it (Santoro, 2018). Nearly four in ten principals expect to leave within three years (NASSP, 2021). If that includes you, if you are exhausted and privately wondering why nothing works, the data suggests your exhaustion and your students’ disengagement share a single root.

Every one of these numbers is a mouse the eagles never heard.

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Three Things Principals and Superintendents Can Do Before the New School Year

Awareness without action curdles into guilt, and guilt helps no one. Here are three things you can do between now and September, each drawn from the principles of Self-Directed Education, the growing movement built on the science of self-determination showing that human beings learn best when their needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness are met (Deci and Ryan, 2000). Each one is fully within your existing authority.

First, conduct a listening tour of the people who left. This summer, personally call five families who withdrew their children and five teachers who resigned. Ask one question: what would have had to be different for you to stay? Then say nothing and take notes. Do not defend, explain, or offer solutions. You are not there to win them back. You are there to hear the testimony that never reaches your office, the flight data from the planes that went down. Every leader who has done this describes the same experience, a pattern snapping into focus within the first three conversations.

Second, protect one day to shadow a student. In 2014, a veteran educator named Alexis Wiggins shadowed two students for two full days and wrote an account that spread through faculty lounges across the country. She sat where they sat, moved when they moved, and asked for nothing the students could not ask for. “I could not believe how tired I was after the first day,” she wrote, and she found herself planning sweeping changes to her own teaching by nightfall (Wiggins, 2014). A principal or superintendent who blocks out one full day in the first week of the new year to shadow a single student, and who protects that day on the calendar now, before the September avalanche buries it, will discover what six hours in those chairs actually costs. One day will teach you more than a decade of walkthroughs.

Third, restore one genuine act of autonomy. Choose a single compliance structure in your building that exists for institutional convenience rather than for children, and remove it before opening day. Restore the recess that testing prep consumed. End the silent lunch. Let one hour a week belong entirely to students’ own questions. Democratic and sociocratic schools, including the Spokane Learning Co-op, run entirely on the consent of the people in them, and the research behind them shows that even small restorations of autonomy produce visible changes in engagement almost immediately (Gray, 2013; Deci and Ryan, 2000). Pick something you can announce in August, defend in October, and stand beside in June, when a parent stops you in the hallway to say their child talks about school at the dinner table again.

The Educator You Meant to Become

You went into education because school was where you were seen, and you wanted to give that feeling to children. The system rewarded your success by promoting you into positions where the experience of everyone it failed becomes quietly invisible from the leader’s chair. The disengagement cliff, the absenteeism surge, the resignations, and the quiet exodus of families are all testimony from people whose experience differed from yours, and your position makes their testimony the hardest evidence for you to see and the most important evidence for you to seek.

The good news is larger than the bad. You hold real power, You hold real power, and once you see how school hurts people, you already know how to help them. Children and teachers are not broken; they are responding rationally to an environment that denies them autonomy, and environments can be changed by the people who run them. By using the principles of Self-Directed Education, you turn school into a place people genuinely want to attend and to work in, the kind of school you thought you were building all along.

The girl with the gold stars became an educator because she loved learning and loved children. She is still in there, and she is the right person for what comes next. The system does not need another defender. The system has plenty of defenders. It needs a leader brave enough to believe the people it harmed.

Share This Letter

If you know a principal, a superintendent, or a teacher who loved school, send this to them. The people who most need this letter are the ones least likely to find it on their own, because everything in their experience tells them it cannot be true. If school harmed you, or someone you love, sending this letter may be the most direct way to finally be heard.

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I write The Joy of Learning for parents and educators who want to see conventional school clearly and discover what education looks like when it is built on consent. If this letter moved something in you, subscribe and join readers in 104 countries.

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Tell Me Your Experience

Were you the student with the gold stars, or the student whose testimony never reached the office? Your story in the comments helps every reader who thinks their experience was the only one. I read every comment.

Go Deeper

If you lead a school and want help designing your listening tour, your shadow day, or your first restoration of autonomy, I consult with educators and administrators who are ready to lead differently. Reach out, and we will build it together.

Bibliography

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2023). Youth Risk Behavior Survey Data Summary & Trends Report.

Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (2000). The “what” and “why” of goal pursuits: Human needs and the self-determination of behavior. Psychological Inquiry, 11(4).

Ellenberg, J. (2014). How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking. Penguin.

Gallup. (2016). Gallup Student Poll: Engaged Today, Ready for Tomorrow.

Gray, P. (2013). Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life. Basic Books.

Gray, P. (2018). Children’s and teens’ suicides related to the school calendar. Psychology Today, Freedom to Learn.

Jost, J. T. (2020). A Theory of System Justification. Harvard University Press.

Kahan, D. M. (2017). Misconceptions, misinformation, and the logic of identity-protective cognition. Yale Law School, Cultural Cognition Project.

Lortie, D. C. (1975). Schoolteacher: A Sociological Study. University of Chicago Press.

National Association of Secondary School Principals. (2021). NASSP Survey of Principals and Students.

National Education Association. (2022). Poll Results: Stress and Burnout Pose Threat of Educator Shortages.

Plemmons, G., et al. (2018). Hospitalization for suicide ideation or attempt: 2008–2015. Pediatrics, 141(6).

RAND Corporation. (2022). State of the American Teacher Survey.

Santoro, D. A. (2018). Demoralized: Why Teachers Leave the Profession They Love and How They Can Stay. Harvard Education Press.

UK Department for Education. (2024). Pupil Absence in Schools in England.

U.S. Department of Education. (2024). Chronic Absenteeism Data.

Wald, A. (1943). A Method of Estimating Plane Vulnerability Based on Damage of Survivors. Statistical Research Group, Columbia University.

Wiggins, A. (2014). A veteran teacher turned coach shadows 2 students for 2 days. Granted, and... (Grant Wiggins’ blog).

Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy. (2023). Homeschool Research Lab / Washington Post analysis of homeschool enrollment growth.

A child is in the middle of building something. It isn’t finished. The bell rings. The child has to stop, leave it exactly where it is, and move to the next room, whether or not anything got resolved, whether or not the thought was complete. This happens many times a day, every day, from day one of kindergarten through the last day of high school.

Unstructured time for kids, the kind where a child gets to follow one thought or one project all the way through, has been quietly engineered out of childhood. The bell is only the most visible piece of the machinery. The deeper lesson is harder to see, and much harder to undo: your hours belong to someone else.

Most of us absorbed that lesson so completely we stopped noticing it. We feel guilty about taking time off. We apologize for needing rest. We schedule every available hour and call it productivity, then wonder why we always feel behind. We never quite have enough time for the things that actually matter to us, the friendships we keep meaning to invest in, the projects we’ve been putting off for years, the long unhurried afternoons that make a life feel worth living. We were trained out of believing we were allowed to have those things, starting the first day someone rang a bell and told us it was time to stop.

The question worth sitting with is this: if your child is in school right now, what are they learning about who their time belongs to?

What the school bell is really teaching children about unstructured time

John Taylor Gatto taught in New York City public schools for twenty-six years and won the New York City Teacher of the Year award three consecutive times before resigning in 1991. He identified seven lessons that all schools actually teach, regardless of what teachers intend. One of them was indifference. The constant ringing of bells, he wrote, teaches students not to care too deeply about any one thing. The bell doesn’t only end class. It delivers a lesson about attention itself: that nothing you are doing is important enough to finish, that depth is beside the point, and that someone else will always decide when you are done.

The schedule structured around fifty-minute periods cannot teach children that sustained attention has value, because the structure itself contradicts that lesson at every turn. Children who spend thirteen years inside that structure do not emerge with the skills or the permission to direct their own attention. They emerge waiting for the next bell.

The math on 18 summers: what conventional school takes from families

There is a phrase that circulates quietly among parents of young children. You only get eighteen summers. It moves through parenting communities with the weight of something people know is true but cannot quite bear to hold in focus. One mother, describing the day her daughter left for college, wrote that she found herself frozen on her driveway, waving goodbye, and that it felt dark and cold even though it was a hot bright Texas morning. Another described the experience as standing at the end of a book, not a chapter, a book, that had been her whole life for eighteen years.

Eighteen summers. That’s it.

A child who attends conventional school from kindergarten through twelfth grade spends approximately 1,200 hours per year in school, plus commute time, plus homework. By middle school, homework alone can add two to three hours to a school day. That is an enormous portion of a childhood allocated to a system designed by people who are not the child’s parents, toward outcomes that are not necessarily the child’s own.

All the family gets are the leftovers: a few hours on weeknights, already compressed by exhaustion, weekends, and eighteen summers, if you count them as whole seasons, which most parents who’ve had a child leave home will tell you is an illusion. Summer fills up too.

Parents who have lived past that moment almost universally report the same thing: they wish they had done things differently sooner. The most repeated phrase across every platform where parents discuss homeschooling and alternative education is not about academics. It is: I wish we had done it sooner.

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Why children need three hours outside every day — and why school makes that nearly impossible

Pediatric occupational therapist Angela Hanscom has spent her career studying what children’s bodies and brains actually need in order to develop well. Her research, explored at length in her book Balanced and Barefoot and in conversations with the 1000 Hours Outside podcast, converges on a number that may surprise parents who have never encountered it: children need a minimum of three hours of outdoor free play every day. Not organized sports. Not structured activities with adult supervision and defined outcomes. Free outdoor time, where the child moves through uneven terrain, makes decisions about their own body, and takes in the sensory environment that the natural world provides and manufactured environments simply cannot replicate.

The reason this matters goes deeper than fresh air. Outdoor movement builds what are called the vestibular and proprioceptive systems, the systems that govern balance, coordination, spatial awareness, and the regulation of attention and emotional state. When children spin, climb, dig, run on uneven ground, and move through natural spaces without being told what to do next, they are not wasting time. They are building the neurological architecture that makes focused learning possible in the first place. Hanscom found that elementary-age children who were not getting adequate movement and outdoor time were showing measurable declines in core strength, balance, and the ability to self-regulate, and that one in six children was being referred for occupational or physical therapy as a result.

The National Wildlife Federation has reported that the average American child now gets four to seven minutes of outdoor free play per day. Four to seven minutes. Children in this same population average four to seven hours of sedentary indoor time daily.

A typical school day runs six to seven hours. Some students say that “SCHOOL” stands for “Seven Cruel Hours Of Our Lives.” Add the commute, add homework, add dinner and the routines that follow, and the math is clear. Three hours outside every day is impossible within a conventional school schedule for most families. It is not a matter of parental intention or effort. The schedule itself prevents it.

At the Spokane Learning Co-op, a consent-based, sociocratic Self-Directed Education community on ten acres in Spokane, Washington, three hours outside is not a goal families work toward. It is the ordinary default of a normal day.

“It is hard to pay attention when you are not allowed to move for extended periods of time.” — Angela J. Hanscom, Balanced and Barefoot, 2016

How time scarcity learned in childhood becomes time poverty in adulthood

Research on what psychologists now call “time poverty” has produced a finding that should give every parent pause. More than half of full-time American workers report feeling chronically time-starved, according to surveys conducted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Studies published in the Journal of Health and Social Behavior have linked this persistent sense of time scarcity to elevated rates of depression, anxiety, and burnout. One recent analysis of time poverty research found something even more striking: the damage is not primarily about how many hours a person actually has. It is about whether they experience their time as their own.

People who feel their time belongs to someone else, to employers, to obligations, to an ever-present sense of what they should be doing, suffer the same psychological effects as people who are genuinely stretched beyond capacity, even when the clock says otherwise. The feeling of time poverty depends more on perceived control than on actual hours available. Constant interruptions, long lists of obligations, and a lack of authority over one’s own schedule all produce the same result: the chronic, grinding sense that there is never enough time to do what matters.

Children who spend thirteen years being interrupted by bells, who complete their evenings doing homework assigned by someone else, and who are given no meaningful practice in directing their own attention, are developing a relationship with time that they will carry for the rest of their lives. Adults who feel perpetually behind, who cannot rest without guilt, who cannot invest deeply in community or relationships because the time required feels prohibitive, are not people with a “productivity problem”. They are people who were schooled.

What Self-Directed Education gives children back

Self-Directed Education is not unstructured in the sense of being “random” or without intention. At the Spokane Learning Co-op, children of all ages, from toddlers to teenagers, participate in a community that is organized through sociocratic governance, meaning decisions affecting the group are made by the group, with every voice carrying real weight. Children choose what they pursue, how long they pursue it, and when they are done. They work alongside people of different ages. They are outside, at length, every day. They experience time as something that belongs to them.

Peter Gray’s research on children in self-directed educational settings, documented in his book Free to Learn, shows what happens when children are trusted with their own time over years. They develop the capacity for sustained, self-initiated attention that schools claim to value but structurally undermine. They pursue deep knowledge in areas of genuine interest. They learn to manage disagreement, to negotiate, to collaborate without compulsion, skills that emerge naturally when children have enough uninterrupted time and sufficient autonomy to practice them.

The children who grow up in environments like the Spokane Learning Co-op learn something that cannot be taught by direct instruction: that their hours belong to them, that their attention is worth directing, and that the projects and relationships worth caring about are worth the time required to actually care about them. It is, arguably, the most important preparation for adult life that education could possibly offer.

Things to do today and this week

Today: Count the summers you have left. If your child is eight, you have ten summers. If they are twelve, you have six. Sit with that number. Then ask what the schedule filling those summers is actually for, who designed it, and whether it reflects what you want your child’s childhood to have been. Ask yourself if it’s time to make different choices.

This week: Run the outdoor time numbers. Track how much time your child actually spends outside each day, not in organized sports, but genuine free outdoor time. Angela Hanscom’s research identifies three hours as the daily minimum for healthy brain and body development. If the number you find is significantly lower, that gap is information worth taking seriously.

This week, bigger: Give an entire afternoon back, without conditions. Choose one afternoon and hand it to your child without an agenda, without substitutions, and without announcing how much time is left. If they seem restless, let them be restless. The restlessness is often the first thing that shows up before genuine self-direction takes over. Children who have never experienced time ending on their own terms often don’t know what that feels like, and it shows in how they approach everything else.

Summary

Time is our only non-renewable resource, which makes what children learn about it one of the most consequential lessons of childhood. Conventional school, organized around bells, timed transitions, and hours allocated by someone else, teaches children that their attention belongs to other people. That lesson compounds over a lifetime into guilt about rest, chronic busyness, and the persistent inability to invest deeply in anything that genuinely matters.

Every study on time poverty is, at bottom, a study of adults who were trained as children to treat their own hours as borrowed. They feel behind before the day begins, cannot fathom taking three hours outside, and have lost the thread of what they actually care about. Children who grow up owning their time become something different: adults who know how to use it, for deep work, for genuine community, for the kind of relationships and projects that give a life its texture and meaning.

The Spokane Learning Co-op exists as evidence that a different approach is possible: a consent-based, sociocratic Self-Directed Education community where children direct the shape of their own days, spend hours outside as a matter of course, and learn, through daily practice, that their hours belong to them. What they take into adulthood is not simply knowledge. It is a relationship with time that most of the adults around them were never given the chance to develop.

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If you have never stopped to consider what the school bell is actually teaching, there is more where this came from. Subscribe to The Joy of Learning for more on what conventional schooling does to attention, autonomy, and the hours that make up a childhood, and what it looks like when children are trusted to direct their own.

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Share this with a parent who seems to be watching their child’s days fill up faster than they can keep track of. It may be the next step in a more intentional life.

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Join the Conversation

When was the last time you had a stretch of hours with nothing scheduled and nobody checking on you? What happened? Tell us in the comments.

Sources and Further Reading

Gatto, J. T. (2017). Dumbing us down: The hidden curriculum of compulsory schooling (25th anniversary ed.). New Society Publishers. (Original work published 1992)

Gray, P. (2013). Free to learn: Why unleashing the instinct to play will make our children happier, more self-reliant, and better students for life. Basic Books.

Hanscom, A. J. (2016). Balanced and barefoot: How unrestricted outdoor play makes for strong, confident, and capable children. New Harbinger Publications.

National Wildlife Federation. (n.d.). Be out there: The whole child. https://www.nwf.org/~/media/PDFs/Be Out There/BeOutThere_WholeChild_V2.ashx

Sansone, G. (Host). (2021, November 8). Play is the main occupation of children [Interview with Angela Hanscom]. 1000 Hours Outside Podcast. https://www.1000hoursoutside.com/blog/play-is-the-main-occupation-of-children-interview-with-angela-hanscom

Lachman, M. E., & Weaver, S. L. (1998). The sense of control as a moderator of social class differences in health and well-being. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74(3), 763–773.

Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Department of Labor. (2023). American time use survey. U.S. Government Publishing Office.

Picture report card day in a conventional classroom. Some children light up. Others fold the paper before anyone can see it. Schools built that moment, piece by piece, over years. Competition in schools is taught deliberately, built into the structure through ranked grades, gold stars, and spelling bees where someone has to lose.

Most adults remember exactly where they sat in that hierarchy. The reading group they were placed in by age seven. The chart with everyone’s multiplication times tables, color coded by speed. The grading scale that meant a strong test from one student quietly lowered the standing of another. Nobody explained the mechanism out loud, because nobody needed to. Children absorbed it the way they absorb a native language, simply by living inside it long enough.

What if the competition itself was the curriculum, and the math and reading were just the vehicle for delivering it?

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The hidden lesson behind competition in schools

A ranking system only works if everyone is competing for the same limited supply of good scores. Someone has to lose ground for someone else to gain it. A child cannot simply learn the material and be done. A child has to learn it better than the person next to them, because the grade itself is measured against the room, not against the material.

Conventional schooling never quite says this out loud. The psychologist Peter Gray, who has spent decades studying how children learn in the absence of adult-imposed structure, has documented something striking about play among children who are not being graded or ranked: it organizes itself around fairness and shared benefit, not domination. Children left to their own devices tend to negotiate rules that keep everyone in the game. Adults, through the architecture of schooling, are the ones who introduce winners and losers as a natural feature of childhood.

Ranking children against each other is a recent invention, layered on top of a much older and more durable instinct. It works because human beings are status-sensitive by nature, and a school that wants obedient, sortable students has found an efficient lever to pull. Teaching children to rank themselves does not reflect anything true about how learning or cooperation actually works.

What ranked grades and ranked lists actually teach children

Here is the quiet curriculum running underneath every spelling bee, every honor roll, every reading level sticker on a folder. Children learn that other people’s success is a threat to their own. They learn that help given to a classmate is help subtracted from themselves. They learn to perform confidence even when they feel none, because looking capable matters more than being curious.

“Grades are for meat, milk, eggs, and lumber, not human beings.” — Katy Purviance

That line tends to stop people the first time they read it. Grades exist to sort commodities by quality for a market. A side of beef benefits from a numbered grade because the buyer never has to meet the cow. A child is not a commodity moving through a supply chain, yet a ranked grading system treats them exactly that way, sorted for an audience that is not even in the room.

A child who has internalized that classmates are competitors will hesitate before offering help, even when help would cost them nothing, even when that help would help them too. A child taught that their worth is relative to everyone around them will struggle to feel secure anywhere that does not rank them, including most of adult life. The skills that conventional schooling rewards, outperforming a peer, protecting an advantage, working alone for individual credit, are not the skills that build a marriage, a friendship, a neighborhood, or a functioning workplace. Almost everything that matters after graduation runs on cooperation, and almost nothing in twelve years of ranked grades practiced it.

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The research on cooperative learning and mixed-age communities

The alternative is already happening, and it has existed the entire time conventional schooling has been telling children the opposite story.

Gray’s research into hunter-gatherer childhoods describes communities where children of widely different ages play and work together constantly, with older children naturally mentoring younger ones. Mixed-age groups are simply how humans organized learning before institutions intervened and began sorting children by birth year. In that setting, a ten-year-old teaching a six-year-old to start a fire deepens the older child’s own mastery at the same time it gives the younger child a guide who remembers exactly what it felt like to not know yet. Everyone gains something in the same moment.

Mixed-age, non-ranked groups produce something a single-age, graded classroom structurally cannot: a wide spread of skill levels in the same setting with no ladder to climb and no rank to defend. A child who is behind in one area is often ahead in another, and there is no single number trying to summarize them. Cooperation becomes the obvious strategy, not because anyone moralized about kindness, but because the structure itself makes cooperation the most useful and natural thing to do.

This pattern is observable and repeatable right now, in mixed-age, non-graded settings, including ones built specifically around removing the scarcity that conventional schools manufacture.

How sociocratic and democratic schools remove the scarcity

The Spokane Learning Co-op, a consent-based, sociocratic Self-Directed Education community on ten acres in Spokane, was built around a single founding commitment: treat children as full people, worthy of trust and respect, rather than as products to be measured and sorted. Removing rank was a natural consequence of taking that commitment seriously, not a separate goal someone had to argue for.

There are no grades at the Co-op. There is no honor roll, no reading level chart, no spelling bee. Children of different ages spend their days together outdoors, year round, in all weather, choosing what to pursue and how to pursue it. What emerges is what most parents already recognize from a good family dinner or a well-run job site: people of different ages and skill levels getting things done together, each contributing what they actually have to offer, with no one keeping a running scoreboard of who is “winning.” Older children mentor younger ones because that is what naturally happens when nobody is competing for the same narrow form of approval.

Democratic and sociocratic schools share this same founding commitment, even where their decision-making processes differ. A democratic school resolves community decisions by majority vote. A sociocratic school, like the Co-op, resolves them by consent, meaning a decision moves forward when no member has a reasoned objection, rather than when the largest group simply outvotes the rest. Both models start from the same premise: a child is a full person now, not a smaller, less finished version of an adult who has to earn full personhood through performance.

If children treated this way organize themselves around fairness, and if removing rank produces more cooperation rather than less, then competition in schools was never a necessary ingredient for learning. It was a choice made by the people running the institutions, and it served them well. A ranked, sortable student body is easier to manage than thirty individuals with thirty different needs. A child taught to chase approval from an authority figure is easier to control than a child who already trusts their own judgment. Ranking children was never really about helping them learn. It was about making a crowded room of children easier to run.

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Three things to do today and this week

Today: Catch the comparison before it lands.
For 24 hours, do not compare your child or your students to anyone else: not a sibling, not a classmate, not a number on a chart. Every time the urge to compare rises, pause and notice what you would say instead if ranking were not available to you. The goal is not to become a kinder narrator of the same ranking system. The goal is to discover how much of your own language was built around a scarcity you never actually chose.

This week: Spend real time somewhere with no ranking at all.
Find one mixed-age setting where children of different ages spend time together with no test, no grade, and no leaderboard: a homeschool co-op, a park day, or a visit to a community like the Spokane Learning Co-op. Watch closely who ends up teaching whom, and notice how rarely it has anything to do with age. This is what cooperative learning looks like when nobody engineered a winner into the gathering.

This week, bigger: Remove one ranking system completely.
Most fixes to a competitive structure leave the structure standing. A friendlier grading system is still a grading system. Choose one place where ranking currently happens in your home or classroom, a reading group sorted by level, a chore chart with prizes for “best,” a sport with constant standings, and remove it for two weeks without replacing it with anything new. Watch what children do once the structure that was constantly telling them where they stand simply disappears.

Summary

Competition in schools feels permanent because it is everywhere, but it is a man-made structure, not a law of nature. For most of human history, children learned cooperatively, in mixed-age groups, with no ranking attached to the process at all.

The research on childhood play and the lived example of communities built without ranked grades point to the same conclusion. Remove the manufactured scarcity, and cooperation is what children default to, because sharing was never actually in competition with their own success in the first place.

The Spokane Learning Co-op, run as a consent-based, sociocratic community, shows what becomes possible when a school is built on the simple premise that children deserve to be treated as full people. Children do not need to be ranked to learn. They need adults willing to trust that cooperation, not competition, was the original design.

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Where did you first learn that someone else’s success meant less for you? Tell us in the comments.

Bibliography

Gray, Peter. Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life. New York: Basic Books, 2013.

A teacher commented on a recent article that alternatives to conventional school are prohibitively expensive and require a full time adult caregiver. He is not alone in thinking this. It is the first objection nearly every parent raises, often before they have looked at a single number. The objection sounds like math. It is not. The real answer has little to do with a bigger paycheck and everything to do with a village, the thing every family used to have and almost no family has now.

This article is for the parent who reads about self-directed education, feels something open up in her chest, and is about to close the tab because she has already decided the door is not open to her. Wait. Stay with me for one more paragraph, because I think you have decided too fast. Maybe you are a single mom who cannot work from home and cannot afford private tuition, who has concluded, with real grief, that this is simply not an option for people like you. I want to challenge that conclusion. The financial pressure is real, but the conclusion was built on a frame handed to you by the very system you are trying to leave.

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The Hidden Cost of “Free” School

Conventional school is not free. Every family already knows this, because it shows up on a property tax bill or a payroll stub whether or not a single child in the household ever sets foot in a classroom. That cost is visible, expected, and budgeted for at the level of an entire community, which is precisely why it never feels like a personal financial decision the way enrolling in something else does.

That visible tax cost is real, and it is not the whole bill. Underneath it sits a second cost that never appears on any government ledger, because no one has figured out how to itemize it. It shows up in rising rates of childhood anxiety and depression that pediatric researchers have tracked climbing for decades. It shows up in a teaching profession with attrition so severe that researcher Doris Santoro coined the term demoralization to describe what is driving experienced, capable teachers out of classrooms, the slow erosion of the ability to act on their own values. It shows up in the testing and remediation industry, a sector that profits directly from standardizing childhood into measurable units. It shows up in the adult years of millions of people now spending money on therapy to recover a sense of self-worth that was never supposed to be conditional on a grade in the first place.

No one receives an itemized invoice for any of this. It arrives later, in a doctor’s office, in a resignation letter, in a quiet moment when a grown adult realizes they have spent their whole life performing for approval instead of living for meaning. The tax dollars were always visible. This second cost is the one that stays hidden, distributed across years and across individual households so that the family standing at the schoolhouse door in August never has to weigh it against anything else.

Compare that to the family considering self-directed education. Every cost is visible up front. That visibility feels like expense. It is actually honesty, and honesty is rarely what gets chosen when the alternative is comfortable invisibility.

Why “I Can’t Afford It” Is the System Talking, Not You

Here is the quiet assumption sitting underneath the affordability objection: that conventional school is the neutral, default option, and anything else is the thing that requires justification, budget, and proof of feasibility.

Ivan Illich, writing in Deschooling Society in 1971, argued that modern institutions train people to mistake the institution for the only legitimate path to the thing the institution claims to provide, in this case, learning itself. Once that substitution takes hold, anything outside the institution starts to feel risky, fringe, and unaffordable by definition, regardless of what it actually costs.

This is an easy trap to fall into because the entire system is built to make it feel like common sense. The household already pays for conventional school through taxes, a cost spread across an entire community and paid whether or not it is ever consciously weighed against anything else. Self-directed education, by contrast, asks a family to look at its full cost at once, in dollars they have to find this month, on top of taxes they are already paying. That ordering makes one option feel free and the other feel expensive, even when the tax-funded option is also carrying a second, uncounted cost that never shows up on the same bill.

That is not a measure of which option actually costs more. It is a measure of which costs are hidden and which ones are not.

The barrier was never the actual cost of the alternative. The barrier is the belief that school is the default and everything else requires justification.

What Self-Directed Education Actually Costs

Self-directed education is not one price point. It is a range of models, and several of them cost very little.

A homeschool cooperative is often the lowest cost entry point. A handful of families pool resources, rotate supervision days, and share a single rented room or someone’s living room. The primary cost is time, distributed across several adults instead of carried by one.

A community-based model expands that further, with families, mentors, and sometimes local businesses or libraries offering space, skill sharing, and supervised time in exchange for participation rather than tuition. These models exist in cities and small towns across the country, often built quietly by parents who simply decided to stop waiting for permission.

A dedicated self-directed learning center, like the Spokane Learning Co-op, the only outdoor, consent-based, sociocratic self-directed education center in Washington State, sits at the more structured end of the spectrum. It serves children from one to eighteen on ten acres in Spokane, governed by sociocracy, a decision-making process where children and adults hold real voice in how the community runs itself. A center like this carries real operating costs, the same way any dedicated space does. It is also the kind of model that grows directly out of community organizing, families coming together, pooling what they have, and building something none of them could have built alone.

Some of these models still cost real money. The point is that the range is wide, and the lowest cost models depend on exactly the resource conventional school quietly assumes families do not need from each other anymore: a village.

The Single Mom Question, Answered Honestly

If you are a single parent working full time with young children who cannot be left unsupervised, supervision during work hours is the whole problem. Telling you to simply pull your children out of school without addressing it does not solve anything.

The solution is not for you to individually solve a problem that was never meant to be solved individually. The solution is the rebuilding of mutual aid, people sharing resources, time, and care directly with each other, no money changing hands, because they have agreed that nobody in the group goes it alone. This is closer to the original human default than the modern nuclear family, which absorbs every burden alone, ever was.

A mutual aid arrangement among parents can look like rotating supervision days, one working parent’s children cared for by a non-working or differently scheduled parent on Mondays, in exchange for reciprocal care another day. It can look like a retired grandparent in the network trading supervision for help with errands or home repairs. It can look like five families splitting the cost of one part time caregiver for fifteen hours a week, turning five separate, unaffordable arrangements into one shared, affordable one.

None of this requires you to have a village already. It requires you to start building one, and that work, while real, is far more achievable than most parents believe, because the infrastructure for finding other people who want exactly this already exists.

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Mutual Aid Is Not a New Idea. It Is an Old One We Were Talked Out Of

The naturalist Peter Kropotkin spent years studying cooperation in the animal world and in human communities, publishing his findings in Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution in 1902. His central argument ran directly against the assumption that survival is primarily a contest between isolated individuals. Kropotkin found that cooperation, not competition, was the more consistent driver of survival across species and across human societies, particularly in times of scarcity.

That finding matters here because the affordability objection rests entirely on a competition framework. It assumes each family must individually out-earn the cost of leaving school, alone, in isolation, as if community were a nostalgic extra rather than a load bearing structure. Kropotkin’s research points the other way, toward cooperation as the option more likely to hold up under real pressure.

Self-directed education researcher Peter Gray has documented something similar in his work on how children learned for nearly all of human history, embedded in multi-age, multi-adult communities where supervision, mentorship, and resources were distributed across many people rather than carried by one exhausted parent. The nuclear family, carrying every cost of child rearing alone, is a recent and historically unusual arrangement, not the timeless norm it is so often assumed to be.

What Intentional Community Looks Like Right Now, All Over the World

This is the part of the article I most want you to read carefully, because it is the part that turns grief into a plan.

Intentional communities already exist, right now, in numbers most people never learn about. The Foundation for Intentional Community, a nonprofit that has supported this movement for more than three decades, maintains a free directory listing over 1,200 intentional communities, including ecovillages, cohousing, coliving arrangements, communes, shared homes, and housing cooperatives. Nearly half a million people visit that directory every year looking for exactly this.

Cohousing communities cluster private homes around shared common space, often including shared childcare and meals, while families keep their own income and property. Ecovillages organize around shared land and labor, frequently including shared education for children as a built-in feature. Some communities are explicitly built around shared parenting and homeschooling cooperation as their founding purpose.

You do not have to move in order to make this a reality for your family. You can start with the smallest possible version of it, a handful of families in your own neighborhood who agree to share what they have. The Foundation for Intentional Community even offers online courses for people who want to learn how to join, start, and grow an intentional community, built by people who have already done the trial and error so you do not have to start from nothing.

How to Start a Village When You Don’t Have One Yet

You do not need a deed, a charter, or a meeting agenda to begin. You need three families and one honest conversation.

Start by naming what you actually need out loud to people you trust, even partially. Not a fully formed plan, simply the truth, that you wish you had people to share this with. Grief stated out loud invites company. Grief held privately gets mistaken for a personal failure to plan well enough, which is exactly the lie this entire system depends on you believing.

Then look at what already exists near you before assuming you have to build from scratch. Visit the Foundation for Intentional Community’s directory at ic.org and search by region. Look at their forming communities listings, where new groups, sometimes only two or three families deep, are actively looking for others to join them at the ground floor. Spend just one hour checking out the website this week. You may discover you are not starting a village at all. You may be joining one that is already underway.

If nothing exists yet in your area, start absurdly small. One shared supervision day a week between two families is a village with two members. It grows from there.

The Spokane Learning Co-op as a Living Example

The Spokane Learning Co-op did not begin as a finished institution with a budget line for everything. It began with me, a teacher, spending a year having coffee with parent after parent, asking what they wished existed. Those conversations turned into a grant from VELA, funding that helped get the doors open, but the grant came after the relationships, not before them. The structure that emerged is consent-based and sociocratic, meaning children and adults share real decision-making power over how the space runs. It now serves children from one to eighteen on ten acres in Spokane.

Money mattered. It always does. But the thing that actually built the Co-op was a year of showing up to talk with people, one cup of coffee at a time, before there was a grant or a site or a single child enrolled.

You Are Allowed to Grieve the Village You Never Had

If you read this and felt something tighten in your chest, that feeling is grief, for a kind of support that should have surrounded you and your children from the beginning, but did not.

That grief is real. You are allowed to mourn a village that was taken from families generations before you were born, replaced with the expectation that you would simply manage alone and call your exhaustion normal. You are also allowed to believe, at the same time, that this village can still be yours. Not someday, in some distant ideal future. Beginning this week, with three families and one honest conversation.

Self-directed education was never the luxury. It is the return of something that was taken, and the way back to it runs through the same thing that has always carried people through hard seasons, other people, chosen on purpose, sharing the weight together.

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What to Do This Week

Find your three. Not a co-op, not a curriculum, not yet. Three families this week, the ones who say “I wish I could pull my kid out” with their eyes more than their mouths at pickup. Isolation makes this cost feel individual and impossible. Three families is where every co-op and every learning center on record actually began.

Take one hour at ic.org. The Foundation for Intentional Community’s directory, forming communities board, and courses already exist. You do not have to invent any of this from scratch. Spend one hour this week reading what is already near you, or what others built starting from nothing at all.

Name the grief, out loud, to someone. Tell one person this week that you are mourning a village you never had, and that you believe it could still be yours. Grief spoken out loud becomes the first thread of the very network that solves this. The Spokane Learning Co-op did not start with money. It started with people willing to say this to each other first.

In Summary

The most common objection to self-directed education, that it is too expensive and requires a stay-at-home parent, is conventional school’s own propaganda, repeated back as fact. School only looks like the affordable default because its true costs are hidden and paid later, in mental health, in teacher demoralization, and in adults spending decades recovering a sense of worth that was never supposed to be conditional in the first place.

Real alternatives exist at every income level, from homeschool cooperatives built on shared supervision, to community-based programs, to dedicated centers like the consent-based, sociocratic Spokane Learning Co-op. For families who feel genuinely priced out, the deeper solution sits in the rebuilding of mutual aid and intentional community, resources that already exist worldwide and are easier to find than most parents believe.

This is not a fringe idea waiting to be proven. It is an old idea, documented as far back as Kropotkin’s 1902 research on cooperation as a driver of survival, returning to meet a generation of parents who were taught to believe they had to do this alone.

If this article put words to something you’ve been carrying for too long, share it with one parent who needs permission to stop blaming themselves for the cost of something that was never supposed to be a solo project.

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Subscribe to The Joy of Learning for more honest reckonings with what conventional school costs us and what we can build instead.

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And tell me in the comments, what would your village look like, if you had one? Who are the three families you would call first?

Bibliography

Foundation for Intentional Community. “About FIC.” Accessed June 2026. https://www.ic.org/

Gray, Peter. Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life. New York: Basic Books, 2013.

Illich, Ivan. Deschooling Society. New York: Harper & Row, 1971.

Kropotkin, Peter. Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution. London: William Heinemann, 1902.

Santoro, Doris A. Demoralized: Why Teachers Leave the Profession They Love and How They Can Stay. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press, 2018.

For nearly all of human history, children learned inside the daily life of their community, not inside an institution built to sort and rank them. They learned by watching, helping, asking, and being trusted with real responsibility, the way every child learns the things that matter to the people raising them. Compulsory schooling, in the form most of us went through, is a recent invention, built less than two hundred years ago to produce obedient workers and soldiers. It has worn the costume of inevitability so well that most of us never stopped to ask whether it was the only way, or even a good one. This article asks the question that matters most once you see that clearly: what do we build instead?

What School Actually Teaches You to Remember

If a textbook tried to teach cooking the way it teaches everything else, it might read something like this:

This is what conventional schooling does to nearly everything it touches. A living, breathing human activity, something people have done since long before written language existed, gets reduced to a date, a name, and four answer choices, one of which the test will accept as correct. Learning was never meant to be reductionist. Knowledge and skills practiced, refined, and passed down for generations by real people solving real problems in front of them. School cannot teach that origin story, so it invents a tidier, deader one instead.

The real question was never what children learn. Mathematics, science, language, history: every human community has engaged with these in some form, because curiosity about the world is not a school invention. The real question is how a child comes to know them. Whether the knowledge arrives as something to be memorized for a test and then dumped from lack of use, or as something earned through genuine pursuit and kept for life.

A carpenter does not learn geometry from a textbook imposed by an institution. A carpenter learns geometry because they want to build something true, and the math arrives in service of that want. A child in a farming community centuries ago learning to work the land was not absorbing one narrow fact. They were learning material science, mechanical reasoning, weather prediction, and risk assessment, all at once, all tied to something real, all retained for a lifetime because the knowledge belonged to them. Ask any adult whether they still use the algebra they memorized for a test. Most cannot. Algebra arrived the way the multiple choice question about cooking arrives, detached from any reason to keep it, and detachment is what lets knowledge slip away.

So what does school actually teach you to remember, after twelve years and thousands of hours? Not cooking. Not algebra. Not even history. It teaches you to remember that the correct answer belongs to someone else, that it will be handed to you on a schedule you did not choose, and that the moment the bell rings, you are free to forget the rest. That is the one lesson that sticks. It is the only one school ever fully succeeds at teaching.

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Children Need Structure. They Don’t Need a Fence Built Without Them

A frequent and thoughtful objection raised by educators inside conventional schooling pushes back on exactly this point. Children do need something, the argument goes. They need structure, adults, correction, and access to knowledge they would not stumble onto alone. Without that, what stops a child from drifting through twelve years the way the multiple choice cooking question drifts through a single class period, present but never truly learned?

No one serious is arguing that children should be left without adults, without structure, or without access to the wider world. Every consent-based, sociocratic Self-Directed Education center, including the Spokane Learning Co-op, is full of adults, full of structure, full of deliberate access to real knowledge and real tools. The disagreement was never about whether structure should exist. It is about who gets a say in building it.

Structure built around a child by the people raising that child, with the child’s own input on what it looks like, is a very different thing from structure imposed by an institution that never asked the child anything. This is what natural learning looks like in its purest form: a child supported by adults and peers who are genuinely paying attention, not managed by a system designed for crowds. Elements of the more progressive conventional schools, such as project-based learning, real partnerships with outside organizations, and students discovering fields they would never have found alone, are genuinely good things, and they exist there because of educators who fight hard for them within a system built to resist that fight. Good things can clearly happen inside conventional schooling, through extraordinary individual effort. The question is why we keep asking individual educators to wage that fight at all, when there is a model where the fight is unnecessary because the structure was built with the child from the start, not imposed on them from outside it.

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What Freedom Actually Looks Like Up Close

There is a particular fear that comes up often when people picture children given real freedom. The fear is that a child left free to “just run around feral” will not run toward anything at all. They will simply run, presumably in circles, in a theoretical emptiness devoid of other people, things, materials, or ideas.

That image is genuinely unsettling, and anyone who has watched a truly neglected child go quiet and far away is right to take it seriously. It is also not what Self-Directed Education is. A child in a community-based Self-Directed Education environment like Summerhill, a Sudbury school, or the Spokane Learning Co-op is surrounded by mixed-age peers building forts and inventing games; by adults who are ready for all the conversations that come up and who notice what lights them up; by ready-to-go resources, tools, and materials; and, of course, by the real responsibility of being part of a real community. The fear of feral children mistakes freedom for isolation. What actually produces a withdrawn child is not freedom. It is being left without a community to catch what they bring back, whether that child is at a desk or in a field.

Purpose arrives the way it always has for human children: through relationship, through being trusted with something that matters, through watching people they admire do work that means something. Give a child both freedom and a community paying close attention, and curiosity finds direction the way water finds a path downhill.

The Story We Were Told About Children

Underneath nearly every objection to this idea sits one assumption that rarely gets examined directly: that children, left to their own devices, will become unruly or empty, and must therefore be tightly controlled from the earliest possible age.

Centuries ago, European philosophy built a story about human nature in its raw state being brutish and dangerous. That story became the justification for increasingly strict control over both adults and children, and the strict control then got pointed to as evidence the story was true all along, a loop with no outside reference point. Anthropologists and historians examining the actual record of human societies, including the recent work of David Graeber and David Wengrow in The Dawn of Everything, have found this story does not hold up. Societies that European colonizers encountered often raised children with far more autonomy and far less discipline, and produced capable, grounded adults all the same.

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What We Can Build Instead, and How to Build It

Building a real learning community where children are respected as real people does not mean waiting for conventional schooling to fix itself, and it does not mean waiting for permission. It means three things, starting this week.

Find or start a circle of people willing to ask the bigger question together.
One family choosing differently is meaningful. A community choosing differently is what actually shifts what feels possible for everyone watching. If a consent-based center exists near you, show up. If one does not, find two or three other adults willing to ask what it would take to build one.

Bring your hardest question into the comments, the one you have not said out loud anywhere else.
This argument gets stronger because people argue with it. Every objection raised here started as a real comment from a real reader who cared enough to push back. If something in this article still does not sit right with you, that disagreement is useful, not just to me but to everyone reading alongside you. Say the thing you are still not sure about. It will shape a future article.

Bring one more adult into the circle this week, specifically someone who is afraid of what freedom will do to a child.
Not to win an argument with them. To let them watch. Fear of children’s freedom rarely survives sustained contact with a child who has actually had it.

What This Was Never About

This was never about choosing the better school. This is about a community of adults deciding, together, that children do not need to be managed into becoming capable, curious, and kind. They need to be trusted into it, the way human communities trusted their children for nearly all of human history, before anyone built a fence and called it civilization.

Conventional schools will keep asking exhausted, devoted teachers to fight for every inch of trust their students deserve, one classroom at a time, against a system built to resist them. Self-Directed Education starts from the place that fight was always trying to reach.

If this gave language to something you have been trying to build for years without knowing how to explain it, send it to one person who needs to hear it can be built, not just imagined.

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If you want the next article in this conversation before it goes anywhere else, subscribe. This is where I keep building the argument, one objection at a time, alongside everyone willing to push back on it.

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I want to know what you are building, not just what you are walking away from, and I want your hardest objection too. Tell me in the comments. I read every one.

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Bibliography

Deci, Edward L., and Richard M. Ryan. Intrinsic Motivation and Self-Determination in Human Behavior. New York: Plenum, 1985.

Gatto, John Taylor. Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling. Gabriola Island: New Society Publishers, 1992.

Graeber, David, and David Wengrow. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021.

Gray, Peter. Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life. New York: Basic Books, 2013.

Öcalan, Abdullah. The Sociology of Freedom: Manifesto of the Democratic Civilization, Volume III. Oakland: PM Press, 2020.

You were not born afraid of math. You were not born hating to read. You were not born believing you are not a creative person.

Somewhere along the way, something changed. Maybe it was a timed test that left your hands shaking. Maybe it was a red mark on an essay that made you stop writing for fun. Maybe it was a teacher’s sigh, a label, a reading group that told you exactly where you ranked among your classmates.

For nearly all of human history, none of this was done to children. Tthe thing we now call education, in the form we know it, did not exist. Learning was simply part of living. No one needed a separate category for it.

This article is about what changed, when it changed, and why. It is about a word, enclosure, that describes something that happened to land a few hundred years ago and something that happened to childhood not long after. Most importantly, it is about what it means for you, and for your children, and what can be reclaimed.

What Childhood Looked Like Before School Existed

Peter Gray, a research professor at Boston College who has spent decades studying how children learn, has documented something that should reorient how we think about education entirely. For most of the time humans have existed, children learned everything they needed without anything that resembled a school. There were no classrooms, no curricula, no grades, and no separation between “learning time” and the rest of life.

Anthropologists who have lived among hunter-gatherer communities around the world have asked the adults there a simple question: how do your children learn? The answers, gathered across different cultures and different continents, converge on the same description. Children learn by watching, by playing, and by exploring the world around them, at their own pace, on their own terms, free to do so from morning until night.

This was a functioning system, refined over hundreds of thousands of years, producing adults with extraordinary skill, knowledge, and capacity for cooperation.

The political theorist Abdullah Öcalan, writing about the earliest forms of human social organization, describes these communities as built around solidarity rather than hierarchy, around shared purpose rather than competition for scarce resources. Children belonged to the community as members, not as a separate category to be managed, trained, or evaluated. Their learning happened simply because they lived alongside the adults around them, woven into the ordinary fabric of a shared life, with nothing imposed from outside.

Hold onto that fact, because everything else in this article depends on it. For most of human history, no child needed anyone to teach them how to learn, because no one had yet separated learning from living.

How Children Learn When Nothing Gets in the Way

Modern research keeps arriving at the same place those communities already understood.

Patricia Kuhl, a researcher at the University of Washington, has shown that infants begin processing the sounds of language before they are born, learning their mother’s voice through bone conduction in the womb. By six months, babies can distinguish the basic sounds of their native language. By the age of five, most children have a vocabulary of thousands of words and can build grammatically complex sentences, all without a single worksheet or vocabulary quiz. As the neurobiologist Lise Eliot has explained, language is instinctive because the brain has evolved dedicated circuits for acquiring it, the same way it has evolved circuits for vision.

Curiosity works the same way. Researchers Gruber, Gelman, and Ranganath, publishing in the journal Neuron, found that when people feel curious about something, the brain’s reward circuits activate, the same circuits that respond to food. Curiosity makes learning feel better, and it makes the brain better at holding onto what it learns.

Self-Determination Theory, developed by psychologists Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, describes the conditions under which this natural drive flourishes or collapses. When people experience a sense of autonomy, competence, and connection to others, intrinsic motivation grows. When those conditions are replaced by control, comparison, and isolation, intrinsic motivation can disappear almost entirely, sometimes within a matter of years.

Children arrive already curious and driven to make sense of the world, requiring no installation and no instruction manual. The hunter-gatherer communities Peter Gray studied simply let this happen, with no theory of motivation required.

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The Birthright That Got Enclosed

If this is true, and the evidence suggests it is, a question follows naturally. What happened? How did something this deeply built into human nature come to be treated as something that must be installed, measured, and graded?

The answer lives in a single word: enclosure.

A few hundred years ago in England, most land was shared. Families could graze animals, gather firewood, and grow food on land that belonged to the whole community, land people called the commons. Over time, that land was fenced off. Walls went up. Land that had belonged to everyone for generations became the property of a few, and the families who depended on it were locked out. Historians call this process enclosure, and its effects reached far beyond agriculture. People who had once had access to what they needed without payment now had to sell their labor for wages just to reach resources they had previously shared freely. The fences separated people from fields, from each other, and from ways of living that had worked for centuries.

Something similar happened to childhood, though it took longer and left no walls you could point to. Before conventional school existed, learning was part of the commons. It happened everywhere, all the time, inside families, inside work, inside play, inside the ordinary rhythm of community life. No one owned it. No one paid for it. No one needed permission to learn something new.

Conventional school built a fence around that. It took something that had belonged to everyone and placed it inside a building, on a schedule, under the authority of an institution. Access now requires enrollment. Progress now requires approval. These fences are invisible, and they function exactly the same way. They decide who gets in, what counts, and on whose terms.

What is called education in a society organized around competition and production is an enclosure of something that was once a birthright.

This is the lens Öcalan applies to the larger arc of human history: a small group gains control over resources that once belonged to everyone, then builds an ideology that makes the new arrangement look natural, inevitable, even beneficial. Applied to childhood, the ideology sounds like this: learning is “difficult,” children must be made to do it, and an institution staffed by trained professionals is the only place where it can happen “properly.”

That ideology has been remarkably effective. It has been repeated for so long, by so many well-meaning people, that it now feels like common sense, regardless of whether or not it is actually true.

The Marks Every Adult Still Carries

If enclosure is real, it should leave evidence. It does, and most adults are carrying it without even knowing it.

Consider math. Jo Boaler, a professor of mathematics education at Stanford, has documented that roughly half of American adults report feeling anxious about math. The cause is not a lack of natural ability. Boaler’s research points to a specific source: timed testing, introduced to children as young as five. Neuroscientists Ian Lyons and Sian Beilock found something remarkable when they studied math-anxious adults. The act of simply anticipating a math problem activated the posterior insula, a region of the brain associated with the experience of physical pain. The anxiety is encoded in the body itself.

Consider reading. Some of the writers history now considers among its finest had brutal experiences in school. F. Scott Fitzgerald was dismissed from his school at age twelve, his early writing dismissed by a teacher as barely literate. George Bernard Shaw compared his schooling to imprisonment. The Nobel laureate Doris Lessing left school at fourteen and later described what happened there as a kind of indoctrination. These were children with obvious ability, whose relationship to learning had been damaged by an institution that could not recognize what it was looking at.

Consider the reflex so many adults still carry without noticing it: the question “will this be on the test?” Alfie Kohn’s review of decades of research on grading found that grades reliably do three things. They reduce interest in the subject being graded. They push students toward the easiest possible task, since intellectual risk becomes dangerous the moment it is being scored. They reduce the quality of thinking itself, replacing the question “is this true?” with the question “is this what they want?”

Stanford researcher Mark Lepper tracked this decline directly, finding that intrinsic motivation falls in a straight line from third grade through eighth grade. The longer a child stays inside the enclosure, the more completely the fence does its work.

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This Was Never a Personal Failure

None of this happened because you lacked intelligence, discipline, or talent. The institution was simply doing exactly what it was built to do.

John Taylor Gatto spent decades as a public school teacher in New York City and was named New York State Teacher of the Year before resigning publicly, in an open letter published in the Wall Street Journal. In his acceptance speech, he described what he had come to see as the real curriculum of school, regardless of subject. He called it confusion: students moving through disconnected fragments of information with no relationship to each other or to their own lives. He called it class position: students learning, through tracking and ranking, exactly where they stood in a hierarchy. He called it provisional self-esteem: a sense of worth that depends entirely on someone else’s judgment.

Ivan Illich, writing in Deschooling Society, argued that schooling teaches people to confuse the experience of being taught with the experience of learning, and a diploma with actual competence. The result, he wrote, is a deep uncertainty about one’s own ability to think, decide, or act without an expert’s approval.

“Genius is as common as dirt.”

— John Taylor Gatto

Gatto wrote that near the end of his teaching career, arguing that society suppresses this genius because it has never figured out how to manage a population of people who have genuinely learned to think for themselves.

The damage so many adults carry was never a sign that something was wrong with them. It was a sign that the institution was functioning exactly as designed, on millions of children, year after year, for generations.

Self-Directed Education and the Work of Reclamation

There is a place, right now, where children grow up without this fence ever being built around them.

The Spokane Learning Co-op sits on ten acres in Spokane, Washington, and serves children from age one through eighteen. It operates outdoors, in every season Washington has to offer, all year long. There is no curriculum imposed from above, no grading, no ranking. Decisions about the community are made by consent rather than majority rule, which means a decision does not move forward until no one has a serious objection to it. Children are not divided into grade levels based on age. A six-year-old and a sixteen-year-old might work side by side on the same project, each contributing what they actually have to offer.

Visitors sometimes expect to see chaos. What they find instead is children who know exactly what they are doing, moving toward things that interest them with a kind of focus rarely associated with childhood anymore. Nothing here has taught them yet that their curiosity needs to be managed, scheduled, or earned.

This matters for two reasons. First, for any parent wondering whether a different way is even possible, that this is real and not a mere thought experiment. Children who grow up inside Self-Directed Education communities do not arrive at adulthood carrying the marks described earlier in this article.

Second, and just as important, it matters for adults who cannot change anything about their own children’s schooling tomorrow. The reclamation can begin with you, this week, regardless of what any institution does.

Start by naming your own enclosure. Write down three things you currently believe about your own abilities, the kind of belief that sounds like “I am not a math person” or “I am not creative.” For each one, try to remember the first time you were told it, or shown it, through a grade, a test, or a comment from a teacher. Most people find the moment within minutes. What you are looking at is a verdict an institution handed down at a specific moment, for reasons that had nothing to do with what you were actually capable of.

Then, give a child in your life one full day with nothing assigned. No worksheets, no required reading, no schedule. Simply watch, and write down what they choose to do, for how long, and how they seem while doing it. Parents who try this often expect boredom. What they usually find is a child who knows exactly what they want to do, and pursues it with more focus than any worksheet ever produced.

Finally, find the commons. If you are near Spokane, visit the Spokane Learning Co-op and watch a normal day unfold. If you live elsewhere, look for a community built on the same principles, consent rather than control, exploration rather than assignment, and see it for yourself. The fences around childhood were built over centuries. Inside your own family, they do not have to last that long.

Summary

For most of human history, children were never separated from the work of learning. They lived inside community, and learning was woven into belonging, purpose, and relationship, not delivered to them by an institution standing apart from daily life.

What gets called education in a society built on production and ranking is the enclosure of that birthright. It took something children once did as a matter of course and turned it into a system of assessment, comparison, and control. The math anxiety, the aversion to reading, the belief that you are not a creative person, and the reflex to ask whether something will be on the test are evidence of that enclosure, not flaws in you.

None of this is a personal failure. It happened on a civilizational scale, and naming it changes what comes next. Recovery is possible for adults, and for children, places like the Spokane Learning Co-op already show what learning looks like when the fence is never built. Choosing that, for your children or for yourself, means taking back what was always yours.

If You Saw Yourself in This

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Someone you know is still walking around believing they are “not a math person” or “not a reader,” and they have never once stopped to ask where that belief came from. Share this with them. It might be the first time anyone has told them the problem was never them.

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Join the Conversation

What is the belief you are still carrying, the one that started with a single moment in a classroom and never left? Tell us about it in the comments. Whether you are an adult still living with the mark of it, or a parent watching one start to form in your own child, you are not alone in this, and saying it out loud is part of how it loses its grip.

Bibliography

Boaler, Jo. Research on math anxiety and timed testing. Stanford University.

Deci, Edward L., and Ryan, Richard M. Self-Determination Theory.

Eliot, Lise. Research on neurobiology of language development.

Fitzgerald, F. Scott; Shaw, George Bernard; Lessing, Doris. Biographical accounts of early schooling experiences.

Gatto, John Taylor. “The Seven Lesson Schoolteacher,” New York State Teacher of the Year acceptance address, and resignation letter, Wall Street Journal.

Gray, Peter. Free to Learn and related research on play, curiosity, and learning in hunter-gatherer societies. Boston College.

Gruber, M. J., Gelman, B. D., and Ranganath, C. “States of Curiosity Modulate Hippocampus-Dependent Learning via the Dopaminergic Circuit.” Neuron.

Illich, Ivan. Deschooling Society.

Kohn, Alfie. Research synthesis on the effects of grading on motivation and learning.

Kuhl, Patricia. Research on infant language acquisition. University of Washington.

Lepper, Mark. Research on the decline of intrinsic motivation from third to eighth grade. Stanford University.

Lyons, Ian, and Beilock, Sian. Brain imaging research on math anxiety and the posterior insula. University of Chicago.

Öcalan, Abdullah. Manifesto for a Democratic Civilization, Volume 1.

A reader left a comment on a recent article here that made me feel, for a moment, less alone. She wrote: “We know the answers but nothing is changing. Capitalism benefits from the public school system we currently have. Capitalism requires that the majority of students learn to comply. That will not change until we dismantle capitalism.”

She is right. She is also right that nothing is changing. There is documented historical evidence explaining exactly why nothing is changing, and why nothing can change from inside the system.

In 1969, Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner published Teaching as a Subversive Activity, a book so confrontational that its cover showed a red apple with a lit fuse coming out of the stem. Postman had spent years watching what students actually do in classrooms: sit, listen, and repeat back what they have been told. They are almost never asked to observe, question, or think for themselves. He called the ability to recognize and reject received nonsense a “crap detector,” and he argued that schools were systematically producing its opposite. The reader who left that comment had somehow held onto hers. Most people don’t.

The compulsory schooling model that manages American children today was not designed to educate them. It was designed to prevent the kind of people who might challenge power from ever becoming that kind of people in the first place. Call it what it is: documented history. It is happening in your child’s classroom today.

Children enter school as question marks and leave as full stops

Postman borrowed that phrase from an old saying, and it is more precise than it sounds. Children are born with a nearly inexhaustible drive to figure things out. Watch a two-year-old with a cardboard box. Watch a four-year-old with a puddle. The questions come in cascades. The experimentation is relentless. Learning, in its natural form, looks like barely contained joy.

By the time those same children are in third grade, the situation is entirely different. They have learned to wait. They have learned to ask permission before they speak, to check their answers against the teacher’s answer key before deciding what to believe, to measure their worth in letter grades and gold stars. By middle school, many of them have stopped asking questions altogether, except to ask what will be on the test.

School, Postman and Weingartner argued, is not primarily a place where content is transmitted. It is a place where a particular way of being is rehearsed, hour after hour, year after year. The medium, as Postman put it, is the message. The structure of the classroom, not what is written on the board, not what is printed on the worksheet, is the real curriculum. Sitting in rows teaches children that knowledge has a source, and they are not it. It teaches them that the person at the front of the room is the only one worth facing. Bells teach that your engagement with any subject is regimented and externally controlled. Grades teach that your value is subjective and assigned by someone else. None of this is accidental.

The medium is the message, and the message is obedience

Postman and Weingartner drew a comparison that was uncomfortable in 1969 and remains uncomfortable today. They noted the striking similarities between the structure of the conventional school and the structure of a mass-production factory: the five-day week, the careful division of labor for both teachers and students in a place that calls itself a community, the high premium on conformity, the deep suspicion of originality, and, most significantly, the administration's concern for product rather than process.

The factory was the blueprint. In the nineteenth century, Prussia developed a system of compulsory mass schooling designed explicitly to serve the state’s need for obedient soldiers and productive factory workers. The model spread across Europe and into the United States because it served those in power well. It produced people who would follow instructions, tolerate monotony, defer to authority, and perform on command. John Taylor Gatto, who won New York City Teacher of the Year three consecutive years before resigning in a letter published in The Wall Street Journal, spent the rest of his career documenting what that model actually teaches.

“Genius is as common as dirt. We suppress our genius because we haven't yet figured out how to manage a population of educated people.” — John Taylor Gatto

Gatto identified these seven lessons that every conventional school teaches, regardless of the good intentions of individual teachers.

1. Confusion: everything is taught out of context, disconnected from meaning or use.

2. Class position: children learn their place in the hierarchy and are discouraged from leaving it.

3. Indifference: the ringing of bells trains children not to care too deeply about anything.

4. Emotional dependency: children learn to look to authority figures for permission and validation.

5. Intellectual dependency: students wait for experts to tell them what to think.

6. Provisional self-esteem: a child’s sense of worth is made contingent on external evaluation.

7. Constant surveillance: nothing is done without being observed, judged, and recorded.

None of this appears in any curriculum guide. Every one of those lessons is delivered by the structure of the institution with perfect consistency, year after year, regardless of how gifted or dedicated any individual teacher may be.

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What Gatto documented that no one in education policy wants to say out loud

Ivan Illich, writing in Deschooling Society in 1971, put the sharpest point on what Gatto had documented. Illich argued that the school system teaches students to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, and a diploma with competence. The result is what he called psychological impotence: a population that has been trained to believe it cannot learn, think, or act without institutional authorization. A population like that does not challenge the systems that govern it. It asks those systems for permission.

This is the function that the commenter was pointing to, and she was right to call it by its name. The hidden curriculum, which Postman named, which Gatto mapped in seven devastating lessons, and which Illich traced to its institutional roots, exists because schools are working exactly as they were designed to work. When parents, teachers, and reformers argue over curriculum content, classroom management strategies, or “the one right way to teach kids how to read,” they are polishing the bars of a cage and calling it progress.

Why curriculum reform cannot fix a system that is not broken

Every few years, a new reform movement rises with a promising name. No Child Left Behind. Race to the Top. Common Core. Social-emotional learning. Each reform movement reaches through the bars, adjusts something, and walks away. The graduation rates shift slightly. The test score gaps widen or narrow by a few percentage points. The headlines declare progress or failure. School is still school.

This is what Postman understood in 1969 and what remains just as true today. Reform movements accept the premise of the institution. They argue about what should be taught, but only within the narrow corridor of subjects the institution has already decided are worth knowing, as though music, philosophy, ecology, carpentry, grief, and joy are not knowledge at all, and how it should be tested, and who should be held accountable. They do not ask what the institution is for, or whether what it is for is good for children. That question is, in Postman’s exact framing, the subversive one.

“It is quite probable that the most original problem-solving activity students engage in at school is related to the invention of systems for beating the system.” — Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner

The political theorist James C. Scott would have recognized what Postman observed in classrooms. In Weapons of the Weak, his landmark study of Malaysian peasants living under systems of domination they could not openly challenge, Scott documented what he called everyday forms of resistance: foot-dragging, feigned ignorance, quiet sabotage, and other forms of non-cooperation that subordinated people use when direct challenge is too costly. Students do the same thing. They work the system just enough to survive it. They figure out what teachers want to hear and they provide it, holding their actual thinking in reserve. That is what intellectual energy looks like when it has nowhere honest to go. It is not laziness. It is rational adaptation to an irrational environment.

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Self-Directed Education as a structural refusal, not a lifestyle choice

Self-Directed Education is not a gentler version of conventional school. It does not ask how to make the classroom more comfortable or the curriculum more engaging. It asks different questions entirely: What happens when children are trusted to direct their own learning? What happens when adults trust how learning has worked naturally for all of human history?

The research on that question, led by Peter Gray at Boston College, is clear. Children who have genuine control over what, when, and how they learn develop intrinsic motivation rather than dependence on external validation. They develop self-trust rather than self-doubt. They develop the capacity to pursue a question because it matters to them, not because someone will grade them on it. In other words, they develop exactly the qualities that the hidden curriculum is designed to suppress.

There are places where this is already happening. I know this because I built one.

The Spokane Learning Co-op, Washington State’s only outdoor, consent-based, sociocratic Self-Directed Education center serving children ages one through eighteen on ten acres in Spokane, was built by a teacher who knew that reform was useless. After teaching from preschool through university across five countries, she understood from the inside that the only way back home to natural learning was community-based Self-Directed Education. The Co-op operates without coercion, without grades, without bells, and without the hierarchy that Gatto named as one of the seven hidden lessons. Children there are already learning how to live in a free society by actually living it.

Centers like the Spokane Learning Co-op, alongside democratic schools and sociocratic learning communities across the country, are not reform movements. They do not argue with the institution. They build something outside it, on entirely different premises: that children are natural learners, that autonomy produces competence, and that a person who has never been trained to wait for permission does not need to unlearn that conditioning as an adult.

This is what the commenter who left that comment is really asking for. She does not want a better version of the system that requires compliance. She wants a world in which the next generation is not shaped by that system in the first place. Self-Directed Education is how that world gets built, one child at a time, in real places, right now.

Parents, here’s what you can do this week

Build a crap detector with your child, starting tonight.

Postman’s central demand of education was that it produce citizens capable of questioning received wisdom. Conventional schools are structurally designed to produce the opposite: children who wait for authority figures to tell them what is true, what matters, and what they are worth. You can begin undoing this at the dinner table tonight. Ask your child not “what did you learn today?” but “what did you wonder about today?” Ask “did anything your teacher say not make sense to you?” When they answer, do not redirect them toward the correct answer. Sit in the question with them. You are watching a naturally curious child be shaped into someone passive, compliant, and afraid to be wrong. What becomes possible instead is a child who trusts their own thinking, which is the one thing the system was built to prevent.

Stop waiting for the system to give you permission to leave it.

The most common thing parents say when they are considering alternatives to conventional school is some version of: “I want to, but I don’t know if I am allowed, or ready, or qualified.” That hesitation is itself a product of what Illich called schooled thinking, the belief that expertise belongs to credentialed institutions and not to you. The Spokane Learning Co-op was built by a teacher who did not wait for permission. Families across the country are building alternatives in living rooms, on farms, and in community centers. Research your options this week. Visit one. Ask one question of one family who has already made the leap.

Refuse, in one concrete way, to enforce the compliance curriculum at home.

If you cannot leave conventional school right now, you can refuse to be its enforcement arm inside your house. Stop asking about grades before you ask what your child found interesting. Stop inviting compliance and start inviting questions. When your child asks something you cannot answer, say so, and figure it out together. Every adult who models genuine curiosity is practicing a different relationship to authority and knowledge. That practice is the exact thing the system was designed to make unnecessary.

Teachers, here’s what you can do this week

1. Stop ranking children against each other. Scarcity of reward is one of the hidden curriculum’s most powerful tools. When you post grades publicly, read scores aloud, display honor rolls, or frame any assignment as a competition, you are teaching children that worth is scarce and must be won from peers. This week, eliminate all ranking practices from your classroom. Replace it with nothing. Watch what happens to the room.

2. Let a student’s question derail the lesson. The bell schedule, the unit plan, the pacing guide: all of these exist to keep intellectual curiosity from going anywhere uncontrolled. When a student asks a question that leads somewhere the curriculum didn’t plan for, the hidden curriculum demands you redirect them. This week, follow one question instead. Let the class go where genuine curiosity takes it. You will not cover the material. You will do something more subversive: you will model that questions matter more than answers.

3. Tell your students the truth about what school is. Not as a rant. Not as a resignation. As an act of intellectual honesty with young people who deserve it. Tell them that school was designed with specific purposes in mind, that those purposes are worth examining, and that their own critical thinking is the most important thing they will ever develop. Postman called this the crap detector. You can call it whatever you want. Teach it anyway.

What this means, plainly

In 1969, Neil Postman argued that the structure of the classroom, not the content of the lesson, is what actually educates children, and that what it educates them toward is passivity, compliance, and the abandonment of their own questions. In other words, the medium is the message. He was describing a mechanism. Gatto documented its origins. The compulsory schooling model was explicitly designed to produce obedient soldiers and compliant factory workers. The hidden curriculum, accepting arbitrary authority, trading time for tokens, competing for scarce rewards, waiting for experts to think for you, was always the point.

Tweaking the curriculum, changing the testing standards, or hiring more compassionate teachers does not address the purpose for which the institution was built. Those efforts take place entirely inside a frame that the institution itself created. As long as we debate how to improve schools, we are not asking whether schools, in their current form, should exist at all. Postman understood that asking that question was the subversive act. Illich went further and said the institution itself was the obstacle.

Self-Directed Education is a structural refusal to participate in that frame. Centers like the consent-based, sociocratic Spokane Learning Co-op do not improve on the conventional school model. They replace it with something built from entirely different premises. The children who grow up inside those premises, children who have never been taught to wait for a bell, to compete for a grade, or to distrust their own curiosity, are the answer to the commenter’s question. Change does not come from reforming the institution that was built to prevent it. It comes from building something else.

Join the conversation

I want to hear from you. Did you know this history before today, or did something in this article shift what you thought you understood about schooling? Was there a book, a moment, a teacher, that first made you see the system clearly? Leave a comment. Tell me where you are in this.

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If this named something you have known for years but have not seen said plainly in print, send it to one person who needs to hear it. The people most hungry for this framing are the ones who already sense it but have not seen it grounded in documented history. Give them something solid to hold onto.

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What You Can Do Right Now

If you are a parent who has been circling the idea of leaving conventional school, or a teacher carrying the moral weight of what the system asks of you, you do not have to figure this out alone. Book a Way Out Session for Parents & Teachers at tidycal.com/purviancekaty. In this 60-minute session, we'll get clear on what's happening in your specific situation, identify your real options, and map out your next step with confidence. For parents: whether you're thinking about pulling your kids out of school, just starting to explore homeschooling or alternative education, trying to understand why your child is struggling, or looking to start a microschool or learning community, this call is for you. For teachers: whether you're burning out, feeling the moral weight of what the system asks of you, or ready to imagine something different, this call is for you too. Come ready to talk honestly about where you are. Leave with clarity about where to go next.

Citations

• Postman, Neil, and Charles Weingartner. Teaching as a Subversive Activity. Delacorte Press, 1969.

• Gatto, John Taylor. Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling. New Society Publishers, 1992.

• Gatto, John Taylor. “I May Be a Teacher But I’m Not an Educator.” The Wall Street Journal, July 25, 1991.

• Illich, Ivan. Deschooling Society. Harper & Row, 1971.

• Scott, James C. Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. Yale University Press, 1985.

• Gray, Peter. Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life. Basic Books, 2013.

The Spokane Learning Co-op is Washington State’s only outdoor, consent-based, sociocratic Self-Directed Education center, serving children ages one through eighteen on ten acres in Spokane. Learn more at spokanelearningcoop.org.

You became a teacher because you believed something about children. You believed they were curious, capable, and worth protecting. You believed that what happened in your classroom mattered, that your presence in their lives could make a difference, even a small one, even on the worst days.

Then the years passed and something changed. The mandates piled up. The standardized tests crowded out the lessons you had actually planned to teach. You watched children you had come to love shrink under the weight of a system that measured their worth in percentile points and compliance scores. You began spending your evenings recovering from the day rather than preparing for the next one.

You called it burnout.

Education philosopher Doris Santoro has a different name for it. That word is demoralization. Burnout is an energy problem. Demoralization is a values problem. If you are burned out, rest helps. If you have been demoralized, no amount of rest will restore the sense that your work means something, because your suffering comes from being asked daily to do things that violate your understanding of what education is supposed to be for.

The teachers experiencing demoralization most deeply are the ones who refused to give up on children. When you see this, you see everything differently. You start to understand your own suffering more clearly. You start to understand the institution that produced it.

The Difference Between Burning Out and Being Demoralized

Santoro spent years studying teachers who were leaving a profession they had entered with great love and high intention. What she found challenged the most common explanation for teacher attrition.

A burned-out teacher has run out of resources. Given rest, recovery, and renewed support, they can return to work they love. A demoralized teacher has something different happening entirely. They have been required, day after day, to act against their own values. That requirement erodes the sense that anything they do in the classroom is genuinely good for the children they came to serve.

Santoro’s case studies make this concrete. “Gina,” a Teacher of the Year recipient in her research, was not tired. She was ashamed. The instruction the system required her to deliver was, in her own professional judgment, harmful to children. She had spent weeks developing thoughtful, individualized learning objectives only to be told by administration that all faculty would use identical ones. She described the experience as a slow dismantling of everything she had believed teaching was for.

“The people who were really damaged were the people who were already invested and caring and dedicated.”

— Doris Santoro, Demoralized: Why Teachers Leave the Profession They Love and How They Can Stay (2018)

The teachers suffering most are the ones who feel every day the full distance between what they know education should be and what the system requires them to do. Their suffering is evidence of an accurate diagnosis, proof that their professional conscience is working correctly. They have not failed. They have been paying attention.

Your Classroom Love Is Real. The System’s Damage Is Larger.

Before going further, I want to address something directly. Maybe your response to what you have just read is something like: “But my classroom is different. My children know I love them. I work extra hard to make sure every child feels seen and cared for.”

You’re right. Your love is real. The extra hours, the handwritten notes, the memory of each child’s particular sensitivity and particular gift: all of that is real, and it means a lot to the children in your classroom.

This is also true: a child who feels genuinely loved by their teacher and is simultaneously required to sit inside a system that grades, ranks, surveils, and shames them does not experience those two realities as canceling each other out. They experience both, together, combined, and it is extraordinarily disorientating to their developing sense of safety and trust.

A teacher’s love does not dissolve the structural harm. In many cases, it makes that harm more confusing. The child cannot reconcile the warmth of the person in front of them with what that person is required to do to them every nine weeks when the testing window opens or when grades are due.

No matter how much you love the children in your classroom, you are still required to administer the same standardized tests, assign the same grades, enforce the same attendance policies, and submit to the same accountability systems as every other teacher in the building. The system makes no exceptions for love.

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Big Testing: Who Profits When Teachers Turn Children Into Data

Have you thought about this piece of the pie?

The standardized testing industry generates billions of dollars in annual revenue. Nearly 80 percent of educators report feeling moderate or large pressure to have students perform well on standardized tests.¹ The labor that produces that pressure, and that shapes entire school years around preparing children for those assessments, is largely teachers.

What does that labor actually produce for children? UC Davis researcher Megan Welsh found that teachers who prioritized intensive test prep saw no better results than those who taught more broadly.² The tests measure something, but what they measure most reliably is a child’s socioeconomic background. Research on value-added evaluation models found that out-of-school factors account for 60 percent of the variance in student scores, while teacher influence accounts for only 1 to 14 percent.³

The teachers most exhausted by testing demands tend to work in high-poverty schools, where testing pressure is highest and resources are lowest. They pour their professional lives into producing data that will be used to evaluate them, rank their schools, and generate revenue for corporations that had no part in raising those children. What teachers experience as professional obligation, the testing industry books as profit.

Gallup research identifies K-12 teachers as the most burned-out profession in America. Sixty percent of educators report being burned out, and over half say they will leave teaching sooner than originally planned.⁴ These numbers are often discussed as a “staffing crisis.” They are more accurately understood as the predictable result of asking the most caring professionals in the country to spend their careers doing work that violates their own values, exhausting themselves to harm the children they love, in service of someone else's bottom line.

John Taylor Gatto Won Teacher of the Year. Then He Resigned in a Newspaper.

John Taylor Gatto won New York City Teacher of the Year three consecutive years, from 1989 to 1991. When he was named New York State Teacher of the Year, he used his acceptance speech to name seven lessons the institution had required him to teach through the structure of every school day, regardless of his intentions: confusion, class position, indifference, emotional dependency, intellectual dependency, provisional self-esteem, and constant surveillance.

He did not send his resignation letter to his principal. He published it in the Wall Street Journal.

“I’ve come slowly to understand what it is I really teach: A curriculum of confusion, class position, arbitrary justice, vulgarity, rudeness, disrespect for privacy, indifference to quality, and utter dependency. I teach school and I win awards doing it. I should be at the last stage of my career, but instead I feel an urgent need to stop.”

— John Taylor Gatto, The Wall Street Journal (1991)

The most devastating part of Gatto’s conclusion was not that the system was broken. It was that the system was succeeding. It was producing exactly what it had been designed to produce. The teachers carrying out that production were the ones who had devoted their lives to children.

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What Teaching Looks Like When the System Does Not Own the Classroom

What would it mean to teach in an environment where your care for children and your job description were the same thing?

That environment exists. Self-Directed Education centers, democratic schools, and sociocratic learning communities have been building it for decades. At these schools and centers, children learn because they are genuinely interested. Adults serve as guides, mentors, and fellow community members. There are no standardized tests to prepare for, no compliance metrics to hit, no behavior charts, no grades, and no requirement that children perform curiosity on a schedule set by someone who has never met them.

Teachers who work in SDE environments frequently describe their days in language that demoralized conventional teachers recognize immediately. It is the language they used when they first imagined what teaching would be: a community of genuine learners, children who love being where they are, adults whose job is to protect and support rather than manage and measure.

The vision you carried into your credential program describes something that already exists. It has been built, by people who were exactly where you are now, and it is accessible to you.

Three Things That Are Actually Worth Doing

Today: Recognize what is actually happening to you.

Demoralization is the experience of a person whose values are still intact. The shame you carry at the end of a testing season is not a sign that you have failed. It is a sign that your professional conscience is working correctly. Name what is happening clearly: you have been required, repeatedly, to do things that conflict with what you know is right for children. That is a values problem, not an energy problem. Staying inside the institution and hoping for a different feeling doesn’t help. The path forward requires a different kind of change.

This week: Find out whether your teacher dream already exists nearby.

The Association for Self-Directed Education maintains a directory of centers across the country. Visit one. Talk to the adults who work there about what their days actually feel like. Read the follow-up research on Sudbury Valley School graduates, who entered college, careers, and lives with the full range of ambitions intact and with unusually high rates of creative, self-directed work. If there is no SDE center in your community, the networks and resources for building one exist. Teachers have built SDE centers from the ground up in rural areas and in cities, on borrowed land and in borrowed buildings, starting with nothing more than the conviction that something better was possible. The thing you imagined teaching could be already exists.

Also this week: Let yourself off the hook you hung yourself on.

The teaching profession carries a powerful story about its best people: they are the ones who stay, who fight from within, who keep showing up for children even when the system makes it nearly impossible. That story serves the institution. It asks teachers to martyr themselves to a system that hurts them and uses their labor to harm children, and to call that martyrdom a form of service. The values that brought you into teaching were values about children’s dignity and humanity. Those values do not require you to remain inside an institution your own conscience has already indicted. Gatto stayed for decades. When he finally left, he left loudly, in public, on behalf of every child he had been required to fail. His example is a challenge to examine the story you have been told about what a good teacher does, and to ask whether that story is in service of children, or in service of the system.

In Summary

Education philosopher Doris Santoro’s research reveals that the teachers suffering most acutely in conventional schools are suffering precisely because they still care. The distinction between burnout and demoralization is the difference between an energy problem and a values problem. Treating one as if it were the other is why so many talented, committed people spend years trying to recover from something that rest was never going to fix. The system does not damage good teachers by accident. Their commitment to children is precisely what makes them its most effective instrument.

John Taylor Gatto documented this from the inside. The seven lessons he named in his State Teacher of the Year acceptance speech were lessons the institution had required him to teach through the structure of every school day, regardless of his intentions. The most devastating thing he concluded was that the system was succeeding, producing exactly what it was designed to produce, while the testing industry profited from every data point that production generated.

Self-Directed Education, as practiced in consent-based, sociocratic environments like the Spokane Learning Co-op offers teachers something the conventional school cannot: the structural alignment between caring about children and doing your job. In SDE, children’s genuine curiosity is the entire point. The teacher’s role is to support and protect the natural learning that children already know how to do. For a teacher who entered this profession believing that children were worth protecting, this is the only model in which their deepest professional values and their daily work are the same thing. That model exists. It is accessible. The teacher you set out to be is still possible.

If You Saw Yourself In This Article, Share It With the Teachers Who Need to Read It

The teachers suffering most are the ones who care most. They are also the ones least likely to believe that their suffering is coming from the institution rather than from their own shortcomings. Send this article to the teacher in your life who is just barely hanging on. It may be the thing that finally gives them permission to tell the truth about what is happening to them.

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This article is part of the Teachers Deserve Better series at The Joy of Learning. If you are a teacher experiencing moral injury, a parent who wants to understand what your child’s teacher is living through, or an adult who left the classroom and still carries what it cost you, subscribe below. Every issue goes deeper.

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If you are a teacher, tell us where you are right now. If you are a parent, tell us what you wish the teachers in your child's life knew. The comment section below belongs to the people who are done pretending the system is working. Use it.

Take One Step Toward a Different Model

If any part of this article made you curious about what teaching looks like when the system does not own the classroom, the Spokane Learning Co-op holds open visits for teachers and parents who want to see consent-based, sociocratic Self-Directed Education in practice. You do not have to have a plan. You only have to be willing to see something different.

spokanelearningcoop.org

Citations

1. Gallup. State of America’s Schools Report (2014) and State of the Global Workplace Report (2022). Gallup, Inc.

2. Welsh, Megan. Research on test preparation and student outcomes. University of California, Davis. As cited in project research files.

3. Fordham Institute and peer-reviewed literature on value-added measurement models. As cited in project research files.

4. Gallup. State of the Global Workplace Report (2022). Educator burnout and attrition statistics. Gallup, Inc.

5. Santoro, Doris. Demoralized: Why Teachers Leave the Profession They Love and How They Can Stay. Harvard Education Press, 2018.

6. Gatto, John Taylor. “I May Be a Teacher, But I’m Not an Educator.” The Wall Street Journal, July 25, 1991.

7. Gatto, John Taylor. “The Seven-Lesson Schoolteacher.” New York State Teacher of the Year acceptance speech, 1991. Published in Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling. New Society Publishers, 1992.

8. Gray, Peter. Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life. Basic Books, 2013.

Before the first worksheet, before the first report card, before the first time a teacher told your child to sit still and pay attention, your child was already one of the most sophisticated learners on the planet.

By age five, the average child has mastered thousands of words, cracked the grammatical code of a language no one formally taught them, developed working theories about physics, fairness, and other people’s inner lives, and done all of it with no grades, no curriculum, and no lesson plan. Patricia Kuhl’s research at the University of Washington shows that this learning begins before birth. Infants respond to language sounds ten weeks before they arrive in the world. By kindergarten, children have already performed what may be the most complex cognitive feat of their entire lives… and no one assigned it.

Then they go to school. Within a few years, something changes. The questions get quieter. The experiments stop. The joy of figuring things out gives way to the anxiety of getting things right. Peter Gray, research professor at Boston College, has documented that 83 percent of teenagers name school as their primary source of anxiety. Teen suicide rates fall during school vacations. They fell when schools closed during the pandemic. This data underlines what many parents have witnessed firsthand.

If you have been watching your child lose something vital, something important, something deeply human, this article is for you.

Every Child Is Already a Scientist, a Storyteller, and a Social Theorist

The brain does not wait for permission to learn. Research by Gruber, Gelman, and Ranganath, published in the journal Neuron, found that curiosity activates the brain’s dopaminergic reward circuits, the same systems that respond to food and survival. When a child is genuinely curious, the brain rewards the act of learning at a neurological level. Memory consolidation improves. Information sticks. The researchers identified what they called a “rescue effect”: information encountered during a high-curiosity state is remembered far better than information encountered without it.

Play is the delivery system for this kind of learning. The American Academy of Pediatrics has stated that play enhances brain structure and function and promotes executive function, which is the developmental foundation for all higher-order thinking. Research by Pellis and colleagues found that animals who engage in complex play become more socially and cognitively flexible as adults. Bergen’s research found that children who engaged in complex block play in early childhood showed long-term gains in mathematical thinking years later.

Children resist the specific conditions that prevent learning, not learning itself.

Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, whose Self-Determination Theory has shaped decades of research in educational psychology, found that children whose autonomy is supported show higher academic achievement, stronger intrinsic motivation, better mental health, and a more positive sense of self. Alfie Kohn’s synthesis of the research on grades reaches three conclusions that are hard to argue with once you have read them: grades diminish interest in learning, they reduce the quality of thinking, and they cause children to prefer easier tasks. In other words, the system of grades that was ostensibly designed to measure learning is systematically undermining it.

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What Self-Directed Education Centers Actually Look Like From the Inside

Summerhill School in England has been running since 1921, founded by A.S. Neill on the premise that children, given genuine freedom and real community, will learn what they need to learn when they are ready to learn it. For over a century, children at Summerhill have governed themselves through weekly meetings where every voice carries equal weight. They write and debate their own rules. They hold each other accountable with the kind of seriousness that only comes from actually caring about the outcome.

Sudbury Valley School in Framingham, Massachusetts has operated since 1968 on similar principles. There are no required classes, no grades, and no tests. Graduates have gone on to colleges, careers, and every kind of creative and professional life. They learned to read when they wanted to read. They learned mathematics when it served something they cared about. Learning happens naturally, right on time, as soon as kids have a real-life reason to learn.

Agile Learning Centers use a daily practice of intention-setting, peer collaboration, and reflection. Children decide each morning what they will work on and track their own progress. The adults in the room are facilitators. Liberated Learners centers serve teenagers who manage their own time, pursue their own interests, and build real-world competencies through projects and genuine engagement with their communities.

The Spokane Learning Co-op, Washington State's only outdoor, consent-based, sociocratic Self-Directed Education center, operates on ten acres in north Spokane and serves children ages one through eighteen. There are no required classes, no grades, no homework, no tests, and no coercion. Children spend the gatherings following genuine curiosity on open land and amidst the ponderosa pines, learning through play, exploration, and authentic relationship with a mixed-age community. Governance is shared. Voices carry real weight. Children who grow up here learn not only how to figure out how to build their own Adventure Playground to their liking, but they also learn how to build and sustain a community they themselves had a genuine hand in shaping.

“We are all each other’s teachers. We are all each other’s students. We all have something to teach. We all have something to learn. The way we do that is by making time and space for everyone’s voice to be heard.”

Katy Purviance, Spokane Learning Co-op

A child who finds a frog and teaches the group everything she knows about amphibians is doing science. A group of children who argue over a proposed rule, revise it three times, and settle on something everyone can support is living in community. The distinction between performing an activity and actually doing it is the whole point.

The Thing School Spends Billions Trying to Teach, and Structurally Cannot

American schools spend enormous resources each year on social-emotional learning programs, anti-bullying curricula, character education units, student councils, and community-building exercises. Most of it produces modest results, if it produces any real results at all. The people running these programs are well-intentioned, but they are working inside a system too rigid for real life.

Genuine community requires genuine agency. When your time belongs to someone else, when your interests are beside the point, when your voice is permitted but never actually changes anything, community cannot grow. “Classroom community” and “Social Emotional Learning” become a graded performance. Children know the difference.

At the Spokane Learning Co-op, decisions are made through sociocracy rather than majority vote. In a standard democracy, forty-nine percent of the people could be deeply unhappy with a decision and yet the decision still stands. In sociocracy, the group keeps working until every person has a real yes their heart. Children who grow up making decisions this way develop an embodied, practiced moral instinct for fairness that belongs to them for life.

The capacities that school most says it wants for children, including genuine curiosity, the ability to collaborate through disagreement, the courage to stand up for themselves and for others, and the skill to repair a relationship after a hard moment, emerge naturally when the conditions finally match who children actually are.

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When a Child’s Voice Actually Changes Things

At the Spokane Learning Co-op, the Talk Rock is an ordinary rock, found by one of the children on the first day. The rule is simple: if you hold the Talk Rock, you get to talk. If you don’t have it, you get to listen; that way everyone gets to do something. Every person takes a turn. No voice wins simply by being louder.

Underneath the simplicity of this practice is something profound. Children who grow up with voices that carry real weight, voices that shape actual outcomes, become adults who know how to participate in the world. They know how to disagree without destroying. They know when to hold ground and when to yield. They know the difference between a rule imposed on them and a principle they chose together. If this were a LinkedIn article, someone else might call these “soft skills,” but I call them the things that hold a society together.

“Many youth enter adulthood needing to go find themselves. What if they were never lost in the first place?”

from The Spokane Learning Co-op website

The curiosity, the confidence, the moral seriousness, the ability to make and sustain real friendships are not qualities that cannot be installed through classroom instruction or worksheets. These are qualities that emerge when children are trusted enough to develop them. Fifty years of evidence across dozens of SDE centers on multiple continents says so clearly.

How Your Family Can Benefit From These Principles, Starting Right Now

You do not need to have all the answers before you take the next step. You need one honest observation, one week of following a thread of curiosity, and one conversation. Here’s how.

Today, set aside thirty minutes to watch your child when there is no agenda, no assignment, and nothing scheduled. Write down three things they choose, initiate, or sustain entirely on their own. Do not redirect. Do not add to it. Do not make it “educational.” What you are watching is the learning drive that existed before school arrived, the one that does not require forcing. It is already there.

This week, find one Self-Directed Education center to visit or research. Look for a democratic school, a sociocratic school like the Spokane Learning Co-op, an Agile Learning Center, or a Liberated Learners affiliate. Email them and ask if you can observe for a morning. Pay attention to what the children are doing with their bodies, their faces, and their voices. You are looking for something you may not yet have a word for, something you’re unlikely to see when you volunteer at your child’s school. You will recognize it when you see it.

This week, also ask your child what they wish they could learn about, not what they are studying, but what they genuinely wish they could explore. Then make one concrete move to support it. Find a book. Find a person. Find a place. Let their curiosity lead for one full week and notice what changes in the relationship between the two of you when you are no longer the one holding the curriculum.

These steps are the beginning of something that could change your family’s life in a beautiful way.

Summary

Children are not waiting to be educated. They are already learning, constantly and with a biological drive so powerful that it took decades of compulsory schooling to partially suppress it. Inside Self-Directed Education centers like Summerhill, Sudbury Valley, Agile Learning Centers, Liberated Learners, and the Spokane Learning Co-op, children learn to read because they want to read. They learn math because they need it for something they care about. They learn to make and keep real friendships because they are living in actual community, one with real stakes and real consequences.

What will surprise you is not the academics. What will surprise you is the social and moral learning. School spends enormous resources trying to teach children how to be good community members. Self-Directed Education centers do not teach it. They create the conditions for it: genuine agency, real governance, voices that actually change things. Children figure out the rest the way children always have when finally given the chance.

If you have ever watched your child’s curiosity dim and wondered where it went, know this: the conditions that rekindle it already exist. They are happening right now, in places like north Spokane, and in communities across the country and around the world, every single day.

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If you know a parent watching their child lose their spark, or a teacher who is carrying more than any person should have to carry, please share this. The people who need it most are often the ones who will not find it on their own.

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Have you ever watched your child light up over something they chose entirely for themselves? Tell us about it in the comments. Those moments are evidence of natural learning.

Take the Next Step

Visit spokanelearningcoop.org to learn how the Spokane Learning Co-op works, what a typical gathering looks like, and what programs are available for families at every stage of this journey. If you are in or near Spokane, come see it for yourself.

I get a lot of inquiries from parents who are done with public school. They’ve hit a wall. Their kid is miserable, or they’re watching their kid slowly become someone they don’t recognize, and they’ve finally decided that something has to change. So they start a-googling. We pop up. They come visit.

Of course we want them to sign up.

The problem is this.

When school has spent years teaching you that education looks like school — like compulsion, like control, like a teacher at the front of a room deciding what everyone will learn today — natural learning is a lot to take in. You visit a place like the Spokane Learning Co-op and you don’t see an imposed structure, so you assume there’s no structure at all. No structure means no learning. So you go home.

Insert me weeping.

The thing that breaks my heart even more than the parents leaving, though, is the kids.

They arrive looking sour and sullen and defeated. Years of being managed will do that to you. They hover near mom, not quite making eye contact with anyone, and ask, in a voice that sounds like they’ve already given up: “What am I supposed to do?”

It’s the saddest question in the world. It means school has done its job so thoroughly that this child no longer trusts themselves to know what they want. They’ve outsourced their inner compass to adults who didn’t have their best interests at heart. Now, standing in a field full of kids who are laughing and building and figuring things out, they can’t find it.

This is the beginning of their deschooling phase. It is a real thing and it takes time. There is no shortcut.

What Deschooling Actually Is

Deschooling is the period between leaving conventional school and being ready for something like self-directed education. It looks like aimlessness. It looks like boredom. It looks like a kid who is apparently doing nothing for weeks on end and a parent who is quietly panicking.

This is what recovery looks like.

A child who has spent years in a system that told them their curiosity was irrelevant, their body was an inconvenience, and the right answer was more important than their own thinking is a child who needs time to remember who they are. You can’t skip this part. You can’t speed it up, no matter how much you want to get to the good stuff. You just have to wait, and trust, and resist the urge to fill every hour with something productive.

The worst thing you can do during the deschooling phase is replicate school at home. I know it’s tempting. The structure feels safe. What you’re actually doing, though, is expanding the amount of time your child spends in the thing that broke them. And because now you’re doing it to them the problem gets bigger.

The families who arrive at the Co-op during the deschooling phase are not ready for us. We are not what they need right now. What they need is time. Quiet, unscheduled, no-one-is-watching-you time. They need to be bored enough to remember what they actually like. They need to discover, slowly and in their own time, that they are still in there.

Come back when that’s happened. We’ll be here.

Freedom Heals

I have taught everything from PreK to university, in five different countries. I have sat in more classrooms than I can count, on multiple continents, watching children be managed, and seeing what that does to them, year after year.

When kids who have been through the deschooling phase come to the Co-op, something happens that I have watched over and over and never get tired of seeing. They arrive uncertain. A little stiff. Still waiting, somewhere in their nervous system, for someone to tell them they’re doing it wrong.

Slowly, they stop waiting.

They start digging, or building, or talking to a kid who is four years younger than them like that’s completely normal (it is), or inventing a game with rules so complex it takes twenty minutes to explain. They start laughing. They start advocating for themselves in our Rules Meetings in ways that make me want to cry, the good kind. They start becoming, in front of my eyes, exactly who they were before school got to them.

This is not magic. Freedom heals. Getting to have the specific, daily experience of being trusted is healing. It’s healing to wake up and know what you want to do actually matters. It’s healing to spend three hours on ten wild acres with other kids who are building something together, where no one is going to tell you to sit down, no one is going to grade you, and the only rules are the ones you made together with the consent of the other kids.

This is what happens when you stop managing a child and start trusting them.

The Families Who Are Ready

They’re not hard to spot.

They’ve already been unschooling for a while, or they came to it from the beginning and never looked back. They’ve read Peter Gray, or John Holt, or John Taylor Gatto, and they felt like someone had finally said out loud what they’d always known. They love being outside. They camp. They’ve been to Between the Rivers or Saskatoon Circle or another ancestral skills camp, and they’ve thought: what if childhood felt like this every week?

We’re a magnet for moms starving for community. We’re not just another park meetup where you see different faces every time and you have to be on alert because it’s a public park. We’re a real, recurring, rooted community where people know each other’s names and show up week after week and look out for each other’s kids, and for each other, too.

These families register the same day they visit. Sometimes during the visit. Their kids don’t want to leave.

So I Rebuilt the Website

I’ve been running the Spokane Learning Co-op since September 2024, and I’ve lost count of how many versions of our website we’ve been through. Each one has been an attempt to help the just-right families find us.

This time, I did something I’ve never seen another school or co-op do. I built a page called Who Thrives Here. It describes, honestly and specifically, the families who tend to fall in love with us the moment they arrive. It also describes the families who might not be ready yet, and why, and what to do instead.

It mentions our camp toilet. Upfront. The families who love us most are the ones who don’t care about that.

If you’re in the Spokane area and you’ve been looking for this kind of community for you and your kids, come see us. Scheduling a visit is now as simple as filling out a short form.

Who Thrives Here →

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A researcher at Williams College set out to study variations in curiosity across elementary school classrooms. She had to abandon the study. The problem was not funding or methodology. As researcher Susan Engel later noted, there was such an astonishingly low rate of curiosity in any of the classrooms she visited that there was nothing to measure. In one classroom, she witnessed a teacher respond to a visibly curious child this way: “I can’t answer questions right now. Now it’s time for learning.”

Read that sentence with fresh eyes. A child’s genuine question was treated as an interruption to learning. The institution designed to cultivate the mind had decided, in that moment, that curiosity was a liability.

Before starting school, children ask their parents an average of 100 questions per day (Warren Berger, A More Beautiful Question, 2014). In school, the rate drops to fewer than one question every two hours. When a teacher-librarian introduced open questioning exercises across grade levels, kindergartners generated questions so quickly they could not write them all down. By fifth grade, many students could not produce a single question to ask. Susan Engel documented a fifth-grade classroom where two full hours passed without one student asking anything at all.

A mind that arrived overflowing with questions has learned, systematically, to keep them to itself.

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How Schools Reward Compliance and Call It Education

The architecture of conventional schooling selects for compliance. This is not an accusation; it is a structural description that the research supports consistently.

Joe Feldman’s landmark work Grading for Equity (2018) documents how grades combine academic performance, behavior, attendance, participation, and effort into a single number so entangled that it becomes “often impossible to determine what grades represent.” The American Association of School Administrators confirmed in their 2022 Journal of Scholarship and Practice that teachers routinely use grades as a “compliance device” to assist classroom management, presented as academic assessment. Grades are doing double duty, measuring both what a student understands and whether the student is behaving properly, and the two are impossible to separate.

Edward Deci and Richard Ryan’s meta-analysis of 128 studies, foundational to Self-Determination Theory, found that tangible external rewards systematically undermine intrinsic motivation across all activities studied. Alfie Kohn synthesized more than 70 studies in Punished by Rewards (1993) and reached a conclusion that deserves to be read twice: extrinsic motivators are “not merely ineffective over the long haul but counterproductive with respect to the things that concern us most: desire to learn, commitment to good values.” Kohn observed something many parents have noticed at home without knowing what to call it: intrinsic motivation begins to “tail off sharply” in elementary school, around the same time that grades begin to appear.

The implication is stark. The very mechanism schools use to signal learning is systematically eroding the motivation to learn.

The Neuroscience Is Unambiguous

In 2014, Matthias Gruber, Bernard Gelman, and Charan Ranganath published a study in Neuron that fundamentally reframed what educators should understand about learning. When participants were in a genuine state of curiosity, they retained the information they were curious about more effectively, and they retained completely unrelated information encountered during that curious state with significantly greater accuracy. Curiosity, the researchers found, activates the brain’s dopaminergic reward circuits and enhances the hippocampal connections that consolidate long-term memory.

Curiosity is not a pleasant bonus in the learning process. It is the mechanism by which deep learning actually happens.

Fear and threat operate on an entirely different neural pathway, one that directly competes with curiosity. When students fear punishment for wrong answers, social humiliation for questions, or academic consequences for unconventional thinking, the amygdala activates a stress response. Amy Arnsten’s research (2009, Nature Reviews Neuroscience) demonstrated that this stress acutely impairs prefrontal cortex function, the region responsible for critical thinking, analysis, and creative reasoning. Bruce McEwen and Jason Morrison (2013) showed that chronic stress physically shrinks prefrontal cortex dendritic connections while enlarging amygdala structures, producing what amounts to a larger fear-processing brain alongside a diminished capacity for higher-order thought.

Cortisol data from school children makes this measurable. Hair samples show cortisol levels nearly double during the academic term compared to summer break, with a substantial effect size of d = 0.84 (Psychoneuroendocrinology, 2020). Students carry 15 percent more cortisol on standardized testing days than on regular school days, and those with the highest cortisol spikes perform the worst on those same tests.

The question of whether chronic stress impairs learning was settled by science a long time ago. The question worth asking now is why educational environments are structured in ways that reliably produce that stress that makes learning impossible.

Martin Seligman’s original research on learned helplessness (1967) showed that organisms repeatedly exposed to uncontrollable adverse circumstances eventually stop seeking escape, even when escape becomes available. The 2016 update by Maier and Seligman in Psychological Review made the finding more urgent: passivity is the brain’s default response to prolonged aversive experiences, while the capacity for agency must be actively learned through the medial prefrontal cortex. Schools that deprive children of meaningful control over their learning prevent this neural pathway from developing. As Psychology Today framed it in 2025: “Learned helplessness is not imported by students. It is installed by design.”

What Standardized Testing Did to a Generation of Creative Thinkers

Psychologist Kyung Hee Kim analyzed nearly 300,000 Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking scores collected across several decades and found a pattern that deserves far more public attention than it has received. Creativity scores declined steadily beginning in 1990, precisely the era in which standardized testing became the dominant organizing principle of American schooling. By 2008, more than 85 percent of children tested scored lower on creative elaboration than the average child tested in 1984. The decline was sharpest in younger children, the age group whose creative capacity schools most urgently claim to cultivate.

Banesh Hoffman argued in The Tyranny of Testing that standardized assessments penalize “depth, subtlety, and critical acumen” and require students who are strong-minded, nonconformist, original, or creative to suppress their impulses in order to conform to the format. Kim’s data, gathered a generation later, shows exactly that suppression at scale.

A system that reliably produces this outcome across decades and populations is not experiencing a design flaw. It is producing its design.

The Child Labeled a Problem

Among the most painful findings in education research is what happens to the children who cannot or will not suppress their curiosity in the face of institutional pressure.

James T. Webb, a leading researcher in gifted education, documented that the majority of gifted children referred to his clinical practice “should have been identified as gifted rather than labeled with behavioral disorders” (Webb, 2016). Studies estimate that approximately 20 percent of children diagnosed with ADHD may represent misdiagnoses (Elder, 2010; Merten et al., 2017). Researcher Sue Neu (1993) found that the most disruptive behaviors among academically talented students occurred during “classroom dead time,” the periods in which children had finished the assigned task and were waiting while peers caught up.

A child who challenges a teacher’s reasoning, who asks “but why do we have to learn this,” who finishes the work quickly and continues asking questions, is demonstrating the precise qualities every school claims to value: engagement, intellectual restlessness, and the drive to understand. The same system that lists critical thinking as a “graduate outcome” is sending that child to the office.

Research published in Sage Journals in 2023 found that gifted students are 3.2 times more likely to be victims of bullying than their non-gifted peers. The social consequences of thinking independently in a compliance-based environment are borne by the child, not the institution.

If you were that child, this is not news to you. You have understood it for years in your body, even if you didn’t have the research to explain it. The evidence now exists, and it confirms what you suspected.

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Self-Directed Education: What Happens When You Trust Children

There is a growing and substantiated movement organized around a different premise entirely: that children are biologically equipped to educate themselves through play, exploration, and genuine inquiry, and that the role of caring adults is to support that drive rather than to override it.

This is Self-Directed Education, and its intellectual foundation runs deeper than any recent trend.

Consider these conclusions of people who spent careers inside education, watching it from within, and found the same pattern the neuroscience confirms from without.

“Nature does not turn off this enormous desire and capacity to learn when children turn five or six. We turn it off with our coercive system of schooling. The biggest, most enduring lesson of school is that learning is work, to be avoided when possible.”

— Peter Gray, developmental psychologist and author of Free to Learn

“All I am saying can be summed up in two words: Trust Children. Nothing could be more simple, or more difficult.”

— John Holt, educator and author of How Children Fail and How Children Learn

“I’ve concluded that genius is as common as dirt. We suppress genius because we haven’t yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women.”

— John Taylor Gatto, New York State Teacher of the Year, 1991

Self-Determination Theory, developed by Edward Deci and Richard Ryan across decades of empirical research, identifies three conditions that human beings require in order to develop and flourish: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Conventional schooling, by mandating curriculum content, using grades to create hierarchies of success and failure, and structuring adult-child relationships around authority, systematically undermines all three. Self-Directed Education environments are organized to fulfill all three: children choose their activities, pursue genuine mastery in areas that hold real meaning for them, and build authentic community relationships across ages and interests.

Daniel Pink’s synthesis of behavioral science in Drive (2009) reaches the same conclusion from a motivation standpoint: for tasks requiring cognitive skill, creativity, and higher-order thinking, reward-and-punishment systems produce lower performance. The educational model built on grades, tests, and compliance is counterproductive to its own stated aims.

How Democratic and Sociocratic Schools Handle What Conventional Schools Punish

Sudbury Valley School in Massachusetts has operated since 1968 without mandatory classes, standardized tests, or prescribed curriculum. Students ages four through eighteen govern the school through direct democracy, with every student and staff member holding one equal vote. Questions are welcomed, authority is shared, and disagreement is handled through community process rather than discipline. Peter Gray and David Chanoff’s study of graduates, published in the American Journal of Education (1986), found that Sudbury alumni gained admission to higher education without difficulty, pursued deeply varied careers, and consistently reported a lasting passion for learning and a strong sense of personal responsibility. Approximately 90 percent of graduates pursued higher education when they chose to do so.

Agile Learning Centers, a growing network of self-directed communities across North America, operate on the same foundational trust. Adults in these spaces function as facilitators, working to “provide maximum support with minimal interference.” Disagreement and questioning are treated as intellectual resources, not behavioral problems to manage.

In Spokane, Washington, the Spokane Learning Co-op creates this kind of space for families pursuing Self-Directed Education in community. Children come together to follow genuine inquiry, pursue interests that may not fit neatly into any subject category, and develop as thinkers within a community of families who share the belief that children deserve to be trusted as participants in their own education. The Co-op is, in practice, what the research describes in theory: relational, curious, and built on the conviction that learning and living well are not separate endeavors.

A.S. Neill, who founded Summerhill School in England in 1921, observed that children arriving from conventional school settings required a recovery period before they could engage authentically. “The recovery time,” Neill wrote, “is proportionate to the hatred their last school gave them.” In documented cases, that recovery lasted years. When the environment changed, the children changed. This finding is consistent across a century of democratic schooling evidence.

The transformation these communities document is real, and it is repeatable.

What Teachers Can Do Starting Monday Morning

This section is written for the teachers who feel, with clarity, the tension between what they know is right for children and what the institution requires of them. The research is on your side. Your instincts have been correct.

Start a Wonder Wall this week. Post a sheet of paper in your classroom labeled “I Wonder...” and invite students to write any question that comes to mind, about the subject, about life, about anything at all. Spend ten minutes each Friday exploring one student-generated question as a class. This single shift communicates to students that their questions have value independent of the lesson plan.

Swap one phrase per day. Replace “That’s wrong” with “Tell me more about how you got there.” Replace “We don’t have time for that” with “Great question; let’s add it to our Wonder Wall.” Replace “Does anyone know the answer?” with “What do you think? What’s your evidence?” The language of a classroom teaches as continuously as the content. When teachers model curiosity, Susan Engel’s research shows, children become significantly more likely to explore and experiment.

Bring the case to your administration in language they can hear. Rather than leading with educational philosophy, lead with the data administrators are accountable for. Gallup’s longitudinal student polling shows engagement declining from 74 percent in fifth grade to 33 percent in high school, a collapse that happens across every district in the country. Propose a small pilot program: one class, one semester, one subject, with defined outcomes and a documented report. Meta-analytic reviews confirm that academic achievement is significantly higher for students who participate in self-directed learning (Sobral, 1997; Tekkol and Demiral, 2018). Frame it as a student engagement initiative, a personalized learning pathway, a competency-based approach. The language matters less than the direction.

Your love for teaching has not disappeared, but you must foment the conditions that allow it to function.

What Parents Can Do Tonight at the Dinner Table

The single most powerful shift available to parents requires no curriculum, no materials, and no expertise. It requires only different questions.

“How was school?” produces a closed answer. These questions produce something else: “What made you curious today?” “Did anything surprise you?” “What question did you wish you could have asked but didn’t?” “If you were teaching tomorrow’s class, what would you teach?” These questions do not evaluate performance; they communicate that thinking matters more than outcomes, and that the child’s inner experience of learning is worthy of attention.

When a child comes home and reports that a creative answer was marked wrong, resist the twin impulses of dismissing the teacher or dismissing the child. Instead, try: “Tell me about your answer. I want to understand how you thought about it.” Follow with: “There can be more than one way to think about something. The test was looking for a specific answer, but your reasoning is worth examining.”

Watch for the signs that critical thinking suppression is taking hold: your child stops asking questions at home, expresses anxiety about being wrong, rushes through work to complete it rather than understand it, or begins saying “I’m just not smart.” These responses are learned, not innate, and they can be unlearned in the presence of a different kind of attention.

The Homeschool Trap: Are You Replicating School at Home?

For the growing number of families who have chosen to homeschool, one of the most common and least-discussed obstacles is recreating the structure they left. A rigid schedule segmented by subject, heavy reliance on worksheets, grades assigned to completed work, and the recurring phrase “sit down and do your work” are signs that institutional schooling has followed you home in spirit even if not in name.

John Holt and, later, Ivan Illich described the deschooling process: children need approximately one month of genuine transition for every year spent in conventional schooling before their natural curiosity reasserts itself. This is necessary neurological recovery, the gradual restoration of a mind that learned to protect itself by withdrawing.

During this period, observe what your child does when given complete freedom and no agenda. Follow the rabbit holes without converting them into lessons. Resist the evaluation instinct. The Alliance for Self-Directed Education (self-directed.org) maintains a directory of SDE communities, learning centers, family co-ops, and transition resources for families at every stage of this process. You do not have to rebuild alone, and you do not have to figure it out from scratch. Communities of practice already exist, built by families who asked the same questions before you.

Summary

Schools do not merely neglect critical thinking. The research spanning neuroscience, developmental psychology, and educational assessment demonstrates that conventional schooling actively suppresses it: through grading structures that reward compliance over understanding, through chronic stress environments that neurologically impair the prefrontal cortex, and through institutional cultures that respond to questioning children with behavioral intervention rather than intellectual engagement. The data converges from every direction on the same conclusion: the capacity children arrive with is being systematically diminished by the institutions designed to develop it.

Self-Directed Education offers something more substantive than a reform agenda. It offers a genuinely different relationship between adults and children, grounded in the trust that the drive to understand the world is not a problem to be managed but a capacity to be honored. The outcomes from democratic schools, unschooling research, and SDE communities are consistent with that premise: children given genuine agency and a supportive community learn with depth, resilience, and a relationship to knowledge that lasts.

The path forward is neither abstract nor distant. Teachers can shift the culture of a classroom with a sheet of paper and a different question. Parents can change the conditions of a dinner table tonight. Families ready for something more complete will find communities already doing this work with skill and joy. For anyone carrying the memory of a classroom that punished their curiosity: the research now confirms that it did not have to be that way, and the alternative already exists. That recognition is where transformation begins.

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Arnsten, A. F. T. (2009). Stress signaling pathways that impair prefrontal cortex structure and function. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 10(6), 410–422.

Berger, W. (2014). A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas. Bloomsbury USA.

Deci, E. L., Koestner, R., and Ryan, R. M. (1999). A meta-analytic review of experiments examining the effects of extrinsic rewards on intrinsic motivation. Psychological Bulletin, 125(6), 627–668.

Elder, T. E. (2010). The importance of relative standards in ADHD diagnoses: Evidence based on exact birth dates. Journal of Health Economics, 29(5), 641–656.

Engel, S. (2011). Children’s need to know: Curiosity in schools. Harvard Educational Review, 81(4), 625–645.

Feldman, J. (2018). Grading for Equity. Corwin Press.

Gatto, J. T. (2017). Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling (25th anniversary ed.). New Society Publishers. (Original work published 1992)

González-Cabrera, J., Tourón, J., Ortega-Barón, J., Montiel, I., and Machimbarrena, J. M. (2023). Are gifted students more victimized than nongifted students? A comparison in prevalence and relation to psychological variables in early adolescence. Gifted Child Quarterly, 67(1).

Gray, P. (2013). Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life. Basic Books.

Gray, P. (2023). Play deficit as a cause of decline in children’s mental health. Commentary. Journal of Pediatrics.

Gray, P., and Chanoff, D. (1986). Democratic schooling: What happens to young people who have charge of their own education? American Journal of Education, 94(2), 182–213.

Gruber, M. J., Gelman, B. D., and Ranganath, C. (2014). States of curiosity modulate hippocampus-dependent learning via the dopaminergic circuit. Neuron, 84(2), 486–496.

Hoffman, B. (1962). The Tyranny of Testing. Crowell-Collier Press.

Holt, J. (1964). How Children Fail. Pitman Publishing.

Holt, J. (1967). How Children Learn. Pitman Publishing.

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Kohn, A. (1993). Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A’s, Praise, and Other Bribes. Houghton Mifflin.

Maier, S. F., and Seligman, M. E. P. (2016). Learned helplessness at fifty: Insights from neuroscience. Psychological Review, 123(4), 349–367.

McEwen, B. S., and Morrison, J. H. (2013). The brain on stress: Vulnerability and plasticity of the prefrontal cortex over the life course. Neuron, 79(1), 16–29.

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Neu, S. (1993). Characteristics of twice exceptional students. Research cited in Webb, J. T. (2016). Misdiagnosis and Dual Diagnoses of Gifted Children and Adults. Great Potential Press.

Pink, D. H. (2009). Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. Riverhead Books.

Ryan, R. M., and Deci, E. L. (2000). Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and well-being. American Psychologist, 55(1), 68–78.

Seligman, M. E. P. (1967). Failure to escape traumatic shock. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 74(1), 1–9.

Sobral, D. T. (1997). Improving learning skills: A self-help group approach. Higher Education, 33(1), 39–50.

Tekkol, I. A., and Demiral, M. (2018). An investigation of self-directed learning skills of undergraduate students. Frontiers in Psychology, 9, 2324.

Webb, J. T. (2016). Misdiagnosis and Dual Diagnoses of Gifted Children and Adults: ADHD, Bipolar, OCD, Asperger’s, Depression, and Other Disorders. Great Potential Press.

You’re lying in bed running the same loop you’ve run a hundred times before. The crying at drop-off on Monday. The email you sent the principal that got a three-sentence reply. The way your child came home last week and said, for the second time this month, “I hate myself.” You told yourself it was a phase. You advocated, supplemented, emailed, and explained away the warning signs for another semester. School starts again in nine hours, and you cannot shake the question: what if staying is the mistake I never forgive myself for?

You are not alone in this loop. You are not imagining it. Your child is not overreacting. The question you are afraid to ask out loud is the right question to finally ask.

When the light goes out

There is a specific kind of grief that parents keep describing. It is the grief of watching your child’s personality change. Season by season. School year by school year.

Parents describe the same before-and-after story with striking consistency. A child who was once curious, wild, and alive. A child who loved asking questions and woke up ready to know more about the world. Then school began, and their child turned into someone else.

“My otherwise outgoing and happy child started seeming despondent, depressed, and withdrawn,” one parent wrote on a parenting forum. “He’d often come home from school either in tears or close to tears. He said the words ‘I hate myself’ to me.”

The phrase that appears across parenting communities, Reddit, and comment sections is always the same: “the light went out.”

Parents describe the morning battle in physical terms. A child holding onto the car’s headrest with both hands, begging not to go. A child whose stomach ache begins at bedtime Sunday and peaks in the school parking lot Monday morning. A child with stress-induced hair loss. A 13-year-old who told a reporter, “I was literally pulling out chunks of my hair.” What parents mistake for “behavior problems” are their children’s bodies responding honestly to something that does not feel safe.

The grief is real because the loss is real. A parent is mourning a version of their child that school seems to have taken away from them.

Everything you’ve already tried

You did not do nothing. That is the part this conversation rarely acknowledges. You went to the meetings. You filed the paperwork. You supplemented at home, hired the tutor, navigated the IEP process, sent the emails, switched schools, gave the new school time to work. You have been in fight mode for so long that you cannot remember what it felt like not to be.

Parents who describe this stage reach, without realizing it, for combat language: “battle,” “advocate,” “fight mode,” “walking into the arena.” Researchers have found that mothers of children navigating special education systems carry stress hormone levels comparable to those of combat soldiers.

You switched schools and had a honeymoon period. Then the same patterns came back. You were labeled “the difficult parent” when you pushed harder. You were told to “trust the process,” “give it time,” and “try a different approach at home.”

At some point, a painful and clarifying thought arrived: you were already doing all of the work. The supplementing, the advocating, the late nights, the research. The school was the factor in the equation that was contributing the least to a solution. It was the thing you were constantly working around.

The hardest thing to see

Here is the part most people do not say plainly: for many children, school is the source of the harm, rather than a place where harm is being managed.

Peter Gray, research professor at Boston College and author of Free to Learn, has spent decades documenting what compulsory schooling does to children’s psychological wellbeing. When surveyed, 83 percent of teenagers name school as their primary source of anxiety. Teen suicide rates drop measurably during school vacations and declined further when schools closed during the COVID-19 pandemic. Research on student engagement shows that 74 percent of fifth graders feel genuinely engaged in school. By eleventh grade, that number has fallen to 32 percent. A Brookings survey of 65,000 students found that only 26 percent of tenth graders report loving school, while 65 percent of their parents believe they do.

Gray identified seven compounding harms of compulsory schooling: denial of liberty, interference with personal responsibility, the systematic undermining of intrinsic motivation, the fostering of shame through constant judgment, the promotion of bullying through artificial social hierarchies, the steady increase of anxiety and depression, and the destruction of natural curiosity.

None of that is your child’s fault. The teachers who care most are often suffering under the same structure, trapped between their instinct to nurture individual children and a system that was never built for that. The system produces these outcomes reliably, across schools and districts and decades. Your child is the data, not the outlier.

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What your child needs, and what research says is possible

Every child enters the world as a natural learner. Before any school ever touches them, children acquire thousands of words, master complex grammar, and construct working theories about gravity and kindness and cause-and-effect, entirely through curiosity and play and the intrinsic drive to understand. Gray’s research on hunter-gatherer societies reveals that for hundreds of thousands of years before compulsory schooling existed, children educated themselves through play and exploration. When anthropologists asked adults in these communities how children learn, the answer was always the same: they teach themselves through observation, play, and exploration.

That drive does not disappear when a child enters school. It goes underground, covered over by bells, grades, and the daily message that what a child wants to know matters less than what has been scheduled for them to learn today.

When parents make the decision they were afraid to make, they say the same thing: “I feel like I have my children back. I don’t know that I had realized, fully, how I had lost them.” “The stomach pains are gone. They want to learn.” “My only regret was that I wish I had done it sooner.”

“It wasn’t until I got rid of the ‘school’ mentality that our lives blossomed and I watched my children love learning.”

Self-Directed Education, the philosophy practiced in democratic schools, sociocratic schools, and at centers like the Spokane Learning Co-op in Washington State, is built entirely around this understanding. Curiosity is the engine. The child’s own questions are the curriculum. Adults serve as guides rather than enforcers of a predetermined agenda.

Many parents keep sending their children to school because of a misunderstanding on their child’s ability to go to college without it. These parents should know that Peter Gray’s research on graduates of self-directed learning environments found that they had no difficulty gaining college admission, pursued the full range of careers, and showed particularly high representation in work requiring creativity, self-direction, and genuine initiative. More than a third chose their careers specifically for the pleasure of serving others.

Self-Directed Education is a well-documented alternative to a system producing measurable harm, and it is available to your family today.

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Summary

The research is clear and the parent voices are consistent across thousands of communities. Children who show signs of school refusal, anxiety, physical distress, or a lost love of learning are responding to a system that was not designed for them. Peter Gray’s research documents what most parents sense but cannot name: school has become the single largest source of children’s psychological distress, and the children who thrive are the ones given genuine autonomy over their own learning.

Parents who are lying awake wondering whether staying in school see what school is doing to their children. Every parent who describes the other side of that decision says the same thing: “I only wish we had done it sooner.”

Self-Directed Education offers a fundamentally different relationship between children and learning, one grounded in trust, curiosity, and the understanding that children already know how to learn. You do not have to have everything figured out to begin. You only have to take your next right step.

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Citations

Gray, P. (2013). Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life. Basic Books.

Gray, P. (2011). The decline of play and the rise of psychopathology in children and adolescents. American Journal of Play, 3(4), 443-463.

Deci, E. L., Koestner, R., and Ryan, R. M. (1999). A meta-analytic review of experiments examining the effects of extrinsic rewards on intrinsic motivation. Psychological Bulletin, 125(6), 627-668.

Gallup. (2023). Engaged today, ready for tomorrow: Gallup student poll results. Gallup, Inc.

Gray, P. (2017). Self-directed education: Unschooling and democratic schooling. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education.

Parent testimonies sourced from r/Parenting, r/homeschool, r/ADHD, GreatSchools.org, Niche.com, Mumsnet, and Well-Trained Mind forums

You know that voice in your head. The one that says you should be doing more. The one that tallies your accomplishments and finds them lacking. The one that cannot let you rest because rest feels like failure.

You thought it was just you. A personal flaw. Something broken inside that you have spent years trying to fix through therapy, self-help books, meditation retreats, productivity systems that promise peace but deliver only more striving.

What if that voice was… installed? What if someone taught you, deliberately and systematically, to measure your worth by what you produce? What if you could trace that relentless inner critic back to a specific place, a specific system, a specific design?

You can. The place was your elementary school classroom. The system was grading. Worse, it was intentional.

In 1916, Ellwood Cubberley, Stanford’s influential Dean of Education, wrote that schools are “factories in which the raw products (children) are to be shaped and fashioned into products to meet the various demands of life.” Was he speaking in metaphor, or in policy? In either case, he was articulating the purpose of a system that you, as a child, and now as an adult, might have thought of as natural, inevitable, and neutral.

It was none of those things.

The grading system you experienced was built during the industrial era to produce workers who would accept external measurement of their value.

It worked on you. You learned that your worth fluctuates with your output. You learned that rest must be earned. You learned that who you are matters less than what you achieve.

Right now, that same system is teaching your child the same lessons.

“You Are What You Achieve”: How Grading Creates Contingent Self-Worth in Children

The psychological damage begins earlier than most parents realize. Research by Karen Burhans and Carol Dweck, published in the journal Child Development in 19951, found that children as young as four to seven years old already develop what psychologists call “contingent self-worth.” These young children learned to shift their self-assessment from “I am good” to “I am not good” based on a single failed puzzle.

Read that again. A single failed puzzle was enough to change how a four-year-old felt about their entire self.

Some might say that the kids are too fragile, that they have to toughen up. But look closer. Is this about fragility, or about conditioning? Children arrive in the world with a stable sense of self. They do not naturally tie their identity to task performance. They learn to do this through thousands of small experiences that teach them the equation: worth equals output.

Jennifer Crocker’s foundational research2 at the University of Michigan established the “contingencies of self-worth” framework, identifying academic competence as one of the primary domains where people stake their self-value. Her findings are troubling. Students whose self-esteem depends on academic success experience greater drops in self-worth on days they receive worse-than-expected grades. The more students base their self-worth on academics, the higher their self-esteem on admission days to graduate programs and the lower on rejection days. Academic contingency predicts not only emotional volatility but academic and financial problems throughout college.

Crocker and Park’s influential 2004 paper, “The Costly Pursuit of Self-Esteem,”3 documented that when people adopt self-validation goals in academic domains, they experience outcomes that “undermine learning; relatedness; autonomy and self-regulation; and over time, mental and physical health.”

The system we believed was designed to help children learn is undermining their capacity to learn. The system we trusted to prepare children for successful lives is damaging their mental and physical health. These outcomes reveal what the system was actually designed to produce: not curious, flourishing human beings, but compliant workers who accept external measurement of their worth.

The Factory Model of Education: Why Schools Were Designed to Measure Children Like Products

The first American grading system appeared at Yale in 1785, when President Ezra Stiles sorted 58 seniors into Latin categories: Optimi (Best), Second Optimi, Inferiores (Lower of the Good), and Pejores (Worse). The modern A-F system emerged at Mount Holyoke College in 1897, just as Frederick Winslow Taylor’s “scientific management” was revolutionizing American factories with time-motion studies and efficiency metrics.

The timing was not coincidental.

Education historian Raymond Callahan documented in his 1962 book Education and the Cult of Efficiency how school administrators from 1910 to 1930 systematically adopted industrial methods. “Management meant measurement, as Taylorism would dictate,” Callahan wrote, “and what emerged were all sorts of new bureaucratic practices in schools: the recording of attendance, grades, test scores, and so on.”

John Franklin Bobbitt, who developed curriculum theory at the University of Chicago, borrowed directly from Taylor’s “job analysis” methods. In 1912, Bobbitt wrote: “The educational engineer is not yet satisfied with the percentage of efficiency attained. The six-hour day is not enough. Scientific management demands that the school buildings be in use on Saturdays and Sundays.”

David Tyack’s landmark 1974 study, The One Best System, concluded that reformers “borrowed and amalgamated concepts like regularity, hierarchy, docility, punctuality, assessment, and conformity” from industrial production.

Schools became corporations. Children became products. Grades became quality control.

I often tell parents: Grades are for meat, milk, eggs, and lumber, not human beings. When you grade beef, you are sorting carcasses by marbling and muscle development. When you grade lumber, you are categorizing boards by defects and structural integrity. When you grade a child, you are doing something categorically different, yet the system treats it as the same process. You are taking a developing human being with inherent worth and teaching them that their value can be measured, ranked, and stamped with a letter that follows them for life.

The USDA grades beef. Schools grade children. One of these makes sense. One of these is a profound category error that shapes how human beings understand themselves for the rest of their lives.

Three Devastating Effects of Grades on Children’s Minds

Alfie Kohn, one of the most cited researchers on education and human behavior, synthesized decades of research into three “robust conclusions” about grades. These findings have been replicated across studies, across decades, across populations. They are as close to settled science as educational research gets.

First, grades tend to diminish students’ interest in whatever they’re learning. Every study that has investigated the impact of receiving grades on intrinsic motivation has found a negative effect. The research is unanimous.

Second, grades create a preference for the easiest possible task. When students are graded, they avoid intellectual risks. They choose shorter books, simpler problems, familiar topics. They learn to ask “What do I need to do to get an A?” rather than “What would be fascinating to explore?” As Kohn observes, “Adults have sent the message that success matters more than learning.”

Third, grades tend to reduce the quality of students’ thinking. Graded students skim for what will be “on the test” rather than wondering “How can we be sure that’s true?” They memorize rather than understand. They perform rather than learn.

A Swedish natural experiment tracking over 8,000 students found that primary school grading was associated with decreased achievement in grades seven through nine and lower odds of finishing secondary education. The effects were especially pronounced for students who struggled early.

Ruth Butler’s experiments showed that students given descriptive feedback without grades performed better and retained more interest than students who received grades, even when the grades came with feedback attached. The grade itself contaminated the learning. The mere presence of a letter or number changed the student’s relationship to the material, to the teacher, and to themselves.

Edward Deci’s 1999 meta-analysis of 128 studies found that performance-contingent rewards “significantly undermined free-choice intrinsic motivation,” with effects that were more detrimental for children than for college students. The younger the child, the more damage the grading system inflicts.

The Hidden Curriculum That Prepares Children for Wage Labor

Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis’s 1976 book Schooling in Capitalist America established what they called the “correspondence principle.” The relationships of authority and control between administrators and teachers, teachers and students, students and students, and students and their work replicate the hierarchical division of labor that dominates the workplace.

The correspondences are precise. School hierarchy mirrors workplace hierarchy: principal to teachers to students corresponds to executives to managers to workers. Students work for grades rather than learning, just as workers work for wages rather than satisfaction. Subject divisions fragment knowledge, just as job specialization fragments work, denying both workers and students comprehensive understanding. Students have almost no control over what they study or how they study it, preparing them to defer to supervisors and managers throughout their working lives.

They learn that what matters to them doesn’t matter.

In a study of 237 high school seniors, Bowles and Gintis found that grades related more to personality traits than to academic ability. Low grades correlated with creativity, aggressiveness, and independence. Higher grades correlated with perseverance, consistency, and punctuality.

Read that finding carefully. The students who received the best grades were not the most intelligent or the most creative or the most capable of complex thought. They were the most compliant. The grading system was not measuring learning. It was measuring obedience.

Economist Richard Wolff makes the connection explicit: “It starts as schools train individuals to accept the grades assigned to them as measures of individual academic merit. That prepares them to accept their jobs and incomes as, likewise, measures of their individual productive merit.”

The child who learns to accept a teacher’s grade as the measure of their worth becomes the adult who accepts a boss’s evaluation as the measure of their value. The child who learns to work for external rewards becomes the adult who trades their life for a paycheck. The child who learns that compliance earns approval becomes the adult who cannot say no, cannot set boundaries, cannot rest.

The system works exactly as designed.

From Classroom to Burnout: How School Conditioning Follows You Into Adulthood

Thomas Curran and Andrew Hill’s meta-analysis of 41,641 college students from 1989 to 2016 documented alarming trends. Self-oriented perfectionism increased ten percent. Other-oriented perfectionism increased sixteen percent. Socially prescribed perfectionism, the belief that others demand perfection from you, increased thirty-three percent.

Young people increasingly perceive that others are more demanding of them. Among students aged sixteen to twenty-five, 85.4 percent identified having perfectionist traits primarily focused on academic achievement.

The statistics on high achievers are devastating. Eighty-two percent of senior executives report exhaustion indicative of burnout. CEOs show depression rates estimated at twice the national level. High-achieving students suffer anxiety, depression, substance abuse, and delinquent behavior at rates two to three times higher than the national average.

Research by Victoria Blom found that Performance-Based Self-Esteem was the strongest predictor of burnout over time, stronger than work stressors or private life stressors. People who stake their self-worth on performance outcomes are systematically more vulnerable to psychological collapse.

Seventy percent of students believe their parents value them more when they succeed in school. Over fifty percent feel their parents’ love depends on their achievements.

These children grow into adults who cannot rest. They become parents who unconsciously transmit the same conditional worth to their own children. They become workers who sacrifice health, relationships, and meaning at the altar of productivity. They become humans who have forgotten, if they ever knew, that their worth is inherent rather than earned.

The Voice That Says You’re Never Enough Was Installed on Purpose

Here is the thread that runs through all of this research, the thread that connects your adult suffering to your child’s current experience:

The system that damaged you is now damaging your child in exactly the same way, and it is working precisely as designed.

The perfectionism you cannot shake. The workaholism that cost you your health or your marriage. The persistent feeling that you are never quite enough, no matter how much you achieve. The voice that says you are what you produce.

That voice was installed in elementary school. It was installed through thousands of grades, thousands of evaluations, thousands of moments when your worth was measured and found to be a B-minus or a C-plus or, on good days, an A that you knew you would just have to earn again tomorrow.

Research on Belief in School Meritocracy, published in 2023 across forty countries with over 88,000 participants, reveals that schools systematically teach students to attribute outcomes to individual merit. This belief “reduces perceived unfairness of social class inequality” and “reduces support for policies aimed at reducing income inequality.”

Consider what this means in practice. When children learn that grades reflect individual merit, they learn a broader lesson: that life outcomes reflect individual merit. The child who struggles must not be trying hard enough. The family that cannot pay rent must have made poor choices. The community that lacks resources must lack ambition.

This belief makes us crueler to others. We see suffering and assume it was earned. We see success and assume it was deserved. We build a society where empathy becomes optional because everyone is presumed to be getting exactly what they merit.

This belief also makes us crueler to ourselves. When we struggle, we do not ask whether the system is fair. We ask what is wrong with us. We internalize failure as identity. We carry shame for outcomes that were shaped by forces far beyond our control.

The meritocratic worldview serves those at the top of existing hierarchies. If success reflects merit, then the successful deserve their wealth and power. If failure reflects inadequacy, then the struggling deserve their poverty and powerlessness. No systemic change is needed. No redistribution is justified. No solidarity is required.

Schools teach children to believe this. They teach it through grades, through rankings, through the daily experience of being sorted and measured and told that the sorting is fair.

By the time children graduate, they have internalized a worldview that makes collective care seem unnecessary and structural critique seem like excuse-making.

This is perhaps the cruelest lesson of the hidden curriculum: it does not just damage individual children. It damages our capacity to build a society that cares for all its members.

In other words, schools teach children to blame themselves for systemic failures. When you fail to achieve, you learn that you did not work hard enough, did not have enough talent, did not deserve success. You do not learn that the system was designed to sort and rank, to create winners and losers, to make hierarchy feel natural and inevitable.

The common perception of meritocracy, as the researchers note, “makes this idea effective in distracting from structural inequality.”

You are not broken. You were trained.

“Our schools are, in a sense, factories in which the raw products (children) are to be shaped and fashioned into products to meet the various demands of life. The specifications for manufacturing come from the demands of twentieth-century civilization, and it is the business of the school to build its pupils according to the specifications laid down.” —Ellwood Cubberley, Stanford Dean of Education, 1916

They said the quiet part out loud. Every child who ever sat nervously on the first day of kindergarten, hoping to be seen and known and valued, walked into a factory. They were "raw products." Their curiosity, their creativity, their particular way of understanding the world were not gifts to be cultivated. They were inefficiencies to be processed out of them. The purpose was never human flourishing. The purpose was never joy or wonder or the unfolding of a unique self. The purpose was training them to spend their one wild and precious life generating profit for people who would never know their names.

What Happens When Children Learn Without Grades

The research on Self-Directed Education reveals what becomes possible when children learn without constant evaluation.

At democratic and sociocratic schools, at Self-Directed Education centers like the Spokane Learning Co-op, at Sudbury schools, and Agile Learning Centers, children are in charge of their own learning. There are no grades. There are no rankings. There are no moments when an adult reduces a child’s complex, developing self to a letter or a number.

Peter Gray, research professor at Boston College, has studied graduates of Sudbury Valley School, where students have directed their own education without imposed curriculum, grades, or age segregation since 1968. These graduates had no difficulty being admitted to colleges. They pursued the full range of careers. They showed especially high representation in careers requiring creativity and self-initiative. Over thirty-five percent chose work specifically for the pleasure of serving others.

Gray writes: “Coercive schooling, which tragically is the norm in our society, suppresses curiosity and overrides children’s natural ways of learning. It also promotes anxiety, depression and feelings of helplessness that all too often reach pathological levels.”

When children learn without grades, they develop intrinsic motivation. They pursue questions because the questions fascinate them, not because the answers will be on a test. They take intellectual risks because failure is information, not identity. They maintain the curiosity they were born with rather than having it systematically extinguished by years of performance pressure.

Most importantly, they develop a stable sense of self-worth that does not fluctuate with external evaluation. They learn that their value is inherent, not contingent on output. They grow into adults who can rest, who can fail, who can pursue meaning rather than metrics.

When you remove grades, you remove the contingency. When you remove the contingency, children can develop what psychologists call “unconditional self-worth,” a stable sense of value that does not depend on performance, achievement, or external approval.

This is the transformation that conventional schooling denies and Self-Directed Education makes possible.

Summary

The persistent feeling that you are never enough is the predictable outcome of a grading system designed during the industrial era to produce workers who measure their worth by productivity. Research confirms that grades diminish intrinsic motivation, create performance-based self-esteem, and prepare children to accept lifelong external evaluation of their value. Children as young as four already learn to tie their self-worth to achievement. The perfectionism epidemic, the burnout crisis, and the workaholism that dominates modern life all trace back to classrooms where children learned that who they are matters less than what they produce.

The good news is that this damage is not inevitable. Self-Directed Education centers like the Spokane Learning Co-op remove the constant evaluation that creates contingent self-worth. When children learn without grades, without rankings, without the chronic message that their value fluctuates with their output, something different emerges: intrinsic motivation, intellectual courage, and a stable sense of worth that no external metric can shake.

You did not fail. You were trained. You have the power to choose something different for your children, for your students, for yourself. The system that installed your inner critic is not the only way to educate a child. Alternatives exist, they are backed by research, and they are waiting for parents and teachers brave enough to step outside the factory.

Things You Can Try Today and This Week

For Parents:

Today, change one question. When your child comes home, do not ask “How did you do on your test?” or “What grade did you get?” Instead, ask: “What made you curious today?” or “What was hard and how did you handle it?” Every time you ask about grades, you reinforce the message that achievement is what matters about their day. Every time you ask about experience, curiosity, or struggle, you send a different message: who you are matters more than what you produce.

This week, observe your own inner critic. For the next seven days, notice when the voice appears. The one that says you should be doing more. Each time you hear it, ask yourself: Where did I learn this? Can I remember a specific classroom, a specific teacher, a specific moment when I learned that my worth depended on my output? When you recognize that your inner critic was installed by a system designed to produce compliant workers, you gain power over it. You gain clarity about what you do and do not want installed in your child.

For Teachers:

Today, notice what you are actually measuring. The research shows that grades correlate more strongly with compliance and punctuality than with cognitive ability. As you assess student work, pause and ask yourself: Am I measuring learning, or am I measuring obedience? Naming what the system requires of you is the first step toward changing your relationship with it.

This week, experiment with feedback without judgment. Choose one assignment and provide feedback without a grade attached. Describe what you observed. Ask questions. Offer suggestions. Do not attach a letter or number. Ruth Butler’s research found that students given descriptive feedback without grades performed better and retained more interest. Observe what happens to student engagement when the threat of evaluation is removed.

The ideal outcome is not higher test scores or more compliant children. The ideal outcome is human beings who know their worth is inherent, who learn because learning is meaningful, who grow into adults free from the voice that haunts you. Self-Directed Education centers like the Spokane Learning Co-op offer this possibility. Your children deserve to know it exists.

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You know someone who needs to read this. A fellow parent who agonizes over report cards. A teacher who feels trapped in a system that contradicts their values. A friend who works themselves to exhaustion and cannot understand why they feel so empty despite all their achievements. Share this article with them. Help them see that their suffering has a source, the source was designed, and alternatives exist.

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Join the Conversation

I want to hear from you. When did you first learn that your worth depended on your output? Can you remember the classroom, the teacher, the grade that installed the voice telling you that you are never enough? If you are a teacher: What happens in your body when you assign grades? What would it mean to teach without them? Your stories matter. They help others see themselves. They build a community of parents and teachers who are ready to imagine something different. Leave a comment below and tell me what this article brought up for you.

Think about that for a moment.

The institution that is supposed to be making people smarter has convinced you that you are not smart enough to educate your own child. You spent twelve or more years inside that institution. So did every other parent who has ever felt that particular shame. The system produced you, told you that you were adequately prepared for adult life, and then turned around and told you that you are not qualified to trust your own observations about your own child.

Isn’t that fascinating.

If you have ever sat in a school meeting and felt like the least informed person in the room about your own child, this article is for you. If you have ever driven home from one of those meetings wondering whether you are overreacting, underreacting, or simply missing something that every credentialed professional in that room could see and you could not, this article is for you.

The confusion you feel is the product of years of being told that the institution sees your child more clearly than you do. That message does not survive contact with the truth, but it takes time to stop believing it. Most parents are carrying around a level of self-doubt that the system installed deliberately, and they are slowly, painfully, uninstalling it.

The decision whether or not to leave school has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Understanding where you are on that path is the first step toward actually moving forward on it.

Stage One: Something Is Wrong and You’re Not Quite Sure What It Is

You are not imagining it.

When a child spends six or seven hours a day every day, who uses all of their energy on not getting in trouble, on not getting shamed in front of their peers, who has found a counterfeit safety in staying seated, staying quiet, suppressing reactions, managing the social minefield of the classroom, they come home and explode. This is called After-School Restraint Collapse. Home is where they are finally safe enough to fall apart. It’s no different from an adult with a dehumanizing job who comes home and drinks too much.

Parents who eventually make the leap out of conventional school describe the early stage like this: “My sweet, curious child was no longer the same.” “The light went out in his eyes.” “She used to love learning. Now she says she hates herself.”

The consistency of these responses to their child’s breakdown is almost eerie.

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Stage Two: You Want to Leave, But You Are Terrified of Getting It Wrong

Welcome to the stage where the fear gets loudest.

College. Socialization. Learning gaps. The worry that you will do irreparable damage to your child’s future. This is the stage where parents spend months, sometimes years, researching, second-guessing, and waiting for a certainty that never quite arrives.

Here is what the research actually says about college. Peter Gray, research professor at Boston College and author of Free to Learn, has spent four decades studying what happens to children who learn outside conventional school. His follow-up studies of Sudbury Valley School graduates and his surveys of grown unschoolers are among the most comprehensive data available on this question. Eighty-three to ninety percent of those who wanted to attend college did so. Seventy-eight percent were financially self-sufficient. Ninety-six percent said the advantages of their education outweighed the disadvantages. These are not the results of a fringe experiment. They are the documented outcomes of a well-studied approach to human learning that has been quietly producing thriving adults for decades.

Socialization? Kids get in trouble for socializing in school.

And learning gaps? Every person has them. Every single one, regardless of how they were educated. It is absurd to think that school teaches people everything that they need to know, and all by age 18. Of course it doesn’t. It can’t. The belief that conventional school prevents people from entering adulthood with gaps is part of the same mythology that convinced you that you were not qualified to educate your own child. John Holt, whose foundational work How Children Learn changed the way researchers think about children and learning, argued that learning is not something that needs to be manufactured and delivered. Learning is a natural human drive that schools interrupt. The gaps you are afraid of are not created by leaving school. Gaps are created by spending years in an environment that teaches children to distrust their own curiosity.

Blake Boles takes on every single one of these fears head-on in Why Are You Still Sending Your Kids to School? — a book that I describe in our conversation as no-fluff and gets straight to the point. If your partner is skeptical, this is the book to hand them.

The most important thing to remember, if you’re in this stage, is to remind yourself that the decision does not have to be permanent. It does not have to be all-or-nothing. Thousands of families have started exactly where you are, taken one small step, and then found the next step easier than they expected.

A Note for Both Stage One and Stage Two Parents: The Qualification Question

Return for a moment to that irony.

The institution that told you it makes people smarter also told you that you are not qualified to be part of that process. Consider what that has required you to believe. That twelve-plus years of your own education produced an adult who cannot be trusted to teach your own child. That the parent who has been supplementing, advocating, researching, attending every meeting, and doing the emotional labor of managing a struggling child somehow lacks the qualifications held by a rotating cast of professionals who spend forty minutes a week with your kid.

Huh?

All forms of homeschooling, including unschooling and Self-Directed Education, does not ask you to become a teacher. It asks you to become a more intentional version of who you already are. The shift is from delivering a curriculum to following curiosity. It requires more presence, more attentiveness, more genuine partnership with your child, not performance of expertise. John Taylor Gatto won New York State Teacher of the Year and then left the classroom to write Dumbing Us Down. He could no longer pretend that school served children. He knew from the inside what school was designed to produce. Choosing something different is the clearest indicator of the most meaningful qualification.

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Stage Three: You Have Decided. Now What?

The parents in this stage have done the hard internal work. They have arrived at the decision. They are standing at the edge of the diving board and the only thing left is to jump.

What they need most is to know what the water actually feels like.

The first phase after leaving conventional school is called: deschooling. It looks, from the outside, like nothing is happening. Children sleep in late. They resist anything that resembles a lesson. They spend weeks doing what appears to be absolutely nothing of “educational” value. This phase unsettles parents deeply, because what is happening does not look like school, and this fact makes parents go into a panic.

First, take a deep breath.

Let’s unpack what is actually happening. Deschooling is recovery. It is the nervous system unwinding from years of compliance, evaluation, and the chronic low-grade stress of being measured against a standard that was never designed around who your child actually is. Brent Cameron, whose Self-Design: Nurturing Genius Through Natural Learning documents the British Columbia model that informed Haide’s own journey, describes this phase as the foundation on which everything else is built. So does The Unschooling Handbook, written especially for families who want a practical guide to the early months.

What comes after deschooling is something most parents describe with a kind of wonder. Their child starts wanting to learn something. Without being asked. Without a grade attached. Without fear of being wrong. Maybe for the first time since they started school. That is the moment when homeschooling or unschooling or Self-Directed Education stops being a theory and becomes your beautiful new normal.

This is the beautiful moment when parents stop wondering whether or not they made the right decision.

Choosing this path means more involvement with your child, not less. You are not stepping back. You are stepping into the most important role of your child’s education as the person who knows them best, trusts them most, and is willing to let that trust become the foundation of everything they learn.

Uh Oh! What to Do When Your Partner Is Not on Board

This section is for every parent reading this alone, at night, while their spouse sleeps, quietly terrified that they are the only one who sees what’s wrong.

You are not the only one. The observational gap between two parents is one of the most common elements of this decision, and it makes sense. The parent managing the morning battles, the homework, the tears, and the school meetings has accumulated a body of evidence that the other parent simply has not been present for. It’s time to build a bridge.

The first move is curiosity. Underneath every objection about college and socialization is a parent who wants the best for their child and has only ever been shown one way to provide it.

Arguments rarely build that bridge. Books do. Haide recommends Dumbing Us Down by John Taylor Gatto as a starting point for the partner who trusts institutional authority. Katy recommends Why Are You Still Sending Your Kids to School? for the partner who is short on time and needs the common fears addressed directly and efficiently. Free to Learn by Peter Gray is the research backbone for the partner who needs data before they can move.

Summary

For the parent at Stage One, still trying to validate what they are seeing: your instincts have been reliable this entire time. The confusion you feel was produced by a system that needed you to doubt yourself. You are paying attention. That has always been enough.

For the parent at Stage Two, ready to change but afraid of getting it wrong: four decades of research says that children who learn through self-direction go to college, build careers, and look back on their childhoods with gratitude. The fear of ruining your child’s future is real, and it is not supported by the evidence. Homeschooling, unschooling, and Self-Directed Education are well-documented paths walked by thousands of families before yours.

For the parent at Stage Three, already decided and waiting to feel ready: the path gets clearer as you walk it. The deschooling phase will feel like nothing is happening, and yet it will be the most important thing that happens. You will not walk this alone, and you will not regret beginning.

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Take the Survey

If you recognized yourself in one of these three stages — or if you are somewhere between all of them — I want to hear from you. I am building a resource specifically for parents who are standing at this crossroads, and I want to make sure it is exactly what you actually need. The survey takes about two minutes. It will ask you where you are in this decision, what your biggest fear is, and what would make the next step feel possible. Your answers are shaping what I build next.

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In conventional school, the rules are ready before the children arrive.

They are posted on the wall, printed in the handbook, read aloud on the first day, and signed at the bottom of a form. The children who signed last year signed the same rules. The children who will sign next year will sign them too. The rules exist independently of the people who must follow them, and children learn this very quickly.

Rules are something that happens to you.

At the Spokane Learning Co-op, the first thing we did was ask a different question.

We Are Not a Democracy

Before any of the clubs met at our new program with the local school district, before anyone picked up a pencil or a pine cone or a frog, we sat together in a circle. Children, parents, and I. And I told them something that surprised a few of the adults in the room.

“We are probably unlike any group you have ever been part of,” I said, “because we are going to talk about what kind of group we want to have. Then we are going to talk about what rules we need in order to become that kind of group.”

I also told them what we were not.

We are not a democracy. In a democracy, the majority wins. The problem with that is that up to forty-nine percent of the people could be deeply unhappy with a rule, and they will undermine it and sabotage it. A rule that people do not believe in is not really a rule. It is a cage.

Instead, we use a process called sociocracy.

Sociocracy begins the same way: anyone can suggest a change or a new rule. The difference is what happens next. Instead of voting, we keep adjusting the rule until everyone can say a real yes. A yes in their heart. We are not finished until every single person in the circle can genuinely support it.

The children listened to this with a kind of alertness that I have come to recognize. For many of them, they have never been trusted in this way.

They were trying to figure out whether I meant it.

If You Have the Talk Rock, You Get to Speak

To make sure that every voice gets heard, we use a Talk Rock. It is an ordinary rock, found by one of the kids. The rule is simple: if you have the Talk Rock, you get to speak. If you do not have the Talk Rock, you get to listen.

“So no matter what,” I told them, “you get to do something.”

I have seen this land differently with different children. Some want the rock immediately. Others, when it is their turn, hold it like they are not sure what to do with so much permission. Sometimes a kid passes it without speaking, which of course is also allowed.

What the Talk Rock does, underneath its simplicity, is make the circle fair in a way that children can feel. Sometimes a child’s remarks garner a response from the others, but if another child, excited for their turn, starts a side conversation, I gently remind them who has the Talk Rock. There is no moment where a louder voice wins just because it is louder. Every person gets a turn, and every person gets to be heard.

This is how we teach that every person has a voice that matters.

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What Kind of Group Do We Want to Be?

Once we had established how we would speak to each other, I asked the first real question: What kind of group do you want this to be?

Our morning group went around the circle. They wanted a group that was warm and welcoming. A place where it is safe to be exactly who you are. A group that knows how to work through conflict when it arises, because it will arise, and the question is not whether you can avoid it but whether you know how to move through it together. They wanted permission to go as fast or as slow as they needed. They wanted snacks. They wanted to be outside. They wanted to be social and have fun and feel safe with each other.

Our afternoon group had their own answer. They wanted to learn at their own pace. To learn what actually interested them. To make real friends. To build and create things. To climb trees. To move around freely. To explore outside in nature. To be free to talk.

I wrote everything down.

Then I told them: now we are going to make the rules that will help us become that kind of group.

“What I find, every time we do this, is that people already know what they need. Children know. Adults know. We know what kindness feels like, and we know what its absence feels like. When you ask a group to name what they want, they always reach for the same things: safety, belonging, freedom, and honesty. Every time.”

Don’t Throw Things

The first proposal came from a ten-year-old boy.

“Don’t throw things,” he said.

There was immediate and good-natured pushback. Throwing things is fun. Throwing things is one of the great pleasures of being a child. A rule against throwing things entirely seemed, to several members of the group, like an overreach.

So we adjusted it.

The rule became: “Don’t throw things at people or at their things.”

This took about three minutes. The boy who proposed the rule agreed to the change. Everyone could say yes. We moved on.

What happened in those three minutes is easy to miss if you are watching for something dramatic. A child had an idea. The group pushed back. The idea got better. The child accepted the better version and felt good about it, because the spirit of what he cared about, keeping people safe from things flying at their heads, was fully honored.

This is how ethical reasoning actually develops. It is not taught through a list of prohibitions, or a classroom SEL powerpoint lecture. It grows through exactly this kind of exchange, where you propose something, someone else sees it from a different angle, and together you arrive at something neither of you would have reached alone.

What Counts as a Swear Word?

Later in the circle, a boy proposed the rule: “Don’t say swear words.”

This one was harder.

The group immediately ran into a genuine philosophical problem. What counts as a swear word? Words that are off-limits in one family are perfectly ordinary in another. The line is not the same for everyone, and a rule that depends on a line no one can agree on is a rule that will cause more conflict than it prevents.

A mother in our circle offered a different way to think about it. She wondered whether the rule could address the intent behind the language. Are you saying something because you just hurt yourself and the word just came out? Or are you saying it to put someone else down?

Her question reminded me of a second-grade student I once had, a child who spoke no English, until one afternoon when he spilled very hot water on himself, and in that moment of pure shock and pain, out came his first English word.

I suggested that the rule might be: “Don’t say things that hurt people.”

The boy who had proposed the original rule was not satisfied with this. He wanted the swear words rule, specifically and by name. He held his ground with a clarity that was admirable.

In the end, the group found a way to hold both. The rule became: “Don’t say swear words and don’t say things that hurt people.”

Both things mattered. Both things made it in. The boy got what he came for, and so did the mother who asked the deeper question. This is what it looks like when a community takes every voice seriously enough to keep working until everyone is genuinely included.

The Child Who Voted No on Everything

When we had our complete list of rules, I read them one at a time and asked the group to respond.

A thumbs up meant: I like this rule, and I agree it helps us become the kind of group we said we wanted to be.

A thumb sideways meant: This rule challenges me, maybe pushes me outside my comfort zone, but I do agree it helps us become the group we said we wanted.

A thumbs down meant: I think this rule does not help us become the kind of group we said we wanted. It meant: I see something no one else sees, and I want to help you see it too so we can make it better.

We went through the list. Most rules sailed through. The circle hummed with the quiet satisfaction of people who had done good work together.

Our youngest child gave a thumbs down to every single rule.

If you have spent time with very young children, you already understand something about what was happening there. She had discovered the power of no. It is one of the most important discoveries a small person makes, the realization that you have the ability to stop something, to push back against the world, to refuse. It is not defiance. It is the first experiment with personal agency, and it is actually beautiful, even when it is inconvenient.

We have encountered this in our other groups. The first time it happened, shortly after we opened a couple of years ago, we were genuinely uncertain about how to respond. We had told the children that a thumbs down meant they saw a problem with the rule, that their objection would be taken seriously and the rule would be changed. We meant it. We still mean it.

The question becomes: what do you do when the objection is not that the rule fails to support the community, but that the child genuinely does want to throw things at people, or take other people’s belongings, or say every word she has ever been told not to say?

We cannot reason a very young child into understanding the social contract. Anyone who has tried knows this.

What we can do is keep doing what we are doing. We show the child, over and over again, that her voice is taken seriously. We show her what it looks like when people disagree and work through it with respect. We let her watch older children and adults model exactly the kind of community behavior she will eventually likely want for herself.

Through repeated iterations of this process, even very young children begin to understand that their words and actions have genuine power, and that the way they use that power shapes the kind of place they get to belong to. This understanding comes from living inside a community that actually practices what it believes.

It does not take long before even the smallest children fall in love with equal justice for all.

Justice matters more to children than it does to most adults. This is what happens to us over time. We learn to make compromises we do not fully believe in. We get tired. We become disappointed, or quietly resigned, in ways we may not even notice until years later. Children have not learned any of this yet. They still fight for justice. They still feel its absence. I want to keep that alive in them for as long as possible, because the world needs people who have never stopped believing that justice is worth fighting for, for themselves and for everyone around them.

“Deep down, I think we are all the same. We want to be treated with kindness. We want to belong. We want to be valued. When you create the conditions where people feel safe enough to say what they actually want, they almost always want the same things: to be seen, to be trusted, and to be part of something good.”

A Living Document

At our second gathering at our new program with the school district, there were children and families who had not been with us the first day.

I explained our process, and I read aloud the description of the kind of group we had agreed to become. I asked whether anyone had anything to add. They did not.

Then I read the rules, one by one, and sought their consent. They agreed to everything.

I want you to notice what happened there. These were children and parents who had not been part of the original conversation, and yet when they heard the rules their new community had made for itself, their response was essentially: yes, this is right, this is what we would have said too.

When a community makes rules that are genuinely rooted in what its members care about, those rules resonate with new members because they are rooted in something human and universal. You do not have to have been there on the first day to recognize a rule that treats people with dignity.

I explained that the rules are a living document. We can change them. We can add to them as our group grows and changes. At our other gatherings in north Spokane, where we meet year-round, we start over with fresh set of rules every few months. The community is always evolving, and the rules should reflect who we are right now, not just who we were when we began, before we knew each other as well as we do today.

Sometimes the children agree to a rule that I am fairly certain will not produce the outcome they are hoping for, a rule that have not been fully thought through yet. I let it go forward.

This is intentional. They need to see what their own best thinking produces in real life, among real people, in real time. They need to watch a rule that seemed perfectly reasonable on the day they made it fail to do what they needed it to do. They need to feel the gap between intention and result. That experience is irreplaceable. No explanation I could give them in advance would teach them what the experience itself teaches, which is what to pay attention to, what to consider, what to anticipate, the next time they sit in the circle and propose rules.

This is how genuine self-governance is learned, by building them, watching them, adjusting them, and building them again. Every iteration makes them more skillful, more thoughtful, and more just.

Our rule meetings are an ongoing process of discovering what matters to us, how we want to be, and what we want to live up to.

Want This for Your Family or Classroom? What You Can Try This Week

Today: Sit down with your children and ask one question: “What kind of home/class do you want us to have?” Write down everything they say, without correcting or redirecting. You may be surprised by how much they already know about what it means to be good to each other.

This week: The next time a rule gets broken, skip the usual consequence and try a question instead: “What do you think a fair rule about this would be?” Then ask: “Did what just happened follow that rule?” Let them reason it through out loud. You are not letting it go. You are handing them the harder work, and trusting them to do it.

The Question Worth Asking

In conventional school, the rules are given. Children learn to follow them, to subvert them, or to endure them. What they rarely learn is how to make them together with other people. What they usually never encounter is the fact that their voices truly matter.

Conventional school also teaches children something about respect, though not intentionally. It teaches them that disrespect is normal. That being talked over, dismissed, managed, and moved through a system that was not built with them in mind is simply what it feels like to be a child in an institution. Over time, that feeling stops registering. The disrespect becomes invisible because it has become constant. Children learn to endure it, and then they forget that enduring it was ever a choice.

Our whole foundation at the Spokane Learning Co-op is rooted in radical respect for every person in our community. We want respect to be the thing that feels ordinary here. We want children to be so accustomed to being treated with dignity that when they encounter its absence, they feel it immediately. They will know that something is wrong. They will not accept it as normal, the way so many of us were quietly trained to do. They will keep their dignity, because here, their dignity was never up for negotiation.

The adults who know how to build agreements, to genuinely considering someone else’s, to adjust without surrendering what truly matters to them, to keep working until everyone can say a real yes, these are the people who change things for the better, for everyone, in their families, in their workplaces, in their communities.

We are not just making rules for our weekly gathering. We are practicing something that most of us were never taught and spent years trying to learn on our own in isolation or working out in therapy in middle age.

The children in our circle are learning it now, together, with a rock and a thumbs up and a ten-year-old who proposed a rule and watched it become something better than what he started with.

This is what a humane education looks like. This is a community of hope. This is what we are building.

If this article lit something up within you, the best thing you can do is pass it along to one family who needs to read it. That is how we find the people who belong here.

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We read every comment. Tell us: what rule would your child propose? What rule would you propose?

Every parent knows the dread of seeing the school’s number on their phone.

It means another conversation about your child. Another incident. Another meeting with a teacher or a counselor or an administrator who speaks in careful, clinical language about behaviors and interventions and support plans, while you sit across the table trying to reconcile the child they are describing with the child you know at home.

The child who is funny and fierce and deeply loyal. The child who has strong opinions and is not afraid to say so. The child who knows when something is unfair and will not pretend otherwise.

That child, the one who lights up your house, is the one they cannot manage in theirs. And somewhere along the way, you started to wonder if maybe they were right about your child and you were the one who could not see it clearly.

They are not right. Keep reading.

What the School Sees

Schools have a language for children who do not fit easily into their structure. You have probably heard some of it.

Defiant. Oppositional. A disruption to the learning environment. Difficulty following directions. Does not respond well to redirection. Struggles with authority. Poor impulse control.

This language sounds clinical and precise. It is designed to. Clinical language creates the impression that something has been carefully observed and accurately named. It also, very efficiently, locates the problem inside the child.

The child has the defiance. The child has the poor impulse control. The child is the disruption.

What this language cannot do is ask the question underneath the behavior. It cannot ask: what is this child responding to? It cannot ask: in what environment does this child thrive? It cannot ask: what would we see if we changed the conditions instead of the child?

Conventional school is not designed to ask those questions. It is designed to manage a large number of children in a small space with limited resources and a fixed curriculum on a fixed schedule. Within that design, a child who pushes back, who questions, who refuses to comply with what does not make sense to them, is a problem to be solved. The language follows from the machine.

But this machine is not the whole world. It is one environment, built for one purpose, operating on one set of assumptions about what children are and what they need. And it is an environment that has very little tolerance for the specific qualities that the rest of life tends to reward.

What You See at Home

You know your child in ways no teacher can. Not after thirty minutes of circle time and six hours of asking them to sit still.

You know how they light up when they are talking about something they actually care about. You know how hard they work at things they have chosen to work at, how they will spend hours on a problem that interests them without anyone telling them to. You know how fiercely they love the people they love, and how clearly they can tell when they are being treated unfairly, and how unwilling they are to pretend otherwise.

You know that the child in those reports and the child at your dinner table are not quite the same person.

That gap is information. It is telling you something important about the mismatch between your child and the environment they are spending most of their waking hours inside

Here is what I have come to believe after years of teaching, and after a year and a half of watching children arrive at the Spokane Learning Co-op from conventional schools: the children who generate the most concern inside a conventional school are very often the children with the most to offer. Their behavior is a response. And what they are responding to, when you look carefully, is a system that asks them to be less than they are.

What Compliance Actually Teaches

Peter Gray, a research professor at Boston College who has spent decades studying children and learning, has documented something that should stop us all cold. When researchers survey teenagers about their primary sources of anxiety and stress, eighty-three percent name school at the top of the list. Not friendship. Not family. Not the ordinary uncertainties of growing up. School.

The children who appear to be thriving inside that environment, the ones who are compliant and high-achieving and never generate a phone call home, are not necessarily the ones who are doing well. They are the ones who have learned to manage the anxiety most quietly. They have learned that their worth depends on their performance, that approval is conditional, that the right answer matters more than the honest one. They have learned to give the system what it wants. That learning has costs that do not show up in behavior reports.

The children who cannot do this, who will not do this, who push back and resist and refuse to make themselves smaller, are paying a different price. They are getting the phone calls and the meetings and the labels. Those labels have consequences. Research on how children develop their sense of self during the elementary school years is consistent and sobering: labels assigned in childhood become lifelong identities. Children act in accordance with what the adults around them have decided they are. A child told often enough that they are a behavior problem begins to see themselves as one.

This is a system doing exactly what systems do: categorizing what it cannot accommodate and calling the category a diagnosis.

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The Children Who Arrive at the Co-op

The Spokane Learning Co-op is Washington State’s only outdoor Self-Directed Education center. We meet year-round on ten acres of field and evergreens. Our children range from one to eighteen. We use a consent-based form of self-governance called sociocracy. Nobody is told what to learn or when or how. Adults are present as members of the community, not as managers of it.

The children who come to us from conventional school fall into two broad groups. The first group is the quiet ones: the children who learned early to stay invisible, to manage their anxiety through compliance, to give the system what it wanted until they forgot what they themselves wanted. These children take time to decompress. They stand at the edges for a while. They keep waiting for someone to tell them what to do.

Then there are the ones with a file.

These children arrive differently. They come in with an energy that has been labeled as “disruptive,” an insistence that has been labeled as “defiance,” a strong sense of what is fair and what is not that has been labeled as “poor impulse control.” They have been told, in various ways and with various degrees of gentleness, that who they are is a problem.

What I watch happen when those children arrive at a place that does not try to manage them is one of the most consistent and remarkable things I have witnessed in my teaching life.

They become the leaders.

Every single time.

Within weeks, sometimes days, the child who could not function in a conventional classroom is the one other children are gravitating toward. They are the ones organizing the games, resolving the conflicts, noticing when someone is left out and doing something about it. They are the ones asking the most interesting questions and caring the most deeply about the answers. They are the ones other children follow when something matters.

The kids who get in trouble all the time, who are always getting calls home: those are the leaders. A natural leader is not going to put up with treatment that does not make sense. They are going to push back. That is not a disorder. That is dignity.

The environment changed. The child did not. That is the whole story.

Why Natural Leaders Cannot Comply

Think about what conventional school actually requires of a child for six or seven hours a day.

Sit in an assigned seat. Move when you are told to move. Speak when you are called on and be silent the rest of the time. Accept the authority of adults who may or may not explain their reasoning. Follow rules you had no say in making. Demonstrate your understanding in the specific format prescribed, on the specific timeline prescribed, regardless of whether that format or timeline reflects how you actually think or learn.

For some children, this is manageable. For others, it is genuinely impossible because what is being asked of them contradicts something fundamental about how they are wired.

A child with a strong internal sense of fairness cannot pretend that an unfair rule is fair. A child who needs to understand the reason for something before they can commit to it cannot simply comply on command. A child who is wired to lead, to organize, to question, to push, does not have an off switch for those qualities. They are not choosing to be difficult. They are being exactly who they are in an environment that has no room for exactly who they are.

John Taylor Gatto, who taught in New York City public schools for thirty years before writing about what he had observed from the inside, described one of conventional school’s hidden lessons as this: learn your place and stay in it. The children who cannot learn that lesson are not the children who have failed. They are the children who will not learn their place because something in them recognizes that the lesson as a lie.

What Happens When Nobody Corrects Their Instincts

Last year I watched a thirteen-year-old boy arrive at the Co-op carrying years of being told he was difficult. His former teachers had described him as oppositional. His parents had been called so many times they had stopped being surprised by the calls. He walked into the Co-op on his first day with the specific wariness of someone who has learned to wait and see how long it takes before he gets in trouble here too.

He did not get in trouble.

There was nothing to get in trouble for.

Within a month he had reclaimed his calm authority, the kind that would have impressed any of the administrators who had spent years trying to manage him. He knew exactly how to hold space for younger children to speak. He knew how to recognize when a conflict needed to be addressed and how to bring both sides toward something that felt fair. He knew how to read a group, how to notice when someone was struggling, how to make people feel that what they said mattered.

He had known all of this the whole time. He just had not been in a place that had any use for it.

When those kids arrive at the Co-op and finally have room to be themselves, they do not disappear into the background. They become the people everyone else gravitates toward. Every time.

This is what I want parents to hold onto when the school’s number appears on their phone. Your child’s insistence, their resistance, their refusal to simply comply: these are natural capacities waiting for the right conditions. The school that is calling you is simply the wrong environment for your child. There are other environments. There are environments built on the premise that children come equipped with what they need, and that the adult’s job is to get out of the way and let them use it.

What to Do With This

If you are a parent who has been getting those calls, I am not going to give you a list of strategies for surviving the school system or managing your child’s behavior within it. That is not what this is about.

What I want to offer instead is a reframe that I believe is simply more accurate than the one the school has been giving you.

Your child is not defiant. They are principled.

They are not oppositional. They are unwilling to accept treatment that does not make sense, which is a quality that will serve them and everyone around them for the rest of their lives.

They are not a disruption to the learning environment. They are a person whose way of being does not match the environment, which is a problem with the match, not with the person.

The question worth asking is not how do we get this child to comply. The question is: what environment would let this child become who they actually are?

Some families find that answer inside the conventional system, with the right teacher in the right year who has the freedom and the vision to meet the child where they are. Some families find it through homeschooling, or through a hybrid approach, or through an Self-Directed Education community. Some families find it here at the Spokane Learning Co-op, outdoors on ten acres in north Spokane, where the children who could not be managed are the ones running the show.

All of those paths start with the same first step: believing that your child is not the problem.

Summary

The children who generate the most phone calls, the most meetings, the most concern inside a conventional school are very often the children with the most to offer. Their behavior is a response to an environment that cannot accommodate who they are. When the environment changes, they show us that they are natural leaders.

Conventional school has one category for a child who will not comply: “behavior problem.” Self-Directed Education, practiced in consent-based, sociocratic spaces like the Spokane Learning Co-op, has a different category entirely: a person who knows what they need and will not pretend otherwise. That is not a disorder. That is the beginning of a life lived with integrity.

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Were you the kid who got called home? Or are you raising one right now? I want to hear your story in the comments. You will not be alone down there.

Is It Time to Pull Your Kids from School?

If this article is stirring something in you, you are probably already asking the question. I have created a short survey for parents who are weighing this decision. The more I understand about where you are in this process and what would be most useful to you, the better I can serve you in a way that actually helps. Take the survey here. It takes just a few minutes.

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Hear More of This Conversation

The idea for this article started in a recent conversation with Carl Rust on his podcast, Get Out of the Way and Let Kids Learn, where we talked about what actually happens to these children when they finally land somewhere that has room for them. If you want to go deeper into what the Spokane Learning Co-op is all about and what Self-Directed Education looks like in real life, I have a playlist of interviews that will give you a much fuller picture. It is one of the best ways to understand what is possible for your child. Watch the playlist here.

I felt nervous on the drive over. The kind of nervous I recognized from my years in the classroom, the kind that only shows up when something significant is about to happen.

The Spokane Learning Co-op is in its second year now, gathering three days a week on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. I have watched children grow into themselves inside this community. I have watched parents find their people. I know this works.

This Monday was different. Two groups of kids were about to gather on the grounds of a local school district for the first day of a brand new public partnership, and I had no idea what would unfold. I only knew it would be real.

That day gave me more than I expected, and I think it will give you something too.

How We Started: The Talk Rock and the Circle

We sat down together at a picnic table outside, surrounded by ten acres of evergreens, trails, and ponds. Before we did anything else, I asked someone to find a rock.

A child came back with one. I held it up and told the group we would call it our Talk Rock. I explained the rules simply: if you have the Talk Rock, you get to talk. If you do not have the Talk Rock, you get to listen. So no matter what, you get to do something.

Then I said something I believe with my whole heart: “We are all each other’s teachers. We are all each other’s students. We all have something to teach. We all have something to learn. The way we do that is by making time and space for everyone’s voice to be heard.”

We passed the rock around. Each person shared their name, something they love to do, and something cool about themselves. One child told us she wanted to learn about owls. I looked at her and said, “Would you like to teach us about owls? You might be the expert here.”

Then one child looked at the rock in their hands and asked, completely seriously, “Is this Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson?”

The whole circle laughed. By the end of the day, a child had drawn a face on the rock and written “Dwayne Johnson” across the side. It was official. It was delightful. It was exactly the kind of thing that happens when children are given permission to be fully themselves from the very first moment.

What Happened When Every Voice Had Equal Weight

During the morning session, our Creative Writing Club gathered. The kids talked about what they love to write, what comes easily, and what trips them up. Then everyone wrote for ten minutes.

The idea was that each person would read their work aloud. One young writer was not ready for that. He wanted his mom to read it for him. We encouraged him gently, and he did it. He read his own words out loud to this group of people he had just met.

When he finished, something shifted in him. He told us he wanted to keep working on the story. He said he wanted us to challenge him. Another participant asked if he would read it again so she could think of a good challenge for him.

This time, he did not hesitate.

The arc of a child finding his footing inside a community that believes in him can happen faster than you might expect. This one happened before lunch.

“We are all each other’s teachers. We are all each other’s students. We all have something to teach. We all have something to learn.”

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The Moment on the Trail That Said Everything

After the circle, we walked out onto the land. The kids discovered trails, ducked under branches, spotted ponds. One sharp-eyed explorer crouched down at the edge of a marshy pond and found a tiny frog.

At some point, we turned back. Our youngest explorer was tired and wanted to be carried. A mom who had met this child less than an hour before lowered herself to the ground without hesitation. The little one climbed onto her back, and that mom carried her all the way across the land to the picnic table for our closing circle.

They had just met.

Self-directed education builds curious learners, and it builds the kind of community where a stranger becomes a friend in the span of a morning. That moment on the trail was the best answer I know to the question of what we are really doing here.

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What Is Self-Directed Education, Actually?

If you are new here, self-directed education is a way of learning that begins with the child’s own curiosity, interests, and questions. Children are not assigned a curriculum. They are trusted to pursue what genuinely matters to them, inside a community of peers and caring adults who take them seriously.

This is not a new idea. It is, in many ways, the oldest idea. Children learned this way for most of human history, through apprenticeship, through play, through community, through doing real things alongside real people.

What is new is that most of us went to conventional school, and conventional school taught us to believe that children need to be managed, sorted, graded, and pushed through a standardized sequence of content in order to become capable adults. Many of us absorbed that belief so completely that we never questioned it.

Have you ever asked yourself: if that system reliably produced curious, confident, self-directed people, why do so many adults feel uncertain about their own interests, disconnected from their own instincts, and hungry for a sense of real community?

Self-directed education does not promise a standardized curriculum like school does. Instead, it promises the conditions in which children learn how to learn. Interest-led learning, time outdoors, mixed-age community, and genuine self-governance give children the foundation for a happy, healthy adulthood.

What This Day Felt Like from the Inside

A mom told me that she really wanted more community. I told her she was in the right place.

For the year before we opened our first site in north Spokane, I met with moms in coffee shops, sharing the vision and listening to what they were looking for. The answer I heard over and over again was the same: “I am starved for community.”

Over the past two years at the Spokane Learning Co-op, I have watched mom after mom find her people inside this community, people she looks forward to seeing every week, people she gets together with outside of the Co-op. I will never forget the day a mom sat down, looked around, and sighed with relief: “I love it here.”

When I got back to my car after our day at the school was done, I was on cloud nine. I checked my messages and found a note from a mom who had seen our sign on the school door. She wanted to know how her kids could get involved.

“I am starved for community.” I heard that from mom after mom before we opened. Now I watch those same moms sigh with relief every single week.

That is the transformation this community offers, for the children and for their parents.

One Thing to Try Today, and One Thing to Try This Week

Tonight at dinner: Find a small object and pass it around the table. Make one rule: the person holding it gets to finish their thought before anyone else speaks. Watch what your quietest child does with that space. Watch what happens to the energy in the room.

This week: Go outside with your kids and leave the agenda at home. No destination, no activity planned. Give it thirty minutes and let their curiosity lead. The average American child spends four to seven minutes outside each day. Thirty minutes of unstructured time in nature will feel different than you expect, for them and for you.

What We Are Building Here

On the first day of our new Monday program, two groups of children gathered outside, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. Between them, about ten kids sat around a picnic table, picked up a rock, and began telling each other who they were.

One child wanted to learn about owls. One child felt safe enough to read his own writing aloud to us, even though we had just met. One child named our Talk Rock after Dwayne Johnson and someone else drew a face on it to make it official. A mom told me she was starved for community. A child found a tiny frog. A woman who had just met a tired toddler carried her on her back all the way across the land to our closing circle.

None of this was planned. All of it was the point.

The Spokane Learning Co-op has been building this kind of community since September 2024, three days a week, in every kind of Pacific Northwest weather. Our new Monday partnership means families can now enjoy what we have to offer four days a week.

The school your child deserves already exists. It gathers outside, in community, in all weather, four days a week.

Come Find Us

If this resonated with you, here are two simple ways to stay connected.

Join my mailing list. This is the best way to stay close to what we are building and to be the first to know when we open enrollment opportunities for our full-time option. You can sign up right here: https://www.spokanelearningcoop.org/mailing-list

Find us on Facebook and give our page a like. Our Facebook page is where I share photos, moments, and real-time updates from the Co-op. We would love to have you there: https://www.facebook.com/spokanelearning

If this article made you think of a friend or a parent in your circle who has ever said “I just wish school felt more like this,” please share it with them. The families who belong in this community already found what your friends are looking for. You might be the reason they find us.

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The Spokane Learning Co-op gathers Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Fridays in north Spokane, and Mondays in partnership with a local school district.

There is a place in north Spokane where a two-year-old and a sixteen-year-old might spend an afternoon building something together in the mud, and neither of them thinks anything of it. No bells. No grades. No screens. Just ten acres, all weather, all year, and a community of people who have decided that children deserve better than what most of us grew up with. That place is the Spokane Learning Co-op, Washington State’s only outdoor self-directed education center, and it exists because a teacher and a group of parents refused to pretend that conventional school was working.

Self-directed education is not a teaching method. It is a return to the way human beings have always learned: freely, together, in mixed-age community, at their own pace and on their own terms. The Spokane Learning Co-op is the only place in Washington State doing this entirely outdoors, year-round, in every kind of weather, and it is working exactly the way learning was always supposed to work.

A School Without Walls, a Community Without Conditions

We gather on ten acres in north Spokane. Rain, snow, mud, heat: we are out in all of it, year-round, September through August. Children ages one through eighteen move freely across the land, climbing, building, digging, painting, arguing, negotiating, resting, laughing. There are no required classes, no homework, no grades, and no standardized tests unless a family specifically requests them. There is no curriculum imposed from above and no age-segregated classroom waiting at the end of a depressing cinderblock hallway.

What there is, instead, is community. The Spokane Learning Co-op is secular and welcomes families of all faiths, all ethnicities, LGBTQ+ families, and neurodiverse learners. If you believe in self-directed education, you are welcome here. The only prerequisite is a genuine belief that children are complete human beings who deserve to be treated as such.

Someone once described the feeling of arriving at the Co-op as hospitality: Come eat, come work, come be human with us. That is exactly what we are trying to build. This is a village, intentionally, deliberately, philosophically a village, and every program decision we make points in that direction.

What It Means to Learn in a Village

Last summer, I attended Between the Rivers Gathering, a week-long ancestral skills camp held every year bout 45 miles north of Spokane. Participants of all ages spend a week together learning friction fire, flintknapping, basketry, shelter-building, and dozens of other skills that stretch from the Stone Age to early American homesteading. Evenings unfold around shared meals, music, and conversation that goes long into the night. There are no grades, no rankings, no one deciding whose learning counts and whose does not. What there is, instead, is a living, breathing, mixed-age community oriented around curiosity, skill, and genuine human belonging.

It was one of the most grounding experiences of my life. I left feeling rooted in a way I had not felt since childhood, as though something in me that had been quietly starving finally had a meal. I came home and thought: this is what I am trying to build.

Last month, a mother brought her family to the Co-op for their first visit. She watched the children for a while. She watched the older kids helping the younger ones. She watched the adults stepping back, trusting, waiting. Then she turned to me and said it reminded her of Between the Rivers.

I had to take a breath. There is no higher compliment she could have given me. She had named, without knowing my own experience, the exact feeling I had been trying to recreate: the deep, primal recognition that this is how people are supposed to live and learn together. Hearing her say it out loud felt like coming home.

In his landmark book Free to Learn, developmental psychologist Peter Gray makes a case that should unsettle every parent who survived twelve years of conventional schooling: children are biologically designed to educate themselves. Gray spent years studying the play and learning behaviors of children across cultures and centuries, including students at Sudbury Valley School in Massachusetts, a self-directed school that has operated since 1968. His findings were consistent across every context. The systematic deprivation of children’s freedom to learn, through coercion, evaluation, and rigid age-segregation, does not improve outcomes. It undermines them.

“The decline over decades in children’s freedom to play and explore on their own, away from direct adult supervision, has been accompanied by a continuous increase in anxiety, depression, and feelings of helplessness in children and adolescents.” — Peter Gray, Free to Learn

Two things grow reliably in the environment we have built at the Co-op. The first is genuine social skills. In a mixed-age sociocratic community, there is no teacher managing interactions from the front of a room. A six-year-old who wants to join what the ten-year-olds are building has to figure out how to ask. A thirteen-year-old who disagrees with a community decision has to articulate a principled objection and hold it under pressure. These are not social skills practiced in a worksheet exercise. They are social skills earned through real stakes, real relationships, and real consequences, repeated every day across a wide range of ages and temperaments.

The second is the ability to figure things out. When someone wants to build something, they have to figure out how to do it with what we have. When something is not working, they try a different way. When they do not know something, they find someone who does, or they sit with the not-knowing long enough to get curious about it. Gray calls this capacity “the skills of agency,” and he is clear that it cannot be taught through instruction. It has to be grown through freedom. Most of us spent twelve years in buildings specifically designed to replace that freedom with compliance, and as a result we are still finding our way back to ourselves.

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We Know What We Believe, and We Will Tell You

A friend once described the Spokane Learning Co-op as “a school with a coherent philosophical vision that is open to everyone and doesn’t pretend to be neutral about what it believes.” We accepted that description with gratitude.

Here is what we believe. We believe that play is learning and learning is play. We believe that children are whole human beings who deserve dignity, not compliance. We believe that the outdoors is not a field trip or a reward for good behavior. It is the primary classroom, and for children, it always has been.

We are very similar to Sudbury schools and other democratic school models in many respects, with one meaningful distinction: we practice sociocracy rather than majority-rule democracy. In a sociocratic community, no decision moves forward if any member holds a principled objection. Children here learn early that their voice is not simply counted among others. It is heard on its own terms. A child who grows up making real decisions in a real community, alongside people of genuinely different ages and perspectives, graduates with something that no transcript can capture: the knowledge of how to be in relationship with other people, and the confidence to work through hard things without falling apart.

We are also screen-free. Children at the Co-op climb trees, get cold, get muddy, and work out conflicts face to face. We respect family boundaries but do not prevent children from taking age-appropriate physical risks. Learning to trust your own body is part of what happens here for the simple fact that learning how to manage risk is safer than not learning how to manage risk.

“We recognize that each child has an innate genius and their own unique path. We reject the standardization of children.” — Spokane Learning Co-op Vision

We Are Growing. Come Grow With Us

The Co-op currently offers a homeschool co-op for kids ages 1 to 18. Parents of younger children stay on-site and participate in the community. Older children attend with increasing independence. Most of our families are homeschoolers, though we have created options for children who attend conventional school but need a different kind of afternoon.

We are actively working toward becoming a full-time, Monday through Friday program. When that happens, our currently enrolled families will have first priority. After that, we will open a waiting list, and the families on our mailing list will be the first to know when that waiting list opens. If a full-time option is something your family has been hoping for, the mailing list is where you want to be.

If you visit our website and read the Vision page, you should know something in advance: it has made grown men and women cry. They are still holding onto the little boy or the little girl inside of them who never got what they needed, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty years ago. People cry because they re still grieving what could have been. They’re seeing for the first time the education their children or grandchildren still have time to have.

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Stay Connected to the Co-op

The Spokane Learning Co-op is growing toward a full-time program, and the families on our mailing list will be the first to know when new options open up. Add your name at SpokaneLearningCoop.org so you do not miss what is coming.

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What would it mean for your family to be part of a real learning village? Tell me in the comments. I read every one.

Within minutes of going live, Haide Wall Giesbrecht and I had already wandered into daylight saving time abolition, ancestral skills camps, Harvard architecture school, the moment a child asks “will this be good enough for an A?” and why that question is quietly heartbreaking.

We didn’t plan it that way. That’s what made it so good.

Haide is a therapist, a mother of four neurodivergent children, a lifelong learner, and a writer whose work circles the themes of being and becoming, grief, parenting, and what it means to raise children with your whole heart. She homeschooled her kids for years in British Columbia, navigating everything from play-based preschool programs to self-designed graduation pathways. She has lived this.

I founded the Spokane Learning Co-op, Washington State’s only outdoor, consent-based, sociocratic self-directed education center, serving children ages one through eighteen on ten acres in north Spokane. I have also spent over a decade teaching in classrooms across four continents. I have seen what conventional school does to children from the inside.

Together, we had a lot to say.

In this conversation, we talk about:

What self-directed education actually looks like when you’re living it. Why mixed-age learning environments do something that same-age classrooms simply cannot. The books that cracked everything open (John Taylor Gatto, Sudbury, Summerhill). What teachers really think about the system they work inside. The science teacher who looked at a homeschooled kid and said, out loud, that he wished every student learned that way. The moment Haide’s son remembered a “nursing tree” years after learning about it on a field trip through a forest canopy, with no assignment, no test, no grade. What conventional school quietly teaches children about themselves, and whether any of it is true.

We also laughed. A lot. This is not a lecture. This is two people who care deeply about children, sitting down and telling the truth, and occasionally losing the thread entirely in the best possible way.

We hope you enjoy it.

If you are new here, The Joy of Learning is a Substack for parents who are questioning conventional school, adults who are still recovering from it, and teachers who know something is wrong but aren’t sure what to do about it. Every article is grounded in research, written for real people, and entirely free of the usual edu-speak.

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You know what you are.

You have always known, even when the world gave you very little reason to trust it. You are someone for whom the box, as a concept, has never quite applied. You see connections other people miss. You feel things at a register other people cannot quite access. You ask questions that stop a room, and you have spent most of your adult life learning to stop asking them, because the rooms kept looking at you like you were the problem.

Your teachers loved you. Many of them genuinely did. You were the reason they got into teaching, the child they thought about on the drive home, the student they mentioned at dinner for years after you left their classroom. They felt the heat of what you were. They called it potential. They wrote it in your report card margins with a warmth that was absolutely real.

What they could not give you, because conventional school had no mechanism for it, was development. Not enrichment. Not a harder worksheet or a special program or an invitation to mentor younger students. Development: the experience of being met, at full depth, exactly as you were, and guided toward becoming more completely yourself.

You never received that. The adults who loved you most were operating inside a system that had no framework for a child like you, and so they did what the system gave them to do. They admired you, encouraged you, told you that you had so much potential, and sent you on to the next grade. You carried that unspent potential into adulthood like a letter written to an address that no longer exists.

If there is a screaming panic that lives in your chest where your tender heart used to be, this article is for you. If you feel a longing, unnamed and persistent, to finally become who you were always meant to be, this article is for you. If you have spent years surviving the coarse inhumanity of a world that keeps asking you to be smaller than you are, this article is for you.

“So Much Potential”: The Most Loving Failure in School

There is a particular kind of child who inhabits some classrooms, the one who makes the teacher pause mid-sentence. Her question came from a direction no one anticipated. Her observation cut through the lesson plan to something truer. The connection she made between two apparently unrelated things left the room briefly silent with the pleasure of recognition. The teacher felt something ignite in her chest. She went home that evening and told someone: there is a child in my class this year. You would not believe this child.

That teacher was not wrong. She saw something real. The tragedy is not that the adults around her failed to see her. They saw her clearly. Conventional school simply gave them nothing to do with what they saw.

The gifted identification systems that schools use are built to find a particular kind of intelligence: the kind that performs well on standardized measures, raises its hand with the correct answer, produces legible evidence of exceptional ability in the categories the system already recognizes. The child who memorizes rapidly, who reads years ahead, who completes the worksheet first and correctly, fits that template with precision. She gets the folder, the program, the label. The system knows what to do with her.

The child described in this article is a different matter entirely. Her gifts do not always produce the right answer. They produce the unexpected question. They produce the sideways connection, the instinctive resistance to the premise of the exercise, the drawing in the margin that contains more genuine intelligence than the essay prompt could have summoned. She may have been called creative, or sensitive, or intense, or a daydreamer. She may have been described as not living up to her potential, which was a strange thing to say about a child whose potential was visibly and almost painfully present, simply refusing to express itself in the pre-approved forms.

The adults around her were not unkind, and they were not indifferent. They were operating inside a framework that had no category for what she was. When a framework has no category for something, it does one of two things. It forces that thing into the nearest available category, or it names it as a problem to be solved. The genuinely creative child experiences both, often simultaneously, and often without anyone in the room understanding what is happening.

The Child the System Never Had a Box For

Sir Ken Robinson, whose 2006 TED talk on education and creativity became the most-viewed TED talk in history, with more than seventy-six million views, spent decades making a single argument with remarkable consistency: schools do not fail to cultivate creativity. They actively educate children out of it.

The research behind Robinson’s argument is more precise than his popular reputation suggests. Dr. Kyung Hee Kim at William and Mary analyzed nearly three hundred thousand Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking administered between 1968 and 2008, and found that creativity scores declined consistently beginning in 1990, with the steepest decline occurring among the youngest children, those in kindergarten through sixth grade. In that same period, children were described as becoming less emotionally expressive, less energetic, less humorous, less imaginative, less unconventional, and less perceptive. They are the natural consequences of children whose particular kind of intelligence is being systematically suppressed.

Robinson’s explanation for this is structural, and it is worth sitting with. Schools are organized around a hierarchy of subjects that reflects what industrial economies needed from a compliant workforce, not what human beings need in order to flourish. Mathematics and language sit at the top. The arts sit at the bottom. The subjects that reward convergent thinking, the production of a single correct answer, are valued because they are easiest to grade. The subjects that require divergent thinking, the generation of multiple possibilities from a single starting point, are treated as supplementary at best and “off-task” at worst. A child whose intelligence is fundamentally divergent, who cannot encounter a question without seeing five additional questions nested inside it, is being evaluated by a system that was never designed to see her.

“Many highly talented, brilliant, creative people think they’re not, because the thing they were good at in school wasn’t valued, or was actually stigmatized.”

Sir Ken Robinson, educator and author

The gifted programs were not built for this child. They were built for the child whose exceptionalism was already legible within the system’s existing categories. The genuinely creative child, the one whose gifts are divergent and lateral and not easily measured, often passes through school without ever receiving formal recognition of what she carries. She may be called “good”, or “interesting”, or “full of potential”. She may be loved, genuinely and specifically loved, by teachers who feel the magnitude of what she is but do not have the tools to help her grow. She arrives at adulthood with all of that potential intact, unspent, and increasingly difficult to access beneath the accumulated weight of a world that has never quite had room for her.

What Creative Intelligence Actually Needs to Grow

The research on how creative intelligence develops is, at this point, extensive enough to constitute something close to a consensus. The conditions it requires are specific, and the conditions conventional school provides are almost precisely their opposite.

Creative intelligence requires genuine autonomy: the freedom to follow a question wherever it leads, without a predetermined destination, without a rubric waiting at the end. Research by Edward Deci and Richard Ryan on self-determination theory established that extrinsic rewards, including grades, gold stars, and evaluative praise, undermine exactly this kind of intrinsic motivation. Their foundational studies found that children who were rewarded for activities they already enjoyed subsequently showed significantly less interest in those activities. The reward replaced the internal satisfaction of the activity itself. Every gold star the creatively gifted child received was a small withdrawal from the account of her genuine curiosity.

Creative intelligence requires permission to be wrong, specifically and repeatedly, in the presence of adults who are curious about the wrongness rather than corrective toward it. Robinson put this directly when he observed that the school system makes children afraid of being wrong, a fear he considered fatal to creativity and learning. The child who asks the question that stops the room needs someone to follow that question into territory where neither of them knows the answer. Conventional school, by design, cannot consistently offer this. A teacher responsible for thirty children and accountable to a standardized curriculum cannot stop the lesson every time the remarkable child goes sideways into the genuinely interesting.

Creative intelligence requires time that is not accounted for. Susan Engel’s research on curiosity found that episodes of genuine curiosity occurred 2.36 times per two-hour stretch in kindergarten and only 0.48 times in fifth grade. Young children at home ask between seventy-six and one hundred and seven questions per hour. In school, that rate drops to one-tenth of what it is at home. The structure of the school day, with its periods and transitions and objectives and assessments, is incompatible with the kind of sustained, self-directed inquiry that genuinely creative minds require for development. The curiosity does not disappear. It goes underground.

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The Wound That Has No Obvious Name

The adult who struggled through school has, in recent years, found language for her wound. Educational trauma is a phrase that now exists, with research behind it and communities organized around it. The child who was publicly shamed, or mislabeled, or pushed out, has a story that other people can recognize and respond to.

The adult who is the subject of this article carries something harder to name. She was not publicly shamed. She was, in many cases, publicly celebrated. She was loved. She was told, sincerely and repeatedly, that she was going to do something remarkable. The adults in her life were proud of her, genuinely, in ways she could feel.

The wound is this: being seen clearly, celebrated genuinely, and still somehow missed entirely. Of lighting someone up just by being yourself, and then being handed a worksheet anyway, because the worksheet is what the system provides and the system is what everyone is operating inside of. Of receiving, year after year, the message that you are exceptional, paired with the experience of an education that had no idea what to do with your exceptionalism. Of arriving at adulthood carrying something large and alive and underdeveloped, surrounded by a world that has no more framework for it than your school did.

The shame of the creatively gifted adult is specific and compound. It includes the ordinary shame of not having met the world’s expectations. It also includes something rarer and in some ways harder: the knowledge, private and persistent, that the expectations were the wrong size to begin with. That the life you were being prepared for was not the life your intelligence required. That the gap between who you privately know yourself to be and who the world can see is evidence of a structural mismatch that began in childhood and has never been adequately addressed.

Capitalism Has No Room for You Either, and That Is Not a Coincidence

The world you were sent into after school runs on the same premise school did: that productivity is measurable, that value is legible, and that intelligence has a standard form. The worker who can be evaluated with a standard form, who produces outputs that fit existing categories, who makes her contribution visible in the ways the system already knows how to see, succeeds in that world. The worker whose contribution is lateral, generative, integrative, whose greatest value lies precisely in her ability to see what the system cannot see, has a much harder time.

The precarity that many creatively gifted adults experience in their working lives is real, and it deserves to be named as something other than personal failure. A system built on standardized measurement will always undervalue the intelligence that resists standardization. John Taylor Gatto, who taught for nearly thirty years in New York City schools before resigning publicly, identified what he called the hidden curriculum of conventional schooling: the lessons that are never stated aloud but are taught with perfect consistency. Among them: know your assigned role and stay in it. Drop your interests when the bell rings. Wait for instruction before proceeding. Accept that your self-worth is contingent on the evaluation of experts.

These lessons do not prepare a genuinely creative person for a flourishing life. These lessons prepare a compliant worker for an economy that has always needed compliant workers more than genuinely creative ones. The creatively gifted child who internalized these lessons, and most of them did, because children internalize what the adults around them consistently model and reward, carries them into an adult life where these lessons function not as preparation but as constraint.

Feeling like you are drowning in that life is not your dysfunction. The system was not designed for you. It was designed, with remarkable consistency and considerable success, to produce something else entirely.

“We don’t grow into creativity. We grow out of it. Or rather, we get educated out of it.”

Sir Ken Robinson, educator and author

What Should Have Been There: Self-Directed Education and the Developing Creative Mind

Self-directed education rests on a premise that conventional school cannot accommodate: that children are born with the intelligence, the curiosity, and the drive to develop themselves, and that the primary role of the adults around them is to provide conditions that support that development rather than simply replicating the only model they were ever given.

Peter Gray, a research professor at Boston College who has spent his career studying how children learn when freed from conventional school structures, found in his research on unschooled children that seventy-seven percent reported a clear connection between what they had loved as children and the work they were doing as adults. They knew what they loved because no one had interrupted it with somebody else’s curriculum. Follow-up studies on graduates of Sudbury Valley School, a self-directed learning community where students control their own education without imposed curriculum, grades, or age segregation, found that graduates pursued the full range of careers and higher education without apparent difficulty, and were disproportionately represented in work requiring creativity and self-direction. Over thirty-five percent chose work specifically for the pleasure of serving others. Virtually all reported living according to their own values.

These outcomes are the result of a specific set of conditions: genuine autonomy, freedom from evaluative comparison, the presence of a community that takes the child’s own interests seriously, and adults who understand that their role is to support development rather than direct it. Democratic schools and sociocratic schools, including the Spokane Learning Co-op, are built on exactly these conditions. The children there are not being prepared for lives of creative contribution. They are already living them, at whatever scale is appropriate to their age, because no one has made them to wait.

You, the creatively gifted child that you were, needed these conditions. You needed adults who could follow your sideways questions with genuine curiosity, who could appreciate the uncertainty of not knowing where the inquiry was going, who knew that the development happening in the absence of a rubric was real and valuable and absolutely worth protecting. You needed a community of peers, older and younger, who were each following their own lines of genuine interest, so that learning felt like what it actually is: a lifelong, self-directed, irreducibly personal process. You needed time, specifically the kind of time that conventional school cannot provide, the kind that has no objective and no evaluation attached to it.

You did not receive those things. That loss has real consequences. The good news is that these consequences are not permanent.

How You Begin, Right Now, to Become Who You Always Were

The creative intelligence that was never fully developed has not disappeared. It has been deferred, under pressure, for years. The path back to it is not dramatic. It is specific and patient and available, beginning right now, in four practices grounded in the same principles that self-directed education has spent four decades refining and documenting.

For Adults: Four Things This Week

1. Name your intelligence specifically.

Sit with this question for one full hour this week, with no interruption and nothing to produce at the end of it: what, precisely, is the nature of your gift? Creativity is a category, not a gift. What specific quality of mind do you bring to a problem that other people do not? What do you notice that others miss? What connections do you make that seem obvious to you and startling to everyone else?

Write it down as specifically as you can. Taking your own intelligence seriously enough to examine it on its own terms, without waiting for a system to give it a name or a grade, is the foundational act of self-directed education applied to adult life. The child at the Spokane Learning Co-op who spends three weeks building an elaborate mechanical structure and can explain, in precise and passionate detail, exactly what she is doing and why, has received something the conventional school child has not: real practice in knowing her own mind. You can begin acquiring that practice now.

2. Reconstruct your developmental history.

Go back through your memory and find three or four moments in childhood when your particular kind of intelligence was most fully alive: when you were most completely yourself, most engaged, most electric. These moments existed. They may have happened in school, at the margins of it, or entirely outside it. Write them down in as much detail as you can recover.

Then ask what conditions were present in those moments that are absent from your daily life now. Self-directed education is built on the premise that the conditions for genuine learning can be identified and recreated. You are identifying yours, for yourself, for the first time, and that identification has real power to change what comes next.

3. Give yourself one hour of completely unstructured creative time.

Carve out one hour this week with no goal, no product, no audience, and no evaluation. Follow whatever your mind wants to follow. If you feel compelled to draw something, draw it. If you want to write something no one will ever read, write it. If you want to simply think in a direction that interests you, do that. Resist every impulse to make the hour useful, shareable, or impressive.

School spent years teaching you that learning without an evaluator does not count as learning. Every minute of genuine self-directed engagement this week is an act of counter-conditioning, and the closest thing to the childhood you deserved that is available to you right now.

4. Find one person who actually gets you.

Isolation is where underdeveloped gifts go to disappear quietly, or, as Barbara Sher put it, “Isolation is the dream killer.” Seek out one person, or one community, where your particular kind of intelligence is not merely tolerated but genuinely valued. A creative community. A single friend who has always been able to keep up with you. A gathering of people engaged in something you care about deeply.

If you are in the Spokane area, come visit the Spokane Learning Co-op. Watch what happens when children of all ages are given full permission to develop their own particular kind of intelligence, without anyone requiring that intelligence to take a legible form. You will not only recognize those children. You will recognize yourself in them, and that recognition is the beginning of everything.

For Parents: Two Things This Week

You see your child doing what you did: existing so far outside the conventional categories that the adults around her can feel her but not quite name her. You know what is coming if nothing changes, because you lived it. The path forward begins with two practices you can start this week.

1. Stop waiting for the school to identify her.

Conventional school’s gifted identification systems are built to find a particular kind of intelligence: the kind that performs well on standardized measures. If your child’s gifts exist in a different register, the system may never name them, and that silence is not evidence of absence.

Spend thirty minutes this week writing down what you observe in your child that is genuinely unusual: the specific quality of her questions, the connections she makes, the way she engages when she is most completely herself. Share what you have written with her teacher, offered as a contribution rather than a demand. You know your child in ways the school cannot. Beginning to act on that knowledge is one of the most powerful things you can do for her right now.

2. Build a “yes” environment at home.

The developmental conditions that self-directed education provides, including genuine autonomy, unstructured time, freedom to follow interest without a predetermined destination, and the experience of being met without evaluation, can begin at home this week, regardless of what school is doing.

Choose one domain in which you will follow your child’s self-direction completely. Let her design the project. Let her determine what success looks like. Let her abandon it and start something else. Follow her lead with genuine curiosity rather than directive enthusiasm. The Spokane Learning Co-op is built around exactly this kind of child-led learning, and the research is unambiguous: children whose intellectual autonomy is honored develop stronger intrinsic motivation, more genuine confidence, and a clearer sense of self. You can begin building those conditions tonight.

For Teachers: Two Things This Week

You have had this child in your classroom. She is the one whose questions stop you mid-sentence, the one you think about long after the school year ends, the one who made you remember why you became a teacher. You love her. You also feel, honestly, a little at a loss, because the curriculum has no drawer for her and the system’s tools do not fit what she needs.

Today: Ask her what she is actually thinking.

The next time this child says something that stops the room, resist the impulse to move on. Stop the lesson. Ask her to say more. Ask her where that thought came from, where it goes, what it connects to. Give her three whole uninterrupted minutes to take you somewhere you did not plan to go. Genuine intellectual engagement of this kind is the foundation of every day at democratic and sociocratic schools like the Spokane Learning Co-op. You may not be able to offer it all day inside a conventional school, but three minutes of it, given with full attention and genuine curiosity, may be the most meaningful educational experience this child has all year.

This week: Give her a project with no ceiling.

Give this child one piece of work with no upper limit on where it can go. No rubric. No model answer. No predetermined form. Tell her you want to see how far it goes when she is the one deciding. Then step back and watch.

What she produces will tell you more about the nature of her intelligence than any assessment you have ever administered. It will also tell her something she may never have been allowed to discover: that her mind, given genuine room, is capable of things neither of you has yet imagined.

This, the development of her inner genius, is precisely what she needs in order to live a meaningful life in a future that none of us can imagine.

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Summary

The most genuinely creative children in any classroom are often the ones their teachers loved most and developed least. Conventional school failed them through the specific poverty of its framework: a structure built to measure and reward performance in legible categories. The adults in the room could feel something extraordinary. They simply had no tools adequate to it, and so they called it “potential” and hoped the world would figure out the rest.

The world did not figure out the rest. The world these children were sent into after school runs on the same premise school did: that value is measurable, that intelligence has a standard form, and that the person who cannot make her gifts legible to the dominant system has only herself to blame. The adult who carries twelve years of undeveloped creative intelligence into that world, and finds it coarse and flattening and quietly devastating, is living the logical conclusion of a structural failure. Self-directed education names that structure with precision. It also offers the only corrective that has ever made sense for a child like her: a framework built on the radical premise that intelligence cannot be standardized, and that the most important thing an adult can do for a genuinely creative child is to get out of her way and stay genuinely close.

For the adult reading this now, the child who was loved and seen and still not quite met: your intelligence has not disappeared. It has been deferred, under pressure, for years. Becoming who you always were is a resumption of development that was interrupted by a system that did not have room for you. That development is available now, on your terms, at your pace, guided by your own irreducible sense of what you are and what you are for. Self-directed education, as practiced at democratic and sociocratic schools like the Spokane Learning Co-op, is the framework that should have been there from the beginning. It is here now.

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If you are in the Spokane area, come visit the Spokane Learning Co-op. Come watch what becomes possible for genuinely creative children when the system finally gets out of their way. Come remember what you looked like before the world asked you to be smaller. We would love to have you.

Citations

1. Robinson, K. (2006). Do schools kill creativity? TED Conference. Retrieved from TED.com.

2. Robinson, K., & Aronica, L. (2015). Creative Schools: The Grassroots Revolution That’s Transforming Education. Viking.

3. Kim, K. H. (2011). The creativity crisis: The decrease in creative thinking scores on the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking. Creativity Research Journal, 23(4), 285–295.

4. Deci, E. L., Koestner, R., & Ryan, R. M. (1999). A meta-analytic review of experiments examining the effects of extrinsic rewards on intrinsic motivation. Psychological Bulletin, 125(6), 627–668.

5. Engel, S. (2011). Children’s need to know: Curiosity in schools. Harvard Educational Review, 81(4), 625–645.

6. Gray, P. (2013). Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life. Basic Books.

7. Gray, P. (2017). Self-directed education: Unschooling and democratic schooling. In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education. Oxford University Press.

8. Greenberg, D., & Sadofsky, M. (1992). Legacy of Trust: Life After the Sudbury Valley School Experience. Sudbury Valley School Press.

9. Gatto, J. T. (1992). Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling. New Society Publishers.