Self Directed Education is a Political Act
Self-directed education is a political act because conventional schooling was created with certain aims by philanthropic wealthy business men who created it with aims of restructuring society through it, for the benefit of Industrial Age capitalists. Therefore, any alternative education projects that reject school are implicitly, or sometimes explicitly, attempting to restructure society through education themselves.
Political ideologies have two dimensions: (1) goals: how society should be organized; and (2) methods: the most appropriate way to achieve this goal.
By creating conditions in their educational spaces for microcosms of society to exist and by using design principles to create the microcosm of society that is that school to be both specifically organised using specific methods they follow the definition of an ideology.
What Khost is interested in his how different design decisions at the outset create different conditions for lived experience of "freedom". He classes them into three broad persuasions of freedom:
- Freedom with a focus on autonomy
- Freedom with a focus on community
- Freedom through mutual aid
And these different freedoms stem from what the practitioners understanding of 'what “liberation” actually means to them.' The different methodologies that each utilise are central to how their sense of “freedom” is ideologically politicized. Khost created this diagram to show that there are two types of education; fear based and trust based, and that both exist on a continuum (their differences are minimal compared to the others on the same spectrum, yet vast to any others that utilise the other model.)
This comparison of SDE models to political ideologies is also an important reminder that, while one does not need to support radical politics to believe in SDE, a young person practicing Self-Directed Education will experience radical freedom and trust based ideologies, and those experiences will influence the development of their framing of the world.
Khost got a lot of pushback from facilitators for labeling different models as falling under these banners, specifically Sudbury Schools being branded libertarian, but I wonder if his use of the word "freedom" might have been the problem. Researching about self-determination theory and thinking about autonomy, relatedness and competency at The Garden I am left wondering if your sense of freedom is defined by your experience of the relationship between autonomy and relatedness