your sense of freedom is defined by your experience of the relationship between autonomy and relatedness

In Self Directed Education is a Political Act Alex Khost argues that different self-directed education (SDE) settings (or home environments) will create different children and more specifically the different cultures and how they are experienced by a young person moving through them will create different understandings of "freedom".

These were mapped onto different political ideologies - socialism, anarchism, and libertarian - that caused tension amongst some SDE facilitators who found the association with libertarianism, and the insinuation that freedom with a focus on autonomy might detract from the strong community their settings actually create.

I wonder if in the article, and the following debate, "freedom" is doing a lot of heavy lifting for an interlinked coupling of two Self-Determination Theory (SDT) concepts: autonomy and relatedness. Cross-cultural SDT studies have shown that autonomy in more collectivist societies alters to WEIRD ones. To me it makes sense that alternative education projects trying to re-envision our society might lean on different frameworks for understanding autonomy.

It seems logical to me that different settings operating from different initial design frameworks might create different lived experiences of the three SDT concepts, which, I think, is essentially Khost's argument.

If autonomy is the capacity to direct your life within the rules of whatever society you are a part of, and autonomy and relatedness are culturally defined, what that means specifically for self-direction education projects is that autonomy is downstream of relatedness design in SDE spaces.

If that is the case then the word "freedom" really doesn't mean "autonomy" and "co-operation", which are words that all communities will use to an extent, but how design leads to subtle differences in young people's understanding of the world, how they relate and their identity.

Perhaps freedom comes from how the three SDT psychological needs interact, not just autonomy and relatedness.

Perhaps when thinking about intelligent design for learning communities/spaces we should consider also that bridging autonomy and competency is agency and that competency is created through or hampered by relatedness. Furthermore, for added consideration is generosity a fourth basic psychological need that SDT misses out?