This past weekend I had the fun opportunity to play the role of “Old Wise Guy” at Blake Boles’ weekend retreat for Young Professionals in Self-Directed Education. The event aimed to bring about twenty young people together from a range of programs and democratic schools that support students to follow their interests rather than a mandatory curriculum. The group included people from our Liberated Learners network as well as Cottonwood NYC Agile Learning Center, Hudson Valley Sudbury School, Macomber Center, High Desert Center Gap Year program, Not Back to School Camp, Natural Creativity, Dida Academy, an Austin TX public school teacher, and some people in college or graduate school, including one from Germany.
Blake established a couple of primary goals for our time together:
- Confront the economic question of how one might earn a sustainable income in this field to allow for a long-term career in the field of self-directed education
- Compare notes on how our programs and schools operate, so as to build bridges based on the many core principles we have in common
- Establish a mutually supportive network and a sense of community among young people working in this relatively small field of self-directed education
I am grateful to Blake and to Camp Stomping Ground for hosting this conference, and I feel encouraged that we made progress on all of these goals. We had some direct and creative conversations about how one might earn an income in a field with no public funding and is dependent on tuition fees and fundraising. Every minor idea that works for one person or program may not work for everyone else, but the overall collection of ideas offered a reasonably optimistic view on an otherwise daunting reality. The awareness that we are all facing the same set of hard problems elevates the conversation from a sense of personal success or failure to a realization that paying living wages is a larger social issue, and that we can share this struggle rather than carry it alone.
I particularly enjoyed hearing the similarities among the programs. Many of us lead with rhetoric and vocabulary unique to our projects, and sometimes this leads to misunderstandings and divisiveness. I am more certain than ever that we are all rooted in a deep commitment to offering young people the time and space to discover their interests and pursue them with support. All of us care about holding a safe and welcoming space, and we all want to include the young people as much as possible in decision-making and a sense of responsibility for the community. While I may have intellectually known this before, the personal and group conversations over the weekend brought me to a much deeper appreciation and certainty that this is true.
For me, a major difference remains whether programs are private schools that require five days per week of attendance and encourage enrollment through age 18 for the sake of a diploma or if they use a homechooling approach with more flexible attendance and long-term enrollment expectations. This difference in structure reflects some priorities, but I can see that we all share some very firm premises about respecting and empowering young people.
What struck me most profoundly, however, was the realization that this group of twenty young people who attended the conference do in fact have each other, and hundreds of more colleagues across the country and around the world. This summer I met many young people at the AERO Conference in Portland, OR who are working in the field of self-directed learning. We could have easily doubled the size of this conference had space permitted. There are many centers, schools, and programs to visit, and many peers with whom these young people can discuss the issues.
This network of collegiality simply did not exist for Joshua Hornick and myself when we started Pathfinder/North Star back in 1996. We had each other. I could say, “Joshua, what do you think?” and he could reply, “Well, Ken, I don’t know. What do you think?” We did have plenty of friends and supporters, but we did not have colleagues. We had support from people such as Mary Leue and Jerry Mintz, and we knew people at Albany Free School and Sudbury Valley School. We had many local allies and people willing to be on our Board of Directors.
On a day–to-day basis, though, we were making it up as we went along, with no one really to compare notes. There were no other learning centers in our field, no major homeschooling coops nearby (let alone with age peers!), and no schools committed to self-directed learning. This realization occurred to me in our closing circle at this Young Professionals Conference. I rejoice in how much things have grown in 23 years, and just how profoundly optimistic this makes me feel. These thoughtful and capable young folks have each other, and decades in front of them to improve what they find and create their own original solutions. Their collective wisdom, experience, and ingenuity offers some genuine confidence that we are heading in a very positive direction.
Now, let’s all figure out how to help them make a living at it without burning out.
If you would like to learn when a future Young Professionals in Self-Directed Education retreat may be held, you can sign up for email announcements here: http://madmimi.com/signups/f3732409329047dda6124291a5bf5dfa/join