The following is an excerpt from Empowered Kids, Liberated Parents, by Cassi Clausen and Aaron Browder, posted with permission from the authors. You can purchase the book in paperback or digital version here.
Autonomy means children are in control of their own educations. They are free to design their own educational paths and decide which activities to spend time on, even activities that are deemed useless by educational authorities.
As we mentioned in the previous section, autonomy enables children to listen to their hearts, identify their own needs, and decide to do what’s best for themselves. This power extends to the realm of education and learning too. Children are innately curious; they want to learn about the world and develop skills. Autonomous children spontaneously explore, experiment, investigate, question, and create. You might say that children are learning all the time, even—no, especially—when playing.
Children also strive to attain mastery. You can see this drive most clearly when you see a child playing a video game level over and over again, failing and retrying until he finally succeeds. One young student at The Open School wanted to get good at drawing human eyes, so she practiced drawing them day after day. Nothing could be more natural than a child working hard to achieve something—no coercion is necessary.
Autonomy is important in education because children only learn what they’re curious about, and we can’t control what a person is curious about. Learning happens when a question appears in a person’s head and they find an answer. We can’t control this process because we can’t know what questions are in a child’s head unless they ask them.
Many people, when they hear that autonomous children are always exploring, experimenting, and questioning, assume this means that autonomous children will always choose to study everything on the conventional curriculum—all the science, math, history, literature, music, and so on, that we wish they would learn. This is a mistaken picture. Not everyone is interested in all of these subjects, and that’s okay. Embracing autonomy in education requires us to rethink the meanings of the words “education” and “learning,” so that they are not just about what’s on the conventional curriculum, but encompass the full spectrum of human knowledge and skill. “Education” includes, for instance, learning how to get along with others, how to design things, how to solve problems creatively, how to cope with failure, how to set and achieve goals, how to sell ideas, how to troubleshoot tech problems, how to find information online, and how to manage money. Of course some autonomous children learn chemistry, calculus, Shakespeare, classical music, or other things on the conventional curriculum. It depends on their interest. But for each of these subjects, probably only a minority of kids will choose to pursue it.
Everyone is different. We all have different passions and talents. That’s why children should be in full control of what they study and when they study—and even whether they study. You might feel that a certain activity is educational or not educational, but you might be wrong. You might think that a child chatting with her friends isn’t an educational activity—but she’s actually developing her communication skills, learning about relationships, and learning how to resolve disputes. Or you might think that trading Pokemon cards isn’t an educational activity—but the child is actually learning about argumentation, negotiation, business, and economics. Let children follow their passions and you might be surprised at what they discover and achieve.