Moving Deeper into Self-Directed Education
From the beginning, our vision for the Macomber Center has been to create a “big tent” community, welcoming families from a wide range of educational approaches. Although we are firmly rooted in the philosophy of Self-Directed Education (SDE), our member families have represented the full spectrum—from radical unschoolers to traditional homeschoolers, and everything in between. We have even welcomed families who split their time between remote schooling at home and attending the Macomber Center.
The Macomber Center means different things to different families. For some, it represents a complete educational path: a rich, age-mixed community with plenty of resources, time, and support, where their kids are trusted to take responsibility for their own education. For others, it is just one component of their homeschool curriculum: a place for socialization, free play, and pursuing interests with other kids.
While many SDE schools and centers expect families to commit fully to their educational model, our approach has always been to meet families where they are. We believe that if parents begin to see for themselves the benefits of SDE in their children’s lives they will naturally come to embrace it more fully over time. By contrast, insisting that parents adopt it wholesale only risks alienating families who could otherwise benefit from our community.
This requires us to walk a fine line. On the one hand, we welcome families with a diverse range of homeschooling approaches. On the other hand, a central part of Macomber Center’s mission is to provide guidance and support to families looking to move further outside the traditional educational paradigm. We don’t want parents to feel like they’re being told how to educate their kids—a core value of unschooling is that parents should trust their instincts, rather than feel like they have to rely on “experts” to tell them what is best for their children. At the same time, we want to ensure that parents know SDE is a legitimate educational path, supported by decades of research and evidence, and that our staff—who have decades of experience in this model—are here as a resource for families who want to explore it further.
When parents opt out of school it is usually because they have discovered that traditional education fails to accommodate children’s natural ways of learning. Too often, though, they find that alternative education and homeschooling remain bound by many of the same limitations which prevented their children from thriving in school. Therefore, many parents find that what they really need to do, beyond merely removing their kids from school, is to dismantle the whole framework of traditional education—questioning, and letting go of the beliefs, assumptions, and behaviors which limit the full range of what’s possible for their children’s growth and flourishing.
This process of questioning our long-held, deeply rooted assumptions about education, and disabusing ourselves of those which are found to be limiting, is often referred to as “deschooling.” It may be a long and gradual process, but usually begins with an initial “deep dive“ into books, articles, videos, and podcasts. There is a lot out there, some of it is good and some of it not so good, some of it easily accessible and some of it harder to find. It is helpful to talk to people with a depth of knowledge and experience, rather than looking for answers online or from casual acquaintances who are just beginning their journey. If this is of interest to you, please come and talk to us. That’s what we are here for.
Whether you are on a traditional, homeschool path, or an unschooled journey, we always welcome conversations with parents. The Macomber Center is at its strongest when staff and families are working together in collaboration.