Traditional elementary and secondary schools are a recent invention. Based on an industrial model of schooling, the teaching and learning system most used in America and around the world was created in the mid-19th century and is based on Prussian bureaucratic structures. The end goal for this system, at least in America, was the production of compliant workers for an industrialized economy and responsible citizens for a strong democracy.
For the remaining thousands of years, teaching and learning occurred in mostly decentralized ways, whether it be through apprenticeships, community learning circles, mentorships, or just the deep human impulse to pursue knowledge on your own terms.
Dr. Caleb Collier, Director of The Institute for Self-Directed Learning at Georgia State University, [in his new book Theoretical and Historical Evolutions of Self-Directed Learning] offers four examples of what he (and others) believes a new system of learning can be built around:
“In 1874, a Methodist minister named John Heyl Vincent and a businessman named Lewis Miller organized the first Chautauqua Assembly on the shores of Chautauqua Lake in western New York. It started as a summer program for Sunday school teachers. Within a few decades, it had become one of the largest adult learning movements in American history.”
“By the early 20th century, the Chautauqua Institution and the traveling circuit it inspired were reaching hundreds of thousands of Americans every year: farmers, shopkeepers, homemakers, factory workers. It included lectures, debates, music, drama, and self-improvement programs. Theodore Roosevelt called it ‘the most American thing in America.’”
“What Chautauqua lacked is what makes it remarkable. No required curriculum. No grades. No credentials. No gatekeeping around who could participate. Adults showed up, chose what they wanted to engage with, and formed learning communities around shared curiosity. It was self-directed, community-based learning at a genuinely massive scale, and it was wildly popular precisely because it started from what people actually wanted to know.”
“No figure in American educational history is more important to the concept of ‘education for human flourishing’ than W.E.B. DuBois.”
“…For DuBois, education was inseparable from freedom. He wanted Black Americans to have access to the full range of human knowledge, not just the portions deemed economically useful by a white power structure.”
“His famous disagreement with Booker T. Washington was about exactly this. Washington argued for vocational training to teach Black Americans practical skills and let economic progress lead to social progress. DuBois thought this was a profound mistake, a surrender of the intellectual and political formation that education at its best provides.”
“He wrote that ‘the object of all true education is not to make men carpenters, it is to make carpenters men.’ DuBois wasn’t rejecting the value of hard work. Rather, he was insisting that every human being deserves an education that cultivates their full humanity.”
“The most remarkable self-directed learning story of the 20th century may be one that happened in church basements and community halls across the rural South.”
“In the late 1950s, an educator named Septima Clark, working alongside community organizer Esau Jenkins and the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, developed what became known as the Citizenship Schools. The concrete goal was to teach Black Southerners to read and write so they could pass the voter literacy tests being used to systematically disenfranchise them.”
“These schools were dangerous. Participants risked losing their jobs, their homes, sometimes their lives. The teachers weren’t credentialed professionals but community members who were slightly more literate than their neighbors. The curriculum was entirely practical and purposeful, everything oriented toward exercising the right to vote.”
“A community that had been systematically excluded from both formal education and political participation built its own education system because survival required it….”
“Citizenship Schools prove that self-directed learning has never been a luxury. At its roots, it has always been connected to questions of power, freedom, and who gets to be considered a learner at all.”
“By the early 1970s, a philosopher named Ivan Illich had followed the logic of everything that came before and arrived at a conclusion many found too radical to say aloud. The institution of schooling, he argued, was itself the obstacle.”
“In his 1970 book Deschooling Society, Illich argued that schools have a ‘hidden curriculum,’ a set of lessons taught not through explicit instruction but through the structure of the institution itself. That hidden curriculum teachers students that learning is a commodity, that it comes from institutions, that its quality is measured by credentials, and that a person who hasn’t been through the institution isn’t truly educated.”
“Illich proposed replacing schools with what he called ‘learning webs,’ a network of peer exchanges, skill networks, open libraries of resources, and mentors who could help learners navigate their own paths. Read his vision today and you’ll notice it looks remarkably like the internet. He was writing in 1970, years before the World Wide Web existed. Imagining its basic architecture.”
“His ideas sparked the American unschooling movement, particularly through John Holt, who spent the 1970s making the case that genuine self-direction and compulsory attendance were simply incompatible. Whether the internet has delivered the educational liberation Illich imagined is a more complicated question. The infrastructure exists, but the institutional grip on credentials and access remains powerful.”
Compared to today’s traditional K-12 system of schools, what the Chautauqua movement, W.E.B. DuBois, Septima Clark, and Ivan Illich promoted are more the norm than the exception, when one looks through a self-directed lens.
My wife still tells me that scalability is a problem when it comes to self-directed learning, but I don’t agree.
It seems like a group of learners, identifying a need to learn something, identifying and building a relationship with some type of expert or expertise, while building a learning plan that defines, executes, and evaluates the appropriate learning goals, is all you need. Scale will come based on the success of the model.
Friday News Roundup tomorrow. Til then. SVB
A Better Path to Learning 
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