reading

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Published in the United States by Tells Peak Press

Illustrations by Shona Warwick-Smith (shonawarwicksmith.com)

First edition

ISBN: 978-0-9860119-5-5

E-book ISBN: 978-0-9860119-6-2

Dedicated to Jim, Grace, Dev, Mom, and Dad

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The Art of Self-Directed Learning

In high school or college, did you ever take a class on self-education? A class that helped you learn how to learn?

Neither did I.

Yet whenever we finish our formal schooling—and often during it—that’s exactly what we need to do: learn all sorts of important things, on our own, without a blueprint.

Ask yourself, do you want to:

build something from scratch: a website, a business, a house?
pursue a course of self-study or personal research?
work in a field unrelated to your degree or previous experience?
improve yourself in a deep, meaningful way?
travel independently?

Yes? Then you need self-directed learning. Because for these kind of challenges, no one will hold your hand. The only way to solve the problem is to learn your way there.

But self-directed learning (which I will define in the first few chapters) isn’t just a collection of practical tools for getting stuff done: it’s also a mindset that can help you lead a life very different from that of your friends, family, or society.

This book is a compilation of the wisdom, stories, and tools I’ve garnered from working with self-directed learners for more than a decade. Unlike my first two books, which I wrote specifically for teenagers and young adults facing the question of college, I created The Art of Self-Directed Learning for:

high school and college students who are passionate about learning, aren’t content to just “do school,” and want to take more control of their educations
teenage homeschoolers and unschoolers who want to become more effective and engaged self-educators
young adults who aren’t going to college and who are seeking guidance in their ongoing educations and career pursuits
parents who want to support their kids (or future kids) as self-directed learners
skeptical relatives and friends who want to see that self-directed learning isn’t about mindless wandering, avoiding work, or being irresponsible
adults of all ages who want to shape their careers to better reflect their beliefs
anyone who never wants to stop learning

The book starts with an explanation of who I am and where I’ve been, and then it provides 23 stories and insights for becoming a better self-directed learner. I begin by defining self-directed learning and then discuss motivation, learning online, learning offline, meta-learning, and building a career as a self-educator. The final chapter discusses how nature, nurture, luck, and mindset influence self-directed learning. An original illustration by my friend Shona Warwick-Smith accompanies each chapter to further illuminate its ideas.

Here’s a preview of the upcoming chapters:

	Chapter	Message
	INTRODUCTION
	What I Learned at Summer Camp, Down the Rabbit Hole, Back Out Again, and What I Found	The story of my own education, how I joined the unschooling movement, and why I became a cheerleader for self-directed learning.
	LEARNERS AND LEARNING
1)	The Girl Who Sailed Around the World	Self-directed learning starts with a dream to go farther, see more, and become more than others tell you is possible. But dreaming alone is not enough; you must fight to turn your dreams into reality.
2)	What Self-Directed Learners Do	Self-directed learners take full responsibility for their educations, careers, and lives. Think hard about where you’re going, research all your options, and then move boldly forward.
3)	What Self-Directed Learners Don’t Do	Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. Open yourself to the world and soak up as much learning as possible.
4)	Consensual Learning	Reject the tyranny of forced learning, no matter how desirable the end result.
	MOTIVATION
5)	Autonomy, Mastery, Purpose	The secret sauce of self-directed learning isn’t much of a secret at all: find your autonomy, mastery, and purpose, and you’ll find your way.
6)	Discipline, Dissected	Self-discipline isn’t some universal attribute that you either have or don’t. It’s a product of matching your actions to the work that’s most important in your life.
7)	Cages and Keys	Attitude is a self-directed learner’s most precious resource. For every cage, you can find a key.
8)	Second Right Answers	Generate an excess of solutions for the big challenges in life, and the right answer will present itself.
	LEARNING ONLINE
9)	Googling Everything	The Internet is the most powerful learning tool ever created. Use it early and often.
10)	E-mailing Strangers	Asking for help via e-mail is a low-cost and low-risk move with a potentially huge payoff. Who could you be writing today?
11)	The Digital Paper Trail	Future employers will google you; future romantic partners will google you; and your future kids might even google you, so start filling the Internet with your creations to leave a trail worth following.
	LEARNING OFFLINE
12)	Information Versus Knowledge	Humans still do much that computers cannot. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking you can learn everything online.
13)	Alone, Together	When the challenge of individual work feels overwhelming, join a community of people facing the same challenge.
14)	Nerd Clans	To build a social life as a self-directed learner, seek out pockets of fellow enthusiasts with infectious self-motivation.
	META-LEARNING
15)	Learning How to Learn	Seek out the teachers, coaches, and mentors in life who prefer to teach you how to fish instead of simply giving you a fish.
16)	The Dance Lesson	Learn to dance, and dance to learn. It’s all about communication.
17)	Indescribable Sexiness	To have a great conversation with anyone in the world, all you have to do is PASHE ’em and ROPE ’em.
18)	Deliberate Practice	To go from surface-level skills to deep mastery, find the people and places that can push you farther than you could ever push yourself.
	SELF-DIRECTED EARNING
19)	Pumping Poop for the Win	To make your biggest dreams happen: embrace setbacks, take the dirty jobs when you must, and always work for yourself.
20)	Passion, Skill, Market	Do what you love, but also keep an eye on the needs of others—that’s how self-directed learning can turn into self-directed earning.
21)	Time Wealth	Time is money, but that doesn’t mean you need to make more money to have more free time.
22)	Career Advice from a Robot Dinosaur	To create a self-directed career, build more than a product: build a personality.
23)	How to Light Your Mind on Fire	Stop focusing on the uncontrollable parts of your life—the nature, nurture, and luck factors—and start working hard on developing your growth mindset. That’s the true art of self-directed learning.
	Notes, Asides, Secrets, and Acknowledgments	Further information about the sources, stories, and ideas featured in this book, organized by chapter.
	About the Author

Whether you’re a veteran self-directed learner, the parent of a highly independent child, a student looking for new options, or a newcomer to self-education, this book will give you the tools and inspiration to learn more effectively and give yourself an unconventional education in a conventional world.

Ready? Let’s begin.

INTRODUCTION

What I Learned at Summer Camp

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When I was 11, I went away to summer camp for the first time. I didn’t brush my teeth for two weeks. It was fantastic.

The next summer, I had a camp girlfriend. She was 14. I told her I was 13. We held hands for one steamy week. Then she discovered that I was actually 12, and I learned that lying to make someone like you doesn’t work.

A few summers later, I joined the camp’s toughest backpacking trip. I helped plan the route, pack the food, and lead the group. We hiked to a high-elevation river, played on natural water slides, and ate orange drink-mix powder straight from the bag. Life was good.

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Blake (left), age 15, eating orange drink-mix powder on a backpacking trip

Then, as I did every August, I went back to school—and life seemed to lose its color.

I did well in school. But that didn’t make things better, because camp and school felt like two totally different worlds:

At camp, I had control over my schedule. At school, it was predetermined.
At camp, I could go deep into my interests. At school, I could only skim the surface.
At camp, I was a social freelancer. At school, group identity meant everything.
At camp, adults treated me like a person. At school, they treated me like my test score.
At camp, I went because I chose to. At school, I went because I had to.

School taught me how to memorize a fact until Friday and alter the margins on an essay to create a higher page count; camp taught me how to figure out what I want, take the initiative, conquer my fears, own my victories, and learn from my failures.

To my teenage sensibilities, the annual ratio of camp to school didn’t make sense. Why didn’t I go to camp most of the year and then head off to school for a couple months to learn grammar, algebra, and whatever else camp didn’t teach?

Down the Rabbit Hole

My quiet frustration with school didn’t find an outlet until halfway through college when, by a stroke of luck, a friend handed me a book by New York City public schoolteacher John Taylor Gatto.

Gatto taught for 30 years in some of the best and worst schools in Manhattan. He won multiple awards for his “guerrilla curriculum” of hands-on and community-based activities. Then he quit teaching because he didn’t want to “hurt kids to make a living” anymore, and he started writing—and speaking across the globe—about alternatives to traditional school.

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Excerpt from a handout provided by John Taylor Gatto

Suddenly a switch flipped. Gatto’s guerrilla curriculum and devastating critiques joined forces with my quiet frustration with school. Together they staged a coup in my mind and conspired to take my life in a whole new direction.

Within a month I had abandoned my old college major and custom-designed a new one that let me study education theory full-time. I gave up my dream of becoming a research scientist in order to spend time at tiny experimental schools, read every book I could find about educational alternatives, and organize a class for fellow undergraduates called Never Taught to Learn. My mind was on fire. Little did I know then that within the next five years, my experiences would lead me to my own self-directed career path.

After graduating in 2004, I returned to work at my childhood wilderness summer camp and also got involved with a new one, Not Back to School Camp: the camp for teenage unschoolers (homeschoolers who don’t follow a traditional curriculum in favor of a more self-directed approach).

The campers at Not Back to School Camp—some of whom dropped out of high school, and many of whom never went to school in the first place—were mature, self-knowledgeable, and passionate. They communicated clearly, actively questioned the world around them, and considered their dreams and goals carefully. They were, I realized, exactly who I wanted to work with. Within a few years I decided to build my career around hanging out with young-adult unschoolers, full-time, by creating my little travel and education company, Unschool Adventures.

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Leading the Unschool Adventures South America group, 2011

Soon I was working at two summer camps and running my own leadership programs, writing retreats, and international trips every year, fulfilling my childhood dream of doing camp-style adventures year-round. I thought I’d found the promised land, but something kept nagging at me.

… And Back Out Again

As I went deeper into unschooling, I realized I was riding into the Wild-Wild-West of alternative education. Unschooling was an open and leaderless movement, and like any such movement, both the best and worst rose quickly to the surface.

In its best moments, the philosophy of unschooling promoted listening deeply to one’s child, treating her as a person worthy of adult-level respect, and providing a wide variety of educational options. If her choice included school or college, so be it. In this worldview, everything (including structured learning) was an experiment from which to be learned.