Unschooling and Direct Instruction

In some sense, this is a discussion about biologically primary vs. secondary knowledge

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

I would define unschooling (or “Self-Directed Education”) as a radically student-centered philosophy of education, usually only possible in a home schooling environment. Students explore their environment, typically in mixed-aged groups, and follow their interests with little-to-no direction from adults. There is a “humans learn best through play” throughline to this philosophy. John Holt and Peter Gray (and his substack) would be my suggestion as an entry-point for anyone interested in unschooling. I’ve never heard of anyone else describing unschooling this way, but I’ve always thought of it as the “paleo diet” of education. That is: humans have evolved in a particular context for tens of thousands of years, and so mirroring some of those conditions will optimize our development today.

I’m not sure I would define direct instruction (DI) as a “philosophy” of education per se, however, it’s a close enough proxy for teacher-centered instruction, knowledge-rich curriculum, cognitive-architecture minded, “science of learning” advocates. This philosophy acknowledges that even the minimum knowledge necessary for participation in a modern world is not information that students are going to accidentally stumble upon. They speak primarily in the language of cognitive psychology, e.g., short-term memory, working memory, long-term memory, schemas, encoding, chunking, retrieval, etc. Developing Curriculum for Deep Thinking, E.D. Hirsch, and a familiarity with “Project Follow Through, 1967-1977”, would be my suggestions as an entry-point for anyone interested in these concepts.

A third group that will be mentioned but not discussed, is the group found in most schools, and takes on many names: (lowercase) self-directed learning, constructivist education, inquiry-based learning, 21st century learning, skills/competency based education, Project-Based Learning, etc., and while each have their own nuances, they all attempt to combine aspects of unschooling and DI. That is, they want students to be self-directed and to do most of the activity (e.g. “The students doing the talking are the students doing the learning”, or my favorite, “you know students are learning when they show visible delight”), however, they also want those same students to learn specific content and skills (most often skills over content, because without DI, what else are you going to learn?). Strangely enough, your average teacher, administrator, and board member, has never heard of unschooling, and has never formally studied DI (if asked, “DI” is “teacher-talk”, and that’s about it). They just “know” that real teaching means letting students direct themselves, so long as they are directing themselves directly to where you need them to go.

My cards on the table: I was a fan of unschooling when my boys were little, and my book could be described as an “unschooling book” (although, I wouldn’t describe it as such). That said, my sense is your average DI advocate rolls their eyes at your average unschooler, and they have some justification for their dismissiveness. In short, unschoolers tend to underestimate the novelty of the modern age. Information necessary to function in this world is not the same sort of information necessary in hunter-gatherer tribes. Children aren’t going to learn times tables and phonics the same way they learned hunting, fishing, and basket-weaving ten thousand years ago. Also, children are not going to learn how to “self-regulate” phone use, video games, and chocolate consumption through the “let them do it as much as they want and they will learn on their own through the consequences of their own actions.” That might have worked with Fred Flintstone who had to learn how to self-regulate his berry-and-raw-tuber consumption, but it’s not going to work when there’s a team of the world’s smartest engineers whose only job it is to develop foods and software to keep children addicted to consumption.

As I write this I am sitting in a ski lodge as my son skis. At best, unschooling skiing would have been an inefficient way to learn how to ski, and at worst, it wouldn’t have worked at all. My other son snowboards, but he is not here today because he is at a robotics competition. The odds of him being able to unschool coding approach zero. I have read and respect John Holt (who, I believe, coined the term “unschooling”), and I know he learned a musical instrument later in life, but I’ve come to learn more about violin and classical music through my boys’ experience, and their musical journey would never have brought them to Stravinsky and Berlioz via unschooling; being above-average to great at violin is strictly a Tiger Mom endeavor.

Unschooling does not tend to lend itself to learning biologically secondary knowledge, which, according to Developing Curriculum for Deep Thinking (I referenced earlier):

Is a category of knowledge that we lack a natural mechanism to effortlessly assimilate. It must be consciously taught and effortfully learned, building upon, yet distinct from biologically primary knowledge. Examples of secondary knowledge are reading and writing, solving algebraic problems, and engaging in discussions about geographical, scientific, political, cultural, and historical phenomena (copied and edited from page 6).

To be fair to unschooling (which, again, cards on the table, still holds a place in my heart), and what I never hear DI advocates discuss, is the importance of unstructured play, particularly with younger children, and especially rough-and-tumble play with young boys. Much anxiety, insecurity, mental weakness, and even narcissism, can be traced back to a lack of play, to include somewhat dangerous play. People, and especially children, are not merely computers (bodies attached to a “cognitive architecture”), and completing every book in the What Your Child Needs to Know series (which we love…however…) is only one part of the equation. Unsupervised exploration ought to be as much a part of a child’s curriculum as reading and balancing equations, particularly when they are young.

This may be entirely anecdotal, but I’ll speak for myself and my kids: it seems to me that DI taught us how to read (rather quickly, actually), but “unschooling” reading, i.e. free reign in the library, resulted in a love of reading.

Not to speak that-which-shall-not-be-named, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard either group speak candidly about IQ, which is the most predictive variable in the pedagogical equation. If I were to guess, it seems as though unschoolers don’t believe IQ is real, and DI types think you can overcome low IQ with retrieval practice and working memory management. For the record, I don’t know that’s what those groups think, but it seems that way from my interactions with them.

Neither group (nor the third and silliest “inquiry based,” etc. group) seem ready to accept that IQ has a strong hereditary influence; that students with an IQ of 85 or below are unlikely to learn, say, algebra; and that students with IQs of roughly 115 or above are not going to be served by taking academic classes and engaging in creative assignments with students with below-average IQs.

In some sense, unschooling and DI are polar opposites. I don’t feel right saying something like what we need is a balance between the two. What I do think is that education is a multivariable, complex equation, and trying to solve that equation more often than not turns into some combination of Plato’s cave and whack-a-mole. I think unschooling brings quite a bit to the table, especially for young kids, and especially in terms of the importance of (non-lethal) danger and unstructured play. Unschooling acknowledges how our ancestors evolved and develops children in harmony with evolution. I think DI brings efficiency to student acquisition of biologically secondary knowledge. DI acknowledges that we no longer live in the environment in which our ancestors evolved and adjusts accordingly.