What would your home and school look like if it was designed around the principles of autonomy, competence and relatedness?
The third instalment of my education research
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Hey subscribers,
Here is the next instalment of my research on education. The previous two instalments are here and here.
Last time I wrote, I ended by saying I'd go find some examples of kids being given very high levels of autonomy and agency, particularly in the context of their education.
I want to explore what the role of education is today, what helps or hinders students' appetite for learning, and how the much-respected Self-Determination Theory of motivation fits in. Remember this theory claims that people thrive when they enjoy high levels of autonomy, competence and relatedness in their lives, and I'm interested in how we can help young people (and ourselves) to develop these traits on our education journeys.
Note: I decided, in a truly meta way, to do this research using a breakthrough educational tool: the latest ChatGPT feature called “Study & Learn.” Reports claim that it acts like a personal tutor, creating study plans and giving you questions as opposed to just spitting out answers. So, I fired it up, gave it all the context, and within minutes it asked me to reflect on my own early life at home and at school, about how much, or how little, autonomy I had.
On reflection, I had quite a lot of autonomy outside of organised structures like home and school. But not so much inside of them.
Outside, I grew up in the pre-internet era. Everything about my childhood was characterised by "playing out" and socialising face-to-face with friends and enemies alike.
I walked to school. I roamed beyond the limits of my neighbourhood. I drove my car to faraway towns.
Crucially, during both major periods of my schooling (primary and secondary), I spent countless hours exploring large areas of unpopulated land. During primary school it was the plot of unused land behind our house, which I affectionately called "the jungle" (despite it not being more than the size of a tennis court). During secondary school, me and my mates spent all our time hanging around on what we called "the rec"—public recreation ground the size of several football pitches and surrounded on all sides by extensive woodland. This "exploration as foundation for agency" is a key point that I'll come back to shortly.
Inside, it was a different story.
Inside at home, whilst my parents were fantastic parents who loved me unconditionally and gave me plenty of freedom to play, cook, make things, and become whoever I wanted to become, they were both victims of overly controlling helicopter parenting, which naturally ended up seeping into their parenting styles with me.
The implicit message that is telegraphed to kids through nit-picking and helicoptering is that parents always know better than kids, kids can't be trusted to do things in their own way, and the result is they have a hard time developing much agency, competence or relatedness in the home.
Inside school, what can I say?
It was typical state-run schooling in 1990s northern England. Separate facilities. Ringing bells. Detention and report cards. A predetermined curriculum delivered in a formalist way. And plenty of overly controlling teachers and dinner ladies. It was education "because we say so." Education by coercion.
Being a kid who thrived when given freedom and the chance to do creative work, I obviously didn't take well to the academic side of school, and instead of applying myself I chose to view school in the only way that made sense to me: as one big social event. Because of this, any autonomy, competence and relatedness I developed at school was in service of becoming popular, not educated.
Next, this new AI tutor of mine asked me another question (which I think is a fantastic question):
Imagine a school or home environment designed entirely around the principles of autonomy, competence, and relatedness. What would be missing from it that was present in your school/home growing up? And what would be added in that was absent in your experience?
I really enjoyed thinking about this question. What follows are some broad-brush ideas, each of which would probably deserve its own essay. But in the spirit of answering the tutor's question (I like this tutor a lot more than the ones I had at school 😉), I'm just going to share what comes up without overthinking.
In a school designed around the principles of autonomy, competence and relatedness, things that would NOT be present might include:
🚫 Exams: admittedly I would need to find evidence of this before subscribing to it fully, but I can imagine that set curriculums and exams with fixed dates don't exactly give kids an appetite for pursuing subjects in ways that are interesting to them. If you know there's going to be predetermined questions on an exam, and you know you've no choice in what you learn, when or how, AND you've no choice in when you can take the damn exam, then, many kids, like me, would feel put off from learning before they even got started.
🚫 Kids in same-age classes: again, this would need substantiating, but I've heard compelling stories that, from an evolutionary standpoint, humans evolved to grow up in groups of mixed-age. The benefit is that those a little older are able to teach or model how to do things to those a little younger. Mixed age groups are also a more accurate proxy for what the real world is like outside of school. I'm sure there are practical reasons why same-age classes are efficient for industrialised nations to manage, but when you think about it, going through your whole primary and secondary education with people only your own age makes you feel like you cannot or should not relate to those younger or older. I can remember when my friend group began to mix with kids a year or two above and below us. It only really happened in the final two years of secondary school, but it felt really good, it felt like a restriction had been lifted, a restriction that up to that point had seemed absolute. "Hey, it's kinda cool but also kinda weird that I'm now hanging around with Tom and he's in the year below me!" or "Did you hear that Charlotte is going out with Steven and he's in the year above her?" This age-mixing was unthinkable for 80% of my time at school. But I think if school classes were made up of kids that ranged in age, even by a single year or two, it could help kids feel like they were living in a more expansive social milieu, with greater opportunities for agency and belonging.
As for things that WOULD be present in this school, maybe:
✅ Self-chosen project-based learning: once again there is tons of existing research I currently know diddly-squat about, but from what i've heard, project-based learning sounds like a great way to empower kids to learn in a way that is not only highly agentic but also binds subjects and ideas instead of maintaining walls between them—all of which sounds like a big plus 1 for autonomy, competence and relatedness.
✅ An expanded work experience program: I know schools have work experience placements for soon-to-be graduating students and that's great. I was lucky enough to get my first choice of working in an architect's studio (and earn real money when they offered me a part-time job in the summer!). But I've been thinking a lot lately about the benefits of honouring the explore-exploit dilemma1, and I think we should do more to give kids a broader taste of what it's like to work in different jobs. Kids should be allowed to shadow a plumber, a train operator, an engineer, a teacher, a banker, a doctor, a farmer, a pilot, etc etc. I feel strongly about this because (a) it is wise to allow yourself enough time to explore your options before deciding ("In a world like ours that is full of choice, the biggest mistake is premature commitment." - Naval), (b) it really is true that you can only be what you can see, and the reason we don't have a more diverse workforce is not because people lack skills or ambition, but probably because they literally cannot picture what some jobs look like day-to-day and this creates a fog of ignorance that is hard to step into, and finally (c) it's a myth to think that anyone can know what they like and what they are good at merely by thinking about it. People have to try doing things first in order to discover how they perform and how they feel. My old tutor at art school, Linda, used to refuse to see any student unless they had actually done the thing they wanted to talk to her about. This is the way.
In a home environment built around autonomy, competence and relatedness, things that would NOT be present might include:
🚫 Dense urbanism in all directions: given what I've read from
, and others about the childhoods of exceptional people and the link between their achievements and the fact that they had plenty of opportunity as kids to go venturing off alone into woods and forests, I think a home based on the principles of autonomy, competence and relatedness would not be devoid of these expansive natural landscapes. If you’re growing up surrounded entirely by roads, big box stores, people, adverts, noise, and strictly controlled infrastructure, you are literally never going to get the opportunity to wander off and get lost in the woods. I'm yet to read about it, and you'll be the first to know when I do, but apparently there are hunter-gatherer tribes around the world where the kids literally learn by wandering.🚫 "Chores": now, I'm not saying that the home shouldn't have jobs for kids to do; just that the word "chores" would be banished from it. Jobs and responsibilities would be re-cast as opportunities and privileges that children are invited to enjoy from a young age so that they can rub shoulders with adults and feel a sense of pride at their equal contribution. Don't ask me how to pull this off yet, I don't know. But that's the nature of a good goal, isn't it? It should challenge you to figure out how to achieve it.
And finally, some things that WOULD be present in this ideal home could be:
✅ Social media closing times: all forms of online consumption, stimulation and distraction (I'm looking at you social media!) would have closing times like shops and libraries do. This would not only teach kids that, despite what they've been led to believe, the internet is not "always on," they have control over it. But also, it would encourage them to find other more empowering and productive things to do during the time they'd otherwise spend doom-scrolling.
✅ Family Growth Sessions: into this new space left by social media consumption could flow any number of agency-giving activities. One of them could be to have a family session where each week a topic is democratically chosen (eg, health, fun, holidays, games, money, hobbies) and ideas, questions, concerns and updates are shared—with time spent doing productive stuff like researching, building, learning, practicing, networking, writing, exercising, or whatever. Me and my wife Corina have actually recently started doing fortnightly sessions like these, and after just one session on health, we have both learned a shit ton of new knowledge, we’ve had conversations that we’ve never had in ten years together, and we’ve made some major decisions that are going to improve the freedom and the quality of the rest of both of our lives.
I signed off last time saying I'd find examples of kids being given uncommon levels of agency in the hope of learning more about the limits and benefits of it.
I haven't done that exactly in this post, I'm still working on it, though I did come across one story, written in one of his memoirs, about Richard Branson being dumped at the side of the road at three in the morning, at eight years old, by his mum, and being told to find his own way home, which was several miles away. It's a surprising story, if a bit predictably sensational for the childhood of a future billionaire. But it does have two tell-tale qualities; namely, the wild wandering through expansive landscapes, and the complete antithesis of helicopter parenting.
I think what I'm really taking away from this post is greater clarity on some ideas that are important to me and worthy of more study:
project-based learning
kids learning among people of all ages
giving kids a chance to see what they can be
and living in a social media- and chore-free home in the countryside
I'm curious what ideas you have. What would be missing, and what would be present, if your home and school life had been built entirely around the principles of autonomy, competence and relatedness?
As always, I'll write again when I learn more.
See you next time. Thanks for reading.
Harrison 👨🎨
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Previous post
Children as decision makers
How do you help young people to meet their need for autonomy, competence and relatedness in their education?
The explore-exploit dilemma is about choosing between trying something new to learn more (explore) or sticking with what you already know works well (exploit). Exploring can help you find better options in the long run, but it might not give good results right away. Exploiting gives you the best known results now, but you might miss out on better things you haven’t found yet. The challenge is deciding when to explore and when to exploit so you don’t waste time or miss out.