Free to Browse with Ben Draper

The whole season 3 of the UnschoolingFuture Podcast will be devoted to kids’ and teens’ digital rights and access to information. This is because I’m writing and illustrating a (comic) book about kids’ and teens’ freedom to self-direct their online learning. The book will be called Free to Browse.

When we talk about self-directed learning, we always talk about it in terms of educational experiences, how life learning can be very educationally enriching and how it prepares kids for the future. Is that really what is most important about self-directed education? Why do we feel the need to try to sell young people’s formative experiences as “academic” or “educational”? 

Ben Draper, a former MIT fellow and the founder/ executive director of the Macomber Center in Framingham, MA, a self-directed learning community for ages 5 to 18, believes that children who grow up with their basic needs being met will have the tools they need when they get older to figure out how to continue to create the kind of life they want to live. In this episode, Ben and I tried to come to the core of how self-directed learning unfolds today and the role digital technology plays in that delicate process.

Resources:

Macomber Center website: https://macombercenter.org/

John Holt, How Children Learn (50th anniversary edition) (A Merloyd Lawrence Book). De Capo Lifelong Books, 2017

Grace Llewellyn, The Teenage Liberation Handbook: How to Quit School and Get a Real Life and Education. Lowry House Publishers; 30th Anniversary Ed. (3rd ed., revised) edition (September 29, 2021)