Teach yourself and become the teacher

All our life we have heard about the importance of education, that it is a powerful tool we can use to change the world and that students should be enthusiastic about learning. How then, in an education system that tends to be oppressive and limiting, are students supposed to gain knowledge and enjoy doing so? Not every student – and not every teacher – fits the mold: there is a lot more to education than just learning what we are told we should know. Herein lays the potential of a new approach to education: self-directed learning.

Self-directed learning entails that the individual takes the initiative and the responsibility for what occurs. Individuals select, manage, and assess their own learning activities, which can be pursued at any time, in any place, through any means, at any age. Learners do not follow a prescribed curriculum, but rather study the subjects they are most interested in, including things that may not be covered in any traditional school subject.

How can this approach to education work in our digital society? In short: Great!

With the digital technology available to us today, self-directed learning has the potential to enrich the lives of students all over the world. They can use the internet to search any topic, use Youtube to watch instructional or educational videos, and learn from experts all over the world using Skype. These are but a few examples of how digital technology can be used, as described by Hamilton (2014), not only as a tool to learn with, but a process to learn through. With the amount of information available, it would be easy for students to direct their own learning and step away from traditional schooling.  In the same way, our available digital technologies could also benefit and promote self-directed distance learning – local and global communities could support and engage each other to facilitate learning everywhere. Even in poorer communities, where schools just have the basics and nothing more to offer students with different ideas about schooling, self-directed distance learning could make a real difference. If they have the access, students could decide to take their education into their own hands and experience more than what a traditional school could ever expose them to.

Students are not just empty vessels and teachers are not all-knowing, and self-directed distance learning could benefit from this idea: students, after studying the subject of their choice, could teach it to other students with similar interests all over the world. In that way, the student becomes the teacher and learning never stops.

Isn’t that exactly what education is supposed to be?