Abstract
In this paper, the authors provide an overview of the unschooling movement, highlighting the important philosophical differences, among other differences, between unschooling and homeschooling. They then argue that to the extent that traditional schooling is a project of massification—increasingly dominated by a neoliberal ethos in our contemporary times—as opposed to emancipation, unschooling should be seen as its antithesis, providing an option for parents seeking a truly democratic education. Building on the basic presumption of the importance of autonomy, the authors contend that unschooling provides important insights to democratic education. A model that radicalizes Rousseau through Freire is presented. Specifically, the authors note Rousseau’s injunction to choose between making a person or making a citizen, and then consider Rousseau’s notion of the general will in combination with Freire’s lesson that citizens must engage with the collective in critically transitive ways. Rousseau and Freire can be read together to present a philosophy of unschooling in schools necessary to education for democracy to overcome the massifying, neoliberal impulse of our time.
Overview and purpose
Over the past 15 years or so, there has been a flurry of publishing on the unschooling movement from “how to” manuals (Hunt and Hunt, 2008; Larrichia, 2012; McGrath, 2010) to the debut of a new academic journal on the topic. 1 Given this, we first provide an overview of the unschooling movement, highlighting the important philosophical differences, among other differences, between unschooling and homeschooling. We will then argue that to the extent that traditional schooling is a project of massification—increasingly dominated by a neoliberal ethos in our contemporary times—as opposed to emancipation, unschooling should be seen as its antithesis which provides much-needed insights to promoting a truly democratic education.
A key component of such an education is the development of autonomy. Autonomy is defined in a variety of similar ways: seeing oneself “as sovereign in deciding what to believe and in weighing competing reasons for action” (Scanlon, 1972: 215); “the capacity for critical self-reflection in the development of value systems and plans of action” (Christman, 2005: 87); or the “capacity to form, to revise, and to pursue a conception of the good, and to deliberate in accordance with it” (Rawls, 1993: 72). While she does not talk about it as autonomy per se and while it may not be completely consistent with her notion of conscious social reproduction, 2 Gutmann’s (1987) well-known principle of nonrepression seems to invoke autonomy as a capacity to be developed through education: “The principle of nonrepression prevents that state, and any group within it, from using education to restrict rational deliberation of competing conceptions of the good life and the good society” (44).
Such conceptions of autonomy build on the Socratic ideal of the examined life, considered to be central to leading a life worth living. Deeper than a life worth living, however, we cleave to Brighouse’s (2006) principle of “flourishing” in a notion of the good life and “autonomy plays an important role in enabling people to live flourishing lives” (15). In order for a life to be flourishing it must, first, contain objectively valuable goods and must be lived from the inside. Of course, as Brighouse acknowledges, identifying which goods may or may not be “objectively valuable” is controversial. But certainly it eliminates some objectively unworthwhile or outright bad things, such as a life devoted to hoarding money (Brighouse’s example) or finding happiness in harming others. Second, a flourishing life must be lived from the inside. In other words, a person’s conception of the good for herself and for others (because her “interests are bound up with those of other people” (Brighouse, 2006: 20)), her reasons for and plans of action, must be based on her examined interests, desires, hopes, and fears.
All of these notions present a form of personal, rationalistic autonomy. While one must develop such capacity to deliberate among competing conceptions of the good life as inherent to the good life itself, we must also recognize the need for a collectivist autonomy. Building on his notion of conscientization, both personal and collectivist notions of autonomy are captured in the work of Paolo Freire—on which we elaborate in a subsequent section.
Building on the basic presumption of the importance of these forms of autonomy and the concomitant idea that schools should educate children in the skills typically associated with the capacity for autonomy (the practice of reason and rational deliberation, weighing evidence and arguments, revising one’s own positions, among others, that are inherent to flourishing), we will contend that the ideal of unschooling is unique in its promise to offer such an education, but perhaps insufficient. 3 To account for this insufficiency, we read Rousseau and Freire together to provide a foundation for a philosophy of unschooling that recognizes the simultaneous need for the freedom of unschooling and the structure of traditional schools.
Here we employ a notion of negative freedom in the way that this operates with the education of Emile. Put simply, negative freedom refers to a simple absence of interference and freedom from coercion (Berlin, 1969). Tracing all the way back to John Locke, should restrictions against individual freedoms be deemed necessary, this necessity must be proven by those who seek to limit those freedoms and that such limits must be “only for the public good” (Locke, 1823: 106). Thus, freedom is the non-restriction of options to the extent that the option one might choose does not interfere with the freedom of others to pursue their options. This is the kind of collectivist freedom supported by libertarian thinkers such as Robert Nozick (1974) who limits the functions of the state to “protecting all its citizens against violence, theft, and fraud, and to the enforcement of contracts, and so on …” (p. 26). Again, we employ this notion of freedom at the individual level in the sense, for our purposes, that individual students, à la Emile, should be free from obstruction and coercion to pursue their interests. 4
The model we suggest, then, represents a radicalization of Rousseau through Freire. This argument begins with Rousseau’s injunction to choose between making a person or making a citizen (Rousseau, 1762). Then we consider Rousseau’s notion of the general will in combination with Freire’s lesson that autonomous, “conscientitized” citizens must engage with the collective in critically transitive ways.
Unschooling, deschooling, or homeschooling?
Arguably, two separately developed alternatives to traditional schooling have contributed to the growth of the unschooling movement: democratic free schools and homeschooling. In free schools and in homeschooling, small numbers of children develop close relationships with caring adults, who are in a position to observe and nurture the interests of each individual child. While the claim may be more generally applicable to free schools than homeschooling since homeschooling and parenting styles vary much more considerably, such approaches are based in social constructivist theories positing that children learn by constructing their own mental models of knowledge and the world, aided by or “apprenticed to” more knowledgeable others.
This notion of apprenticeship is particularly important in Ivan Illich’s discussion of deschooling society. Illich’s approach takes two tacks: First, he wishes to disestablish schools. Second, he defends what he calls “learning webs” as a replacement for traditional schools. The learning web comprises four networks for Illich: References to educational objects, skill exchanges, peer-matching, and reference to educators-at-large. The purpose of these networks is to allow students to pursue their interests, unconstrained. “The creature whom schools need as a client,” Illich (1972) argues, “has neither the autonomy nor the motivation to grow on his own” (150). However, we want to point out, consistent with our overarching concern, that there is nothing in Illich’s argument or his learning webs to suggest that he has not confused autonomy with freedom. For one could conceivably attend to all of Illich’s details and still be “schooled” without specific attention to the notion of autonomy defended here.
Democratic free schools seemingly deal with this concern through the combination of a more structured “school” environment in which children have greater control over their time, activities, and decisions; there is much more freedom than in traditional schools. Sometimes children seek suggestions, but they are as likely to consult other children as they are to consult adults at the school. Each child in a democratic free school constructs his or her own mental models; parents and teachers learn to respect children and their interests and parents begin to trust children to learn without having their learning managed for them. While not representative of all approaches, an early democratic free school, Summerhill, was founded in England in 1921, and continues today, while in the US, the Sudbury Valley School was founded in 1968, giving children full democratic rights at school, and there are now over 50 Sudbury schools worldwide. In such schools, many decisions about what, how, or when children will learn are left to the children themselves, rather than being managed by adults. At Summerhill, for example, while the curriculum is prescribed, students choose whether or not to go to class. At Sudbury, students govern the school, including such “adult” things as staff hiring and facilities use, in cooperation with faculty.
Unschooling is similarly driven by an emphasis on freedom and self-decision making. It is “a method of homeschooling that puts the desire, drive, motive and responsibility for life – this thing we call learning, or education – in the hands of the learner.” 5 Unschooled students do not attend traditional schools or, even more to the point, do not attend school at all, following, for example, Illich’s model of learning webs. There are a couple of comparative and contrastive points to be made here. First, given the strong impetus of freedom in both unschooling and free schools, it should be noted that in many ways life at a democratic free school resembles a form of ‘unschooling at school;’ a paradox of freedom with structure. Second, given non-attendance at a traditional school, unschooling is easily conflated with homeschooling. Of course, unschooling can be, in fact, a form of homeschooling. Beyond that simple assertion, homeschooling is a heterogeneous movement and parents cite myriad motivations for homeschooling their children. This makes it complicated to determine the extent of the unschooling movement within the homeschooling movement, where, we suggest, the former derives from the democratic free school movement and the latter from more traditional understandings of school. What is clear is that homeschooling is on the rise. While homeschooled students currently represent only 3% of the school population in the US, this is growing, albeit slowly—up from 2.2% in 2002 (US Department of Education, 2013). This may be an international trend, as homeschooling has grown by 8% on average in Australia (Chapman, 2015) and by 65% in the UK over the past 6 years (Jeffreys, 2015), for example.
On the one hand, even as it is a heterogeneous movement historically, in the US more recently, the homeschooling movement has gathered steam as religious fundamentalist families began homeschooling in order to avoid the curriculum and morality of traditional schools that they considered suspect. Today, for example, one popular home school site—allinonehomeschool.com—will offer a “curriculum covering science, social studies, language arts, Bible and foreign language (with learning Hebrew). All lessons are based off of the book of Genesis.” Or, consider another homeschool curriculum provider—Accelerated Christian Education, Inc.—who claim that “Education apart from Biblical values is not true education.” Even though the most cited reason for homeschooling is a desire to provide religious and moral instruction (US Department of Education, 2009) many homeschooling parents are secular, drawn to homeschooling as a countercultural experience for themselves and their children. Such motivations largely reflect the ethos of unschoolers. As a homeschooling father in Spain noted, for example, “School doesn’t seem to be the ideal place for kids to learn by themselves, to pursue knowledge, to get involved with the environment, to understand life” (Gaultney, 2016).
Regardless of motivation, many homeschoolers choose to replicate schooling schedules, the division of knowledge into discrete subjects, pedagogical methods, and so forth. The reasons for this seem to be fairly straightforward. First, there has been a proliferation of websites that make doing so quite easy, providing complete curricula and guides through the homeschool approval process (required in the US). Second, following from the thinking of Ivan Illich, it may be that institutionalized notions of “school” and “education” have been reified in a way that has stultified our sociological imaginations around what it means to become and be an educated person. School as we know it has simply become common sense. There are, of course, explanations for this as well, a topic to which we return subsequently. For now, it should be understood that such approaches to homeschooling are simply ways of doing school at home. Of course, there is a bigger difference in the purpose of fundamentalist and secular homeschooling. The former tends to be a rejection of the development of autonomy and is illegitimate therefore. The latter—again, to the extent that it is simply “doing school at home”—while perhaps not a direct rejection of the development of autonomy, arguably undermines autonomy in the same way that traditional schooling does to the extent that, as noted, it replicates it at home.
In an attempt to shed some light on such a heterogeneous movement, what we seek is a normative philosophy of unschooling; one that, hopefully, makes clear that while unschooling and homeschooling can be consistent they are not coterminous. That is to say, that homeschoolers must have particular motivations, purposes, and design to be considered unschoolers. Unschooling parents reject the trappings of traditional school and facilitate their children’s interests and activities, following the raison d’être of democratic free schools. Taken a step further, some families view unschooling not merely as an alternative approach to education, but as an alternative lifestyle in which parenting is not coercive in any domain of life. 6 These families have come to be referred to as “radical unschoolers” (Dodd, 2009). But a coherent philosophy of unschooling, which given the discussion above, cannot only not apply to traditional homeschooling (now defined as those forms of homeschooling driven by religious fundamentalism or that simply do school at home) but also will disallow it, must go beyond a psychological foundation of constructivist learning and even beyond the philosophical ideal of providing a democratic education. For while non-coercion and following the interests of children begins a democratic education, a democratic education should also have as its core purpose the promotion of democracy and, even more specifically, critical democracy. In other words, while freedom is a necessary aspect of unschooling, it is necessary to the extent that it is co-requisite to what should be the overriding concern of unschooling: the development of autonomy. Otherwise, freedom arguably plays to the caprice of children and leaves the development of autonomy contingent to the apprenticer. Together, we argue, freedom and autonomy are required for development of the child as a person who is intellectually independent, capable of living and conducting him or herself in harmony with others, and can lead a flourishing life while caring for the flourishing of others. So education for critical democracy, an education that promotes autonomy as rational deliberation, is not a purely negative ideal. Unschooling requires experiences that serve to inculcate specific dispositions necessary to democratic society. While we cannot pretend to be able to develop a finite list of such things, we might begin with mutual respect of people merely for their personhood, à la a notion of inalienable rights. We might include recognition of diversity of experiences, cultural attachments, religious affiliations, among other things that inform different people’s view of a good life. In other words, such differences, then, serve as a foundation for rational deliberation. We might include a norm of reciprocity by which “we should not make claims and arguments that cannot be accepted by others unless they already hold fundamental moral commitments about which we expect reasonable people to disagree” (Brighouse, 2006: 67). All such dispositions serve the end of critical democracy in which citizens see themselves as subjects. 7 As subjects, they control their own lives. They understand their society and their role in troubling the assumptions and contradictions inherent to it, especially as those contradictions undermine the autonomy of others. In other words, a democratic education built on freedom is necessary but insufficient for educating for democracy.
But, now, we have gotten ahead of ourselves in terms of the argument. Thus, we turn to a discussion of freedom, as exemplified in Rousseau’s natural man. From there, we can consider more carefully the relationship between freedom and autonomy and the importance of that relationship to critical democracy. It is in that final turn that we see the importance of reading Rousseau and Freire together toward a philosophy and model of unschooling.
Freedom and Rousseau
The parent/teacher as facilitator combined with freedom of exploration and experience might be considered an extreme form of constructivism, harkening back to Rousseau’s Emile wherein we “make the acquaintance of the natural man … [for whom] the supreme good is not authority but freedom” (Boyd, 1962). Schooling, traditional schooling at least, is the opposite of freedom. Initially, the need for unschooling is captured in Rousseau’s identification of the need to accentuate freedom in the education of Emile as natural man who lives for himself. But Rousseau also asks, “… but how will a man live with others if he is educated for himself alone?” (Rousseau, 1762: n.p.). So Emile must live as individual and citizen without being corrupted by the society of the latter.
First, the need for unschooling is motivated by the positioning of school as a manipulative rather than a convivial institution. In other words, where Rousseau views society as corruptive of individuals, unschooling advocates point to schools as a—or perhaps the—primary source of corruption. Therefore, we must develop innate human goodness away from the corruptive influence of society, including schools as traditionally writ. Here we must first, Rousseau insists, “choose between making a man or making a citizen” (Rousseau, 1762: n.p.).
For Rousseau, society corrupts by exciting the passions; particularly self-love. From the baby’s first tears, we are taught to be selfish and manipulate others to satisfy our desires. But this instinctive “amour de soi” is about the necessity of self-preservation, neither moral nor immoral. Neither is it in consideration of or relative to others. It is only when this amour de soi combines with the power of reason within the collective that it is transformed into “amour-propre,” a self-love driven by comparison with others. In his first discourse, Rousseau traces this amour-propre to developments in the Arts and Sciences which, not being needs, resulted in pride and vanity. “Our souls,” he argued, “have been corrupted in proportion to the advancement of our sciences and arts toward perfection” and “luxury, licentiousness, and slavery have in all periods been punishment” for our arrogance (Rousseau, 1964: 39, 47, respectively). The result of this is a “base and deceptive uniformity” wherein “One no longer dares to appear as he is; and in this perpetual constraint, the men who form this herd called society, placed in the same circumstances, will all do the same things unless stronger motives deter them” (Rousseau, 1964: 38).
In order to put such stronger motives in place, Emile is not subjected to traditional schooling, at least until such time as a democratic society is achieved. For Rousseau, such a society would enact the general will of the people achieved by individuals acting through reason for the good of the whole. However, prerequisite to the making of this citizen—such that the democratic society envisioned might obtain—is the making of the person through an education based in freedom, one that should be purely negative to “preserv[e] the heart from vice and the mind from error” (Rousseau, 1762: n.p.). Learning must be restricted only by natural capacities and guided by interest, self-initiated discovery, and practical experience. In true Rousseau-ian form, Illich similarly insists on returning “initiative and accountability for learning to the learner or his most immediate tutor” (Illich, 1972: 24). While schooled children are instructed “in their own inferiority,” for Emile, “work and play are all the same … His games are his occupations” (Rousseau, 1762: n.p.).
Contemporarily, we might consider the example of competitive grading as instruction in inferiority and as against freedom, that is, as corruptive. 8 Grading isn’t competitive merely because children compare grades and determine who is and who is not “smart,” as they do. Grading is competitive because teachers use grading to construct categories of students, categories of A, B, C … students. There is nothing natural, or neutral, or objective about this process. Some might argue that it is objective to state that 9 answers correct out of 10 on, say, a multiple choice test is 90%.That, of course, doesn’t dull the fact of categorization and the construction of competition. But, also, consider that 90% is, arbitrarily, a “B” in many schools. It is very straightforwardly the social construction of “rigor,” a pedagogy of a constructed variance (which, of course, proves rigor). Such pedagogy can be seen in common grading practices. In a typical grammar workbook, for example, students will find an exercise in which they must (1) circle the correct verb (learning subject/verb agreement) and (2) underline the subject of a given sentence. The assignment is set up visually such that anxious or impatient children, knowing what to do from what they see, can jump right in and get started circling verbs: There are two verbs in each sentence divided by a comma and enclosed in parentheses, as in “Children who eat well (grow, grows) tall.”
A student who neglects to underline the subject will, of course, get 10 points out of 20: 10 correct (verbs) and 10 wrong (subjects) and fail the assignment—even though one has to know the subject to get the verb correct. The teacher knows this but still, in the name of rigor, will grade accordingly. 9
The educational result of such “rigor” in contemporary times is precisely what Rousseau criticized so long ago: “I see everywhere,” he said, “immense institutions where young people are brought up at great expense … [where] they will know how to write verses they can barely understand …” (Rousseau, 1964: 56). Nevertheless, the fact that young people may barely understand does not stall the desire for amour-propre. From this example of the social construction of rigor, we should see that rigor drives this desire. Instruction in inferiority manifests through comparison with others, such comparative reality now visible through a series of data points called grades. These points are coordinates by which students locate themselves in the arbitrary academic hierarchy, recognizing themselves through others (an inevitable effect of schooling as both Rousseau and Illich understood) via the data points that students inevitably compare. 10 These grades are also a form of property, the prime mover of inequality—as we shall discuss below from Rousseau’s Second Discourse.
In terms of autonomy, it is not at all clear what agentic options any student has in this particular moment of grading. Some students will shrug it off and simpler “try harder the next time” because “that’s the way it is.” This is the desired result and evidence of the manipulative ideological state apparatus at its most efficient. It is manipulation to the extent that, as Illich put it, “School is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is” (Illich, 1972: 163). To put this in Freirean terms, school becomes the inculcator of “mythical explanations of [one’s] reality,” serving to massify or domesticate students’ critical faculties (Freire, 1973: 34). This, then, is the opposite of an autonomy-promoting experience.
Autonomy in the neoliberal order
Contemporarily, we would argue, it is the neoliberal order—a governing rationality that ostensibly privileges autonomy and the autonomous individual—and its radical infiltration into schools that provides such mythical explanations. We see this, Stephen Vassallo (2013) argues, in the notion of self-regulated learning, a form of academic hyper-individualism. As Vassalo puts it from a Freirean perspective, “teaching students to self-regulate their learning aligns with the neoliberal logic to produce adaptable, self-interested, responsibilized individuals so they can operate within environments that are characterized by choice, competition, and personalized learning” (568). But in such neoliberal formations, we would argue that it is not autonomy that is the concern but a faux-autonomy based on a perverse economic rationality that promotes a hyper-individualism wherein individuals “naturally” act in ways that maximize their own personal, economic benefits. As the grading example suggests, economic benefit can also refer to the “currency” of the school: Grades, among other external, manipulative motivations. This rationality is reinscribed given that neoliberalism is effective at import[ing] economically determined terms such as “viable,” “efficiency,” and “cost” into previously non-economically determined spheres (such as education). Of course, the most cost-efficient way for students to “earn” school currency is to succumb to the rigid accountability schemes that drive schooling.
Although not explicit as such, we see the concern over neoliberalism in the work of unschoolers.
11
Consider, for example, the language in the critique of education by John Holt. He argues, Education, with its supporting system of compulsory and competitive schooling, all its carrots and sticks, its grades, diplomas, and credentials, now seems to me perhaps the most authoritarian and dangerous of all the social inventions of mankind. It is the deepest foundation of the modern and worldwide slave state, in which most people feel themselves to be nothing but producers, consumers, spectators, and fans, driven more and more, in all parts of their lives, by greed, envy, and fear. (Holt, 1976: 4) Next to the right to life itself, the most fundamental of all human rights is the right to control our own minds and thoughts. That means the right to decide for ourselves how we will explore the world around us, think about our own and other persons’ experiences, and find and make the meaning of our own lives. (Holt, 1976: 4)
Overcoming such hegemony was, arguably, a primary motivator of Illich’s argument to disestablish schools. In this, Illich points out his notion of disestablishing schools was misinterpreted to mean the elimination of schools. 12 Given that his recommendations for what education should look like never invoke the institution of schools, this would seem a reasonable “misinterpretation.” Nevertheless, the point that might be taken here is that societal deschooling should not involve the elimination of unschooling—whether through free democratic schools or radical unschooling. For these ways of democratically deinstitutionalized schooling (the difference between the former and the latter being a matter of degree) promote authentically flourishing lives in which autonomy plays a critical role. 13
What must occur, then, is critical engagement with the meaning in the experience. This may or may not and need not occur in the exact moment, as our experiences are sedimented events that continue to generate meaning. Critical engagement of one’s autonomy in such reading of experience seems to be what is missing in Emile’s early education in freedom. This is what Freire refers to as conscientization: The process by which people become knowing subjects, becoming aware of their sociocultural and political reality, the contradictions therein, and their capacity to transform that reality. In other words, once in society, how does Emile make sense of his new, unfree condition? How does he engage the manipulative context? Rousseau’s vision might suggest a certain level of passivity to the extent that it is about how Emile might simply maintain his natural goodness within a corrupt society. But we also see in Rousseau a more radical and active vision that engages quite consistently with the philosophy of Freire.
Reading Freire with Rousseau as unschooler
In Rousseau, we see both educational motive and method. But what is arguably missing, given Illich’s more contemporary critique of schooling and the manipulative nature of neoliberalism, is a radical reshaping of autonomy that will speak to the general will in order to avoid that will taking on hegemonic proportion (again, through neoliberalism). Here we are referring back to the individual/collectivity problem and suggest that even as Emile may now know himself through his freedom, this is not the same as autonomy. His autonomy easily becomes the illusion provided by the neoliberal order, received by him through the illusion of choice which he misrecognizes as freedom. Freire puts it as follows: “In our highly technical world, mass production as an organization of human labor is possibly one of the most potent instruments of man’s massification. By requiring a man to behave mechanically, mass production domesticates him” (Freire, 1973: 34). In other words, he no longer questions or, as Freire would state it, “problematizes” his social relations of existence. He abides; he has adapted, taking on the now hegemonic rationality.
If it is not a system of mass production, traditional schooling with its scripted curriculum, common core, competitive grading, neoliberalized notions of self-regulated learning, high-stakes testing, organization by grade level, and “egg-crate” factory-esque architecture certainly all too closely resembles mass production. And what of the rationality that comes from such a system? Consider the questions that children ask in school: How many pages does this have to be? How many examples do we have to give? How many points is this worth? It would be peculiar indeed for a student to ask if she can write as many pages as she wants. Her more constrained concerns are perfectly rational, perfectly rational within the rationality into which students have been schooled. Notice how efficient such students are.
The point here is twofold. First, we rehearse the need for the education provided Emile. If schools are sites of neoliberal (or other kinds of) massification, then conscientization would seem to require the pursuit of “the child’s first sentiment [which] is self-love.” This, recall, is about self-preservation and the need for a purely negative education, not one that is manipulative. Even so, we suggest, second, that Emile must still face the (manipulative) rationality of the schooling to which he might have been subjected in the larger society. Here, self-love must be followed by “love of those about him” (Rousseau, 1964: 56), enhancing his personal autonomy and feeding into a collectivist autonomy. In other words, Rousseau’s individual freedom, sometimes read as autonomy, is necessary but insufficient. As we suggested previously, the differences among people in society serve as a foundation for rational deliberation and, therefore, autonomy. If we remove Emile from society, where/how does he gain autonomy even as he may gain a strong idea of who he is as an individual, his likes and dislikes, his interests, and his abilities? Emile may know what he wants and to some degree who he is, but he will not know how to deal with society. In other words, even personal autonomy is not an individual attribute; it is called into existence by society. In this vein, Garland, while citing neither, points to both Rousseau and Freire, arguing that “The importance of education can be said to be an end in itself prefiguring free social relations of community and reciprocity, comprised of autonomous individuals capable of comprehending both themselves and the world in which they live” (Garland, 2012: 32). Understanding that world, a collectivist autonomy may set in to provide both direction and support for action.
As Bertram (2012) notes, “Rousseau’s account of the general will is marked by unclarities and ambiguities” (n.p.). He goes on to point out that the principal tension is between a democratic conception that the general will is simply what the citizens of the state have decided together and a conception based on abstract ideals that transcend majoritarian or even consensus decisions. The tension is neither binary nor fatal, to the extent that democratic procedures can be the starting point of uncovering the ideals that serve the common interest. Ideally, then, the general will, enacted through laws, will be universally applicable and impact everyone equally. The problem here, as Bertram points out, is that In a state where citizens enjoy a wide diversity of lifestyles and occupations, or where there is a great deal of cultural diversity, or where there is a high degree of economic inequality, it will not generally be the case that the impact of the laws will be the same for everyone.
The conservative nature of mere comprehension suggested by Garland above combined with lack of state legitimacy requires constant transformation of society through the enactment of one’s subjecthood: Freire’s conscientization. Certainly, part of Rousseau’s educational project was, in this vein, to avoid the domestication of man’s critical faculties of which Freire warns. Further, Rousseau would see as political failure a state in which it were possible for one portion of the collective to impose its will on the whole (Rousseau, 1762a: n.p.). The problem here is that any ideological commitment, as we have tried to suggest, disguises itself as will, not imposition. As we noted above, amour de soi combines with the power of reason toward amour-propre. Rousseau argues in his Second Discourse that so many “evils are the first effect of property and the inseparable consequence of nascent inequality [born too of property]” and it is property that amour-propre seeks to protect. Indeed, such protection became a deliberate project of the rich, “destitute of valid reasons” as to why he should be able to appropriate for himself “anything from common subsistence that exceeded [his] own” (Rousseau, 1964: 156, 158, respectively). The rich then proclaim to gather everyone under a single supreme power—laws—such that no one can be oppressed. 14 Such non-oppression would, of course, also protect the property of the rich. Thus, Rousseau concludes that “inequality … draws its force and growth from the development of our faculties and the progress of human mind, and finally becomes stable and legitimate by the establishment of property and laws” (Rousseau, 1964: 180). This process, then, provided the illusion of choice to men “easily seduced” and who “did not have enough experience to foresee its dangers” (Rousseau, 1964: 159-60). Of course, Rousseau continues, “Those most capable of anticipating the abuses were precisely those who counted on profiting from them” (Rousseau, 1964: 160).
This speaks, then, to the need for a more radical pursuit of the general will. This requires both individual and collectivist autonomy. Here Freire is quite helpful. As regards the former, we have already raised Freire's notion of conscientization—also a rationalistic conception of autonomy—which we would argue is a more radical autonomy. It is so in its pursuit of critical transitivity, “increasing men’s (sic) ability to perceive the challenges of their time” and enabling them to reflect on their own state of massification (Freire, 1973: 32, 20, respectively). Critical transitivity is demonstrated when people make “broad connections between individual experience and social issues …. In education, critically [transitive] teachers and students synthesize personal and social meanings with a specific theme, text, or issue” (Shor, 1992). 15 The connection to individual autonomy is further revealed in Freire’s insistence that subjects must pursue integration over adaptation. The former “results from the capacity to adapt oneself to reality plus the critical capacity to make choices and to transform that reality.” Unlike the integrated subject, the adapted object can engage, at most, in “a weak form of self-defense” (Freire, 1973: 4).
The notion of collectivist autonomy entails the ideal of solidarity and, thus, collective action as autonomy. This is obviously an important point given the need for collective action against the inequitable social structures that attenuate the flourishing of self and others. We see this in Freire’s adamance that there can be no valid aid since this reinscribes dominant/subordinant relations in what he refers to as “assistencialism.” It is the subordinant group that must take decisions in this regard. To empower the cultural group, the educational process importantly focuses on getting students to recognize the difference between nature and culture, the latter being a creation of the autonomous collective comprising critically aware subjects (Freire, 1973).
The contemporary state is inarguably divided into the factions representative of political failure for Rousseau. This is especially true along class lines—as well as other lines of exploitation and marginalization (through racism, ethnocentrism, sexism, etc.) 16 —an inevitable by-product of the social relations constructed by capitalism. 17 If existing traditional or institutionalized schooling both undermines autonomy and reinscribes current social relations of dominance, and if unschooling is to be about the promotion of autonomy, then it can’t be properly considered autonomy if the unschooled simply then reinscribe those same social conditions. In other words, a philosophy of unschooling must ask, “autonomy to what end?” There must, for example, be a larger purpose in seeking out myriad “others” in Illich’s “learning webs.” While necessary, it is not enough for unschoolers to simply pursue their own intellectual interests, under an apprentice or otherwise. This purpose, the answer to what end, must refer back to flourishing with the concomitant commitment to the flourishing of others. This certainly points back to the education of the citizen as Rousseau set out and points to autonomy. But a thorough-going notion of autonomy requires conscientization for both an individual and collectivist ideal of autonomy.
Conclusion
In the end, both Rousseau and Freire are speaking to the individual–collectivity problem: Both seek the formation of autonomous subjects as well as engagement with the collective and the creation of a collective autonomy necessary to transforming society. Arguably, Rousseau is more radical in method vis-a-vis the individual and his freedom and Freire more radical in purpose vis-a-vis society and a doubled vision of autonomy. Our primary purpose in this article was to suggest, then, how they should be read together as a philosophy of unschooling, guiding the purposes thereof. This philosophy, as we noted, will render some forms of homeschooling illegitimate, just as it does most forms of traditional schooling. Our project here has been to make some normative claims about unschooling, not to make claims about what contemporary unschoolers think unschooling is or is not. In other words, many contemporary unschoolers are likely to agree with our characterization of what unschooling should be. We would argue that those who do not cannot properly be called unschoolers.
Furthermore, such a philosophy clearly has implications for the legitimacy of traditional, formal schooling. Even though we may theorize formal schooling as a potential site of resistance, the focus should remain on developing the person to see herself “to be a maker of the world of culture, by discovering that [s]he … has a creative and recreative impulse” (Freire, 1973: 47). This, we suggest, is “natural man,” who comes to flourish through his autonomy driven by his freedom, experience, and integration.
To the extent that it does not and cannot provide this, the elaborate, institutionalized apparatus of elementary and secondary schools, reputedly in place to prepare children for college access, may already be counterproductive to the project of facilitating children’s development as subjects. While there may be some latitude, especially at the classroom level, such institutions are inherently conservative—rules, management, schedules, accountability schemes, etc.—necessarily abound. Even the physical spaces engender certain “managed” behaviors and demand particular kinds of rules. 18 The spaces, rules, procedures, resources (or lack thereof), and numbers of students all collude to call teachers into being in reductive ways. Try as they might with the little latitude they have, the people who occupy such spaces are not Rousseau’s tutors. As we have noted above, traditional homeschooling suffers from the same afflictions and is, thereby, miseducative in the same ways.
If schools are to continue to play a role in supporting children’s development, they might better do so as democratic play environments that empower students to pursue their interests as well as their integration (Rolstad, 2012). This notion of unschooling in school may be a minimal starting point to educate for democracy, especially for families who do not find themselves in a position to unschool their children. Kuntz and Petrovic (forthcoming) take this even further by arguing that unschooling need not be seen outside of public schooling but as part of it, working in tandem with more traditional schooling through something like “radical community service learning.” Even so, unschooling in school will only be possible to the extent that schools can begin to relinquish control over children’s thoughts, communications, activities, and access to people from a wide range of ages, abilities, and domains of knowledge. While we cannot provide a complete ideal here, it is incumbent upon us to point to some immediate points of departure.
First, there should be no prescribed curriculum, at least in elementary school up to a certain age range. Schooling has become fixated, in typical technocratic fashion, on some thing called “grade level.” It is, we believe, simply not the case that all children should be required to read or do math or anything else at “grade level” by “grade three” (whatever such referents mean). We know, for example, from book flood approaches, that children’s interest in reading increases with opportunities to engage with interesting reading material and this occurs without direct instruction (Baker et al., 2000). We should, in fact, “flood” classrooms with all kinds of materials.
Second, teacher intervention in student’ play (note how many educators might, just out of habit, replace the word “play” with “work”) should largely occur, a la Rousseau’s negative ideal, only for reasons of safety or when some students interfere with the play of others. There may be other justifiable interventions such as when a teacher seeks to expose students to other possible interests and play, as per our next point. By and large, however, a particular student’s play (or that of groups of students playing together) at a particular activity might carry on for minutes, hours, or even days. This is natural.
Third, just as students are exposed to a wide variety of materials, they should also engage with a wide variety of community members. Community members and other students should regularly be invited to share with students their own play: Electricians, plumbers, chemists, even philosophers. Students should then be flooded with the resources to engage in similar (safe) play. Notice here, and throughout, it is the tutor’s responsibility to design and set up such floods in the classroom, or, whenever possible, bring children to where these resources already exist.
Fourth, there should be no grades, no tests, no assessments that feed into a hierarchical order and create forms of property. Of course, teachers must and should assess students’ abilities and understandings. But, they should (and do) be doing this frequently throughout any given school day through interpersonal interactions with students.
Fifth, all such things must be accompanied by some basic rights for students that are frequently denied in traditional schools such as freedom of movement and freedom of communication.
Perhaps to lesser extent than unschooling given its institutional setting, this sketch of unschooling in school necessarily engages both freedom and the development of autonomy simultaneously. This is because, unlike Emile, contemporary unschoolers, whether in the world or in a democratic school, are already in association with different others. They must, therefore, begin already to take each other’s interests, needs, and flourishing into account, even if, at first, only in terms of the need for negative freedom. But such interaction is required for the development of a critically democratic mind as well as the development of autonomy. For it is in such interactions that other perspectives on and views of the good life are presented. Similarly, in terms of school curricula, as students mature, they might be exposed to different kinds of academic floods, such as projects in sociology (e.g. around issues of race or gender) or projects in economics and politics (e.g. around issues of poverty, election fraud, the imposition of political spectacle over debate since the rise of the Presidential Debate Commission).
Students should then be free to pursue those things that most piqued their interests. In making such a determination, they are also forming the capacity for autonomy, the ability to make and choose their own life plan in accordance with their interests, concern for others, and their own rational deliberation among competing conceptions of the good. They might, in this development as subjects, choose to take action to improve both their condition and the condition of others. As Anyon observes and as was demonstrated with the Mexican-American studies program in Tucson, “studies have documented that such civic activism … typically fosters [students'] positive personal development, and improves their academic engagement and, therefore, achievement” (Anyon, 2011: 102). 19 Again, the ways that students engage, the battles they choose and why, the political (and other) commitments they make, are the enactment of autonomy.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.