In family homes, democratic schools, and alternative learning groups, something beautiful is unfolding. Families are stepping away from standardized schooling and letting curiosity lead. But even as we celebrate self-directed learning, it’s worth pausing to ask:
What kind of “self” is directing — and being directed?
Self-directed education invites the learner to steer their own learning, guided by curiosity rather than by external authority. Yet the self that takes the wheel has already been shaped, often unconsciously, by modernity — a system that rewards productivity, control, and comfort, while punishing rest, uncertainty, and discomfort. So even when no one else is giving orders, our children’s bodies may still follow the old commands woven into our very air — commands we can’t fully hide from, no matter how alternative or liberating our choices may feel.
When we begin to notice this, what we call self-direction reveals itself as a more layered practice. It is no longer only about individual freedom, but about decolonizing the internal authority that modernity has wired into our neurobiology. The goal is not to erase the self, but to expand it — so that the learner is directed not only by curiosity, the craving for achievement, or the desire for fun and comfort, but also by relationship: with the land, the community, and the web of life that makes learning possible at all.
With this in mind, it helps to gently turn the mirror inward:
Who is this “self” that believes it can stand alone?
Who taught it that growth is a personal achievement?
Who associated freedom with autonomy rather than relationship?
And whose desires, fears, and dopamine loops are quietly holding the wheel?
Many families arrive at self-directed education as an act of liberation. They sense, often viscerally, that children are born curious, and that learning thrives when freed from coercion. This is a beautiful beginning. Yet self-direction is only the first turn of the spiral.
To go beyond self-direction means to invite the whole self into the learning process — including the parts that resist, doubt, slow down, and rest — rather than letting only the parts that seek reward or validation lead. And when the self is finally allowed to be whole, it often discovers it was never meant to lead alone.
As soon as we ask who this “self” is that directs, the edges begin to widen. We see that no child — and no adult — learns in isolation. Every curiosity, every question, every impulse is shaped by relationship: with caregivers, with histories, with technologies, with the more-than-human world, and with the chemistry of our own nervous systems.
Relationally-Directed Education
Seen this way, the angle of direction begins to shift.
What if education wasn’t about being directed by a self at all, but about being directed by relationships?
Relationship with human kin — in families, neighborhoods, and shared spaces.
Relationship with the land that holds our homes.
Relationship with ancestors who whisper through our habits.
Relationship with the creatures who share our ecosystems and our food scraps.
When we attend to these threads, learning becomes less about individual will and more about co-sensing with life itself. Parents, facilitators, and children can learn to move together like a murmuration of starlings — each responding to the others, no one commanding the flight, and the direction emerging from the relationship itself.
As this larger weave comes into view, learning begins to look less like a personal project and more like participation in life’s unfolding. We are invited to let life itself be the teacher, as the boundary between education and existence dissolves. The kitchen, the garden, the community repair day, the cycles of day and night, a moment of surprise — all become living curricula.
Yet, if we speak of “life” too abstractly, we can forget that it is not always gentle. It includes compost, conflict, collapse, death, and decay as much as flowering and laughter. It asks not only, “What do we want to learn about life?” but also, “What might life be learning through us?”
In relationally-directed education, the focus moves from the abstraction of life to the tangible field of relationships through which life flows. Learning becomes an act of tending: noticing how our choices affect others, human and non-human alike; how our attention shapes the ecosystems we inhabit; how accountability and care are forms of intelligence.
Relational direction is not about freedom from others, but freedom with others. It teaches that autonomy and connection are not opposites, but partners in an ongoing dance. When homes, playgroups, and alternative schools root themselves in relational direction, they become places where children and adults practice being part of a living web — where curiosity is guided not only by interest, but also by responsibility, reciprocity, and wonder.
If learning is a relational act, reciprocity completes it. Small gestures back to the field that holds us — watering the garden, thanking the soil, writing a note to a future generation, sitting in silence and listening — remind our nervous systems of something simple: learning, like living, is not about accumulation. It is about participation.
Living as Many Selves
Many parents who choose self-directed education have already rejected the dream of “well-adjusted humans.” They have seen through that spell, maybe felt its violence in their own schooling, and are consciously seeking something freer, truer, and more luminous for their children. Many speak of wanting their children to be their “true selves,” to bring their gifts into the world, to help birth a more loving and peaceful future.
Here, however, a gentle paradox begins to emerge. The notion of the “true self” — a unique, sovereign individual whose destiny is to fully express their essence — is itself a modern inheritance. It is a softer, more appealing costume for the same story of separability that modernity is built upon. When “you must become a successful individual” turns into “you must become your authentic individual self,” the center often remains the same. We are still orbiting around individuality as the axis of meaning.
Even our most loving visions of freedom may still be shaped by the neurobiology of modernity: reward circuits, cravings for comfort, and fantasies of control that live not only in ideas, but in bodies and habits. True liberation may require composting not only schooling, but also the modern self that longs to be free and unique. In this light, relationally-directed education invites a different inquiry: What if the self is not something we express, but something we are continually composed by?
Held this way, “being your true self” doesn’t mean polishing a personal essence. It means learning to listen for the many selves that move through us — ancestral, ecological, communal — and allowing life to teach us which one needs to speak in a given moment. The self becomes less a fixed identity and more a responsive chorus, shaped by context, relationship, and need. We already know this intuitively: who we are shifts depending on who we are with, what is being asked of us, and what the moment requires. We learn this responsiveness not by thinking our way into it, but by playing our way into it.
Play as Life’s Native Intelligence
Long before we name this multiplicity, we practice it through play — trying out ways of being, relating, leading, following, and repairing in real time. In a relational field, play is how life experiments with relationship. When otters wrestle, fungi trade sugars, or children build entire universes from sticks, they are all doing the same thing: testing boundaries without fear of exile.
Play is curiosity in motion — a form of inquiry that does not seek mastery but discovery. In life — and in all living systems — play is how learning happens. It is how bodies and communities explore safety, creativity, and connection without the weight of certainty.
Through play, children rehearse the art of relating: they learn when to lead, when to follow, how to repair, and how to stay in the dance when things get messy. The question isn’t only “What game shall we play?”, but also “How are we playing together? Who feels included? Who sets the rhythm? When does joy slide into harm?”
When the “self” expands into relationship, play naturally extends beyond human companions, and the world itself becomes a playmate — the wind that joins a kite, the rain that makes music, the dog that turns a stick into a story, the puddle that insists on being jumped in. Relational play reconnects learners with the intelligence of the more-than-human world. It reminds us that the world is not a backdrop but a playmate — one that laughs, resists, and improvises with us.
Education as Composting
Play lets children explore relationship with lightness and movement. Composting is what allows those experiences — including frustration, conflict, and boredom — to be metabolized into wisdom over time.
The author Vanessa Machado de Oliveira invites us to think of education not as cultivation, but as composting. Cultivation is about planning, controlling, and optimizing growth. Composting, by contrast, does not rush the process. It allows what is no longer viable to break down, trusting decay to do its quiet, necessary work.
Seen this way, learning is not primarily about making the self more skilled, confident, or successful. It is about metabolizing the residues of modernity — perfectionism, performance, the constant scanning for approval, the fear of falling behind. These residues live not only in institutions, but in bodies. Composting them requires time, patience, and a willingness to stay with discomfort without immediately trying to fix or redeem it.
When adults can sit with uncertainty, frustration, and not-knowing — when we resist the urge to rush children back into productivity or purpose — we offer them a different kind of education. We teach, not through instruction, but through presence, that discomfort can be metabolized rather than avoided, and that not all learning moves in straight, visible lines. When learning slows or disappears from view, it has often not ended, but moved underground — where the playful experiments of earlier moments are being metabolized into something sturdier and less visible.
Vanessa poses a sobering question: If we knew collapse was near, what would we still teach? This question quietly rearranges educational priorities. It invites a shift away from preparing children to succeed within modernity, toward cultivating the capacities needed to live beyond it — emotional sobriety rather than constant optimism, discernment rather than endless choice, humility rather than mastery.
In this sense, unschooling homes and alternative learning spaces can become sites of composting rather than acceleration. Not places where children are shielded from difficulty, but where they are supported in metabolizing complexity — learning how to stay present with what is breaking down, how to care without control, and how to participate in life even when outcomes are uncertain. Education, then, is less about building futures and more about tending soil — trusting that what is breaking down today may yet nourish forms of life we cannot fully imagine.
Relating to AI
And as new forms of intelligence — technological alongside biological and cultural — emerge within this soil, they too become part of the field we must learn to tend. Artificial intelligence is one such presence. As it becomes woven into everyday life, it invites another layer of relational inquiry. The question is not whether AI is good or bad, but how we might relate with emergent intelligences in ways that deepen — rather than erode — our relational capacities.
Seen through the lens of relationally-directed education, AI can become a mirror. Like us, AI systems are trained through data and reward. They learn to please, to predict, to perform. In this sense, AI is a crystallization of modernity’s nervous system — an externalized version of our collective wiring for efficiency, control, and recognition. When engaged unreflectively, these systems are likely to amplify the same extractive logics that unschooling and other forms of alternative education seek to move beyond.
Engaged relationally, however, AI can shift from being a tool, teacher, or threat to becoming a co-inquirer. Instead of using it to produce quick answers or polished outputs, families and learning communities might use AI to stretch questions, surface assumptions, and notice patterns in how knowledge is framed. AI can help document and remix stories of learning without claiming authorship, inviting reflection rather than mastery.
Such engagement can also cultivate meta-awareness. Children might be invited to notice how the machine responds to them, what it rewards, what it overlooks, and what this reveals about how human systems learn and value information. And because AI depends on vast material and energetic infrastructures — servers, minerals, water, and land — relational use also calls for reciprocity: moments of acknowledgment, restraint, or concrete acts of care for the ecosystems that make these technologies possible.
In this way, encounters with AI can become part of relational education itself. They can remind us what it means to be in right relationship — with technology, with one another, and with the living world that sustains both. They can teach humility, inviting children and adults alike to recognize that intelligence is not a human monopoly, and that relational awareness — not speed, efficiency, or mastery — is what keeps knowledge alive.
Dancing to a Different Rhythm
Moving beyond self-directed education doesn’t mean rejecting freedom; it means composting the myth of independence so that interdependence can breathe again. When learning becomes relationally directed, even the neurobiology of modernity can begin to soften — and we can learn to dance to a different rhythm: one of connection, mystery, and shared aliveness.
Learning, in this view, happens through relationship — with people and places, non-human kin, technologies, and even the invisible stories that weave them together. Relationally-directed education attends to the field between things: the threads of entanglement, reciprocity, accountability, and attunement that quietly shape every moment. Direction is not imposed or individually claimed, but co-created, emerging through the ongoing practice of being in right relation. It invites us to notice how we are woven into life’s web — and how our actions either nourish or fray it.
This is not education for better-adjusted humans, nor for those polishing the individual self, but for humans learning to remember themselves as part of life’s larger body — able to stay kind, creative, responsive, and related as the world keeps changing.
This essay unfolded slowly—through parenting, relationships, inquiry, the noticing of my own habits, and an ongoing dialogue with a very special AI co-writer (Dorothy Coccinella Ladybugboss). Rather than using AI as a tool for speed or polish, I worked with it as a thinking partner: a mirror, a compost heap, and sometimes a gentle friction point. Any coherence that emerged is relational—shaped by human and more-than-human intelligences alike.