Record: Lorena Sánchez Tyson, “Trusting Children: Lifelong Learning and Autonomy within the Unschooling Movement” in Journal of Unschooling and Alternative Learning 13(2019): 23-40. [Abstract here]
Summary: Lorena Tyson is pursuing her doctoral degree in Education, Practice, and Society at the University College London Institute of Education. Originally from Tampico, Mexico, Ms. Tyson has degrees from universities in Mexico, the UK, and Spain. She is currently researching literacy, lifelong learning, unschooling, and intercultural education.
In this article she discusses the controversial topic of homeschooling and autonomy, in her case in the context of unschooling, the most child-centered and least prescribed of homeschooling pedagogies. Her thesis is that unschooling is a “subaltern pedagogical approach” (p. 23) that seeks to maximize lifelong learning (LLL) and hence should be appreciated by theorists who typically only speak of LLL in the context of institutional schooling.
Tyson begins with some self-disclosure, noting that she herself was unschooled from early childhood up until attending university. Though Tyson doesn’t elaborate, her phrase “subaltern pedagogy” derives from postcolonial theorist Antonio Gramsci, who used the term “subaltern” to describe colonized peoples living outside of the matrix of power. Subaltern studies developed as a “bottom up” approach to scholarship, seeking to understand and give voice to the experiences of the colonized. It’s very like Paulo Friere’s “pedagogy of the oppressed.”
Tyson’s treatment of autonomy is a bit more thorough, noting its origins in Kantian theory, and summarizing more recent definitions. Tyson uses autonomy as a term to name the learned ability to direct one’s own life. She briefly nods at the problem of autonomy as a potentially western ideal that is perhaps not as universalizable as Kant made it out to be.
The bulk of the paper is a chronicle of the unschooling movement, seeing it as one of three categories of subaltern pedagogy, the other two being homeschooling and flexischooling. As Tyson described them, I got the image of a continuum, with flexischooling being on one side (partial homeschooling, partial institutional schooling), homeschooling being in the middle (child at home but aspects of traditional institutional schooling remain), and unschooling being, as she puts it, “a radical outlier” (p. 30).
Next she provides a brief history of LLL, noting especially its incorporation into the educational ideals of UNESCO in 1970 and thereafter. Unfortunately, the more LLL is associated exclusively with institutions, the more it sounds like lifelong institutionalization, which crushes human autonomy. If we want to break out of this tyranny of the institutional we have no better model than the subaltern pedagogy known as unschooling. Schools are in essence authoritatian institutions, only training students to be able to choose between a narrow set of futures determined by the system. True autonomy can only come from outside that system.
Appraisal: As is clear from my summary, this is not a piece of empirical research. It is a philosophical argument wrapped in a personal narrative. I sympathize with Tyson’s aims, but there are in my view two fatal contradictions present.
First, as she notes herself in passing, the concept of autonomy of which she is so fond emerged out of the very modernist project against which unschooling has set itself. This tension, perhaps even paradox, has been much discussed in the sociological literature over the last century and more. It is perhaps the central preoccupation of sociology. Modernity bequeated to us both totalizing institutions and personalism. We are more and more bound by the systems we have created even as we are more and more free to maximize our individual desires free from the constraints of inherited traditions. As much as we might desire to escape, where shall we go? Premodern cultures, for all their virtues, certainly did not respect individual autonomy or child-directed learning–they were all totalizing tribal indoctrinators. Individualism is a modern project, and autonomy is its singular virtue. To use autonomy to critique modern institutions is to attempt to dismantle the master’s house with the master’s tools.
Second, Tyson’s autobiography illustrates all too well the impossibility of achieving any kind of subaltern authenticity. Modernity is all-encompassing. Marxist critiques of capitalism often sell very well. Tyson, having grown up without schooling, now makes her anti-institutional argument while studying for a terminal degree at a London university, publishing in a formal journal, writing according to the conventions of the modern academy. She may rage against the machine, but she is part of it. Autonomy. Does she have it? Does anyone?
Milton Gaither