In a recent interview, David Bidler, founder of the non-profit Physiology First, asked an important question: Should our brains follow what they are interested in, or what we are told to pay attention to? One could argue that this is the central question that defines the variety of educational philosophies in our world today. It is essentially asking, “Who leads? The teacher or the student?”
I started my agile learning community (a center for self-directed learning) two years ago, feeling pretty adamant that the answer to that question was the child. However, after four years of unschooling my own kids, and two years of running my community, I am convinced that this is a false dichotomy. The middle place I am trying to land is relationship-centered learning, where both the mentor and mentee’s experience is valid and useful.
Four years ago, when I first told my kids that our new homeschool plan was to learn the things we are interested in, I envisioned that they would naturally get curious about things that fit into nice subject boxes like math, science, and reading—things that would look like my childhood school days. Instead, the question that came up right away was: “Does Minecraft ‘count’ as an interest?”
The kids didn’t ask that question, but I did. Over and over. Should kids’ brains really follow what they are interested in?
This is a centuries-old question, but asking it in our modern, attention-driven economy is perhaps more nuanced than it was for the pioneers of the child-led learning movement. Handing kids full autonomy to follow whatever captivates their interest now feels a bit like selling them to the loudest bidder.
I am not a neuroscientist, but I have read enough to understand a bit about how our brains, with their novelty-seeking reward pathways, are naturally drawn to engage with our digital devices. And sure, there is a lot we can discover and even “learn” on digital platforms. However, the skill of processing and assimilating that information into applicable uses in our lives is mostly an off-screen task requiring our higher-level thinking, focus, and sustained effort. I can’t tell you how many amazing skills I have “learned” from Instagram that I still struggle to use—or even remember, for that matter.
One of the criticisms of traditional, teacher-led instruction is that kids are incentivized to memorize and regurgitate, making it difficult for deeper engagement, real-world application, and long-term retention. On the other end of the spectrum, allowing unfettered access to the Internet and calling it “educational” possibly gives kids a similar barrage of new (and often disjointed) information. It is interest-led and “self-directed” (although I would probably call it algorithm-directed), so kids appear engaged. But how much is retained? What part is applied? When the project is harder than the video looks, do we sustain effort long enough to troubleshoot, or do we just go back to scrolling for something else new and flashy? Do kids even try the experiment? After all, they just saw it unfold before their eyes in living color. And there’s plenty more where that came from.
We live in the tension of two truths: Kids learn best when they can engage with something that interests them, and kids today are bombarded with constant digital novelty bidding for their attention.
I have found that while I believe strongly in giving kids space to explore their interests, my goals as an educator are twofold:
- I want kids who are capable of following their curiosity and sustaining attention and effort to get to the deeper levels of meaning or higher-level skills within their interests.
- I want to teach kids how to persevere when something stops being fun because they still want what is on the other side of the hard or the boring.
- In our attention economy, I really want kids to know how to direct their own attention. This requires getting clear about what they want, making some sort of plan to get there, and then maintaining focus long enough to follow through on the plan.
One thing I love to teach my kids is that good questions lead to better ones. If we stay stuck in the false dichotomy of teacher versus student, we miss the more important question: How do kids learn to direct and sustain their attention?
An algorithm keeps a child engaged—that’s its goal. It can appear to be sustained attention. A mentor’s goal is actually the opposite: to help the child no longer need them. So curiosity is not enough, but control isn’t, either.
Curiosity is natural and easily led by the child. But focus and sustained effort are skills, and they don’t develop on their own. They require supported practice in the right environment. Kids need someone who can ask good questions, model reflection, and help them break big ideas into manageable steps. Over time, when extended in a caring relationship, that external guidance becomes the internal voice of a self-directed learner. That is the relationship-centered dance led by a guide who knows when to lead and when to follow.
