So Where Are We Now? Malcolm Knowles, the Field of SDL, and the Conversation We Still Need to Have

Dr. Caleb Collier, Director of the Institute for Self-Directed Learning, Ambassador for the National Hybrid Schools Project.

After 2,300 years of philosophers, educators, reformers, and radicals making the case for learner-directed education, someone finally decided it needed a name and a definition. In 1975, a North American adult educator named Malcolm Knowles published a slim but influential book and named what all those thinkers had been circling for millennia: self-directed learning.

This is the ninth and final article in my series on the history of self-directed learning. We have traveled from Aristotle’s Lyceum to Pestalozzi’s orphanages, from the guild workshops of medieval Europe to the Citizenship Schools of the civil rights movement. Now we arrive at the contemporary field of SDL: the academic research tradition that has grown up around Knowles’s formulation, the growing network of SDL-aligned schools, and some of the most important critiques of the field that have emerged in recent decades.

Knowles’s definition has become the standard reference point for the field. In its broadest meaning, he wrote, self-directed learning “describes a process in which individuals take the initiative, with or without the help of others, in diagnosing their own learning needs, formulating learning goals, identifying human and material resources for learning, choosing and implementing appropriate learning strategies, and evaluating learning outcomes” (Knowles, 1975, p. 18). It is a comprehensive definition, deliberately so: trying to capture the full arc of the learning process, from the initial recognition that there’s something to learn all the way through the assessment of what has actually been learned.

Knowles offered four reasons why SDL wasn’t just a nice idea but an urgent necessity. First, people who direct their own learning tend to enjoy it more, engage with it more deeply, and retain what they learn longer. Second, SDL is more naturally aligned with human development: as we mature, we become increasingly capable of self-direction, and an education system that treats adults and near-adults as dependents is working against this developmental trajectory. Third, the pace of change in the modern world means that specific knowledge has a rapidly shrinking shelf life, and the ability to learn on one’s own is more durable than any particular body of content. Fourth (and most compellingly) Knowles argued that in a rapidly changing world, the ability to learn independently wasn’t just a nice-to-have but a survival skill.

“The ‘why’ of self-directed learning is survival,” he wrote in 1975, “your own survival as an individual, and also the survival of the human race” (pp. 16–17). He wrote those words over 50 years ago. In a world of accelerating technological change, artificial intelligence, and rapidly shifting labor markets, the urgency has only grown.

Inspired by Knowles, a researcher at the University of Georgia named Lucy Guglielmino developed the Self-Directed Learning Readiness Scale (SDLRS) in 1978. The SDLRS was a quantitative instrument designed to measure an individual’s propensity toward self-directed learning: to put a number on the quality that Knowles and others had been describing philosophically. This move toward measurement had real consequences, both positive and complicated.

On the positive side, the SDLRS gave researchers a tool to study SDL empirically, to compare SDL approaches across contexts, and to make the case for SDL in the language of quantitative research that carries weight in academic and policy circles. More recent research using the SDLRS and related instruments has confirmed Knowles’s intuitions: self-directed learners tend to be more resilient (Robinson, 2003), demonstrate higher emotional intelligence (Muller, 2005), and report greater life satisfaction (Boyer et al., 2013).

But the move toward measurement also shifted the field’s center of gravity in ways worth examining. When you have a scale that measures self-directedness as a set of characteristics — initiative, persistence, self-discipline, curiosity — the question “how do we support self-directed learning?” can slide into “how do we identify and select self-directed learners?” The rich philosophical tradition behind SDL (the questions about the purpose of education, the nature of freedom, the relationship between learning and democracy) can disappear behind the measurement apparatus.

In 1986, Huey Long established the first International Symposium on Self-Directed Learning at the University of Georgia, which has convened every year since. Out of that symposium grew the International Society of Self-Directed Learning (ISSDL) and the International Journal of Self-Directed Learning. These institutions have done important work in building a community of SDL researchers and spreading SDL-based school designs around the world. SDL is now embedded in K-12 curriculum in Taiwan and practiced in university faculty development programs in South Africa.

One of the most prominent recent developments in SDL practice is the emergence of learner-led microschools like the Acton Academy network. Founded in Austin, Texas in 2009, Acton is a microschool model built explicitly on SDL principles. Students set their own daily learning goals, work in multi-age groupings, progress through mastery-based “badge” systems, and govern much of their school life themselves. Adults in the Acton model are called “guides” rather than teachers, and they are trained to stay in Socratic mode — asking questions, not giving answers.

What’s distinctive about Acton isn’t just the pedagogy but the model: it was built from the beginning to scale. Over a decade, it grew from a single school in a house in Austin to more than 200 schools worldwide (Staker, 2018). It has brought SDL into communities that would not typically have access to progressive private schools, and it has demonstrated that a self-directed learning environment can operate at low cost, making it accessible to a wider range of families. I co-founded The Forest School: An Acton Academy in Atlanta in 2018, and I’ve seen firsthand how the model works in practice.

But the push toward SDL hasn’t been without its critics, and the most searching critique in recent years has come from the Flemish education philosopher Gert Biesta. In The Beautiful Risk of Education (2016) and other works, Biesta raised a concern about what he calls “learnification”: the colonization of education by the language and logic of individual learning.

Biesta’s argument is subtle and worth taking seriously. As education has become increasingly organized around the learner — around individual learning goals, personalized pathways, and the development of self-directed competencies — the language of education has shifted in ways that are not value-neutral. Schools are no longer places of teaching; they are places of learning. Teachers are no longer people who know things and share them; they are facilitators. And education is no longer about the cultivation of shared knowledge, shared values, and shared civic life; it is about helping individuals build skills that will serve their own purposes.

For Biesta, this shift reflects a particular vision of the individual as a free-floating agent who learns for personal advantage in a competitive economy, rather than as a member of communities and civic institutions with shared purposes and shared responsibilities. The discourse of learnification, he argues, individualizes what is fundamentally a social and political process. It puts the entire responsibility for education on the learner and lets institutions off the hook.

This is a critique that the SDL field needs to take seriously, because it points to something real. SDL, at its best, has always been about more than individual skill development. The Citizenship Schools weren’t just about personal empowerment; they were about collective political action. Dewey’s progressive school wasn’t just about individual curiosity; it was about democratic participation. Knowles himself tied SDL to the survival of the human race, not just the success of the individual learner.

The history I’ve traced in this series shows an idea that has been, at its best, both personally liberating and socially transformative. The challenge for our moment is to hold both of those dimensions together: to build learning environments that honor individual agency and cultivate democratic citizenship, that serve children in wealthy families and children in poverty, that produce self-directed learners who are also engaged with something beyond themselves.

That’s not a simple challenge. But as I hope this series has shown, it’s not a new one. It is the same challenge that Aristotle was wrestling with in Athens, that Pestalozzi was working on in his orphanages in Switzerland, that Septima Clark and the Citizenship Schools addressed in churches of the rural South. The question of how we educate human beings for freedom has been one of the defining questions of civilization for a very long time.

We aren’t going to answer it completely. But if we know the history well enough, we can avoid some of the mistakes that have been made before, build on the ideas that have proven durable, and ask the right questions of the moment we are living in. That is what history is for.

This work draws from my book, Theoretical and Historical Evolutions of Self-Directed Learning, if you geek out about this stuff and want a deeper dive.

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