Three Questions for the Future of Education

This is the final piece in a six-part series on what education would look like if it were designed for human flourishing. Start with Part 1.

Public schools in the U.S. are facing something they haven’t faced before: a genuine existential question about whether they’ll survive in their current form.

Enrollment has been declining for years. Homeschooling has more than doubled since 2020. Alternative school models (microschools, hybrid programs, learning pods, and independent SDL environments) are multiplying and school choice policies are making them more affordable. For the first time in the history of American public education, large numbers of families are opting out and finding workable alternatives.

I have complicated feelings about this.

On one hand, the restlessness is legitimate. As this series has argued, the Industrial Age school model was designed to meet the needs of a particular kind of society. It did that, but society has different needs now, and the old model wasn’t built with them in mind. Families sense that lack of alignment.

On the other hand, public schooling has existed at the center of our communities for a century and a half. Horace Mann (the driving force behind public education) saw “common schools” as a way to create a “common people.” This harkens back to the founding vision of America: e pluribus unum, out of many, one. The rapid shift from public schooling threatens one of our key foundations for public good and healthy democracy.

So, that is my worry: education seen only as a private commodity, learning as something families purchase for individual benefit, schools as businesses competing in a marketplace.

If the vision I’ve outlined in this series, education for both individual and collective flourishing, grounded in wisdom and democracy, is going to matter, there are three questions it has to answer.

Will SDL environments serve the public good, or just their own communities?

Most self-directed learning environments are private schools. That’s partly historical (these models developed largely outside the public system) and partly structural (the flexibility they require is genuinely hard to achieve inside traditional district constraints).

The risk is that SDL becomes a sophisticated option for families with resources: culturally innovative, pedagogically rich, but ultimately inaccessible to the majority of children. That would be a tragedy, and it would be a betrayal of the vision of education as something that cultivates a shared democratic life.

The harder version of this question is about values. If SDL environments are disconnected from any sense of public obligation, if they’re building flourishing individuals with no particular commitment to a flourishing society, then they’re not really practicing the eudemonic vision. They’re practicing a very well-designed version of the same individualism that drives conventional schooling, just with more agency.

The SDL community needs to take this seriously. The argument for learner-led education is most compelling when it’s also an argument for democratic citizenship, for equity, and for a society where everyone has access to the kind of learning that produces genuine flourishing.

Will SDL environments build a body of shared knowledge and share it with the wider world?

One of the genuine strengths of small, innovative learning environments is that they can try things. They can iterate quickly. They can learn from mistakes without the bureaucratic drag of large institutions. They can serve as learning labs.

One of their genuine weaknesses is that they often don’t document, share, or rigorously evaluate what they’re doing. Schools can become deeply committed to their own approaches and less invested in contributing to a broader field of knowledge. The result is that a lot of valuable learning stays contained within individual communities, and the broader education conversation doesn’t benefit from it.

If SDL environments are going to influence public education, if they’re going to be more than a niche option for a particular kind of family, they have to build partnerships with researchers, universities, and policy institutions. They have to be willing to have their work studied and scrutinized. They have to contribute to the evidence base that education policy runs on, even when they find that evidence-based culture frustrating or reductive.

This is uncomfortable for communities that value autonomy and distrust external evaluation. But it’s necessary. The case for transforming public education can’t rest on anecdote and conviction alone.

That’s the reason we have the Institute for Self-Directed Learning housed within a microschool. It serves as a learning loop. We have two lab schools (one in-person and one online) that are intentionally designing for flourishing. We learn from real educators and real young people. We share our learnings with the field and invite people to come bear witness. We connect with other schools and learn from them. We iterate.

The field needs more people sharing their learnings (the successes and the failures). The future of schooling needs intentional cross-pollination, not siloed experiments.

Will there be the political will to actually change schools at scale?

This is the hardest question of the three.

The interests that benefit from the current education system are formidable. Standardized testing companies, curriculum publishers, technology vendors, and political factions that depend on particular narratives about schools all have reasons to resist the kind of deep structural change that a truly eudemonic education would require. “Reforming” schools in ways that leave the fundamental design intact is far easier and far less threatening than actually rethinking what schools are for.

Dewey saw this a century ago. He understood that the problem of education was not primarily a problem of pedagogy. It was a problem of political will and social values. Changing schools means changing what society believes it’s trying to produce through schools. That’s slow, contentious, generational work.

It’s happening, though. In Georgia, district leaders are getting support to conduct community outreach (talk to folks who are pursuing alternative environments and learn from them) and design new models that will be in high demand for families. Indiana has launched a statewide network of public microschools. Momentum is picking up. The question is whether designing schools for flourishing can happen at a scale that actually reshapes the society it’s embedded in.

Here’s where I land, after all of this.

The history of education philosophy is full of people who made compelling arguments for exactly this kind of learning: Aristotle, Rousseau, Dewey, Montessori, Neill, Holt, and many others. These arguments weren’t marginal or eccentric. They were serious, well-developed visions of what human beings need to flourish. And they lost, again and again, to systems that prioritized efficiency, control, and compliance.

That track record is sobering. But it’s also clarifying. The ideas haven’t failed because they were wrong. They’ve lost ground because the systems arrayed against them have been powerful and the advocates for them have often been scattered, underfunded, and disconnected from each other.

What I’ve been arguing across this series is that there’s a coherent, philosophically serious, and practically achievable vision of education that the scattered pieces of the self-directed learning movement are groping toward. The vision isn’t new. It’s ancient, actually: it runs from Aristotle through Dewey and into the microschool networks and democratic schools that are operating right now.

What’s new is the moment. Public education is at a crossroads in a way it genuinely hasn’t been before. The question of what comes next is open in a way that it rarely is. And people across the political spectrum, parents, educators, researchers, and policymakers, are more willing to question the fundamental design of schooling than they’ve been in a very long time.

That openness is an opportunity. What we do with it will shape the kind of society the next generation inherits.

The goal isn’t perfect schools. It’s a direction worth moving in: education that cultivates wisdom, character, genuine agency, and democratic community. Education that takes seriously both the flourishing of each individual child and the flourishing of the society those children will build together.

We’ve had that vision for a very long time. Maybe it’s finally time to build toward it.

This is the last piece in the series. If you’re catching up, the full arc runs through Schools Aren’t Failing. That’s the Problem., What If Schools Were Built for Flourishing?, We Stopped Cultivating Wisdom, Design Principles for Flourishing Schools, and Redefining Self-Directed Learning.

The ideas explored here are developed more fully in Theoretical and Historical Evolutions of Self-Directed Learning (Routledge, 2023).

Caleb is the Director of the Institute for Self-Directed Learning and Ambassador for the National Hybrid Schools Program.

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