Self-Directed Education In The Age of Self Discovery
“Can you check on her to see if she is mentally okay? Can you advise her on her future career for us?”
Yes, that’s basically what my mom and grandmother ask me at the end of 80% of our Skype conversations. For your information, “her” here refers to my twin sister, who is taking a gap year to volunteer in Nepal and studying Mandarin in China after her graduation from an IB school in Norway. I never rush her to get into college, of course.
While my family, like many other typical parents in Vietnam (and probably yours too), think of a gap year as an unfamiliar approach for personal development, I believe taking a gap year is a type of self-directed education that should be encouraged. I was told many times how I should “get into college as soon as possible and secure a major for future career.” But no, ages 17 or 18 or even 19 are not the time for us to rush.
It is the age of self discovery.
Going back to the idea of self-directed education, I simply define it as when you choose to “design” your own education experience in a certain period of time. To give you a more specific and comprehensive definition, self-directed education refers to self-chosen activities and life experiences of the person becoming educated, whether or not those activities were chosen deliberately for the purpose of education. It can be organized classes that you take outside your school, online courses, or through any experience that you gain from participating in organizations and outside schools.
Of all the reasons, I believe self-directed education should be more welcomed, especially among kids at the age from 6–11.Curiosity, as the force behind self-directed education, excites and makes children become more active learners. Human’s curiosity has always been seen as an inborn trait. The desire to ask questions and to socialize with other kids, to be attracted by an unknown object, and to discover things out of the norm have always been demonstrated when we were kids. However, I believe the traditional, structured, and standardized pathway of the current education system is killing this curiosity inside students. At our young age, we used to be encouraged to come up with new ideas, to talk about whatever we think, to interact with other kids, and to let imagination prevail. As we approach primary school, then secondary and high school, we find our curiosity gradually fades away as we are unconsciously forced to adapt to a structured and GPA-focused education system.
At young ages, kids go to school and see many of their peers, from whom they learn a lot. Yet they are restrained from learning about their peers because most of the time they have to sit in class, expected to behave in a certain way that “fits” some norm that comes from I don’t even know where.. Kids come to school with an open mind, eager to express themselves, yet the coercive school system itself teaches them how to bottle up their creativity and follow the one-size fits all system. In other words, the strictly structured education builds up a major block for students to satisfy their creativity. As a result, students lose their interest in discovering new perspectives, and their eagerness to learn simply mellows down. Kids were born unique, but schools teach them how to be uniform.
In Vietnam, for example, from my own experience with the primary and secondary education system in three public schools (those already regarded as top public schools in the city), questioning teachers or demonstrating a learning style that is different from others will normally get students into trouble. When kids are assigned to analyze, let’s say a piece of literature, instead of giving them opportunities to express different perspectives, teachers normally set a final version that they should adhere to if they want to do well on the exam. I still remember how much I hated learning by heart these pages of literature analysis (and history, geography, and the list goes on). I hated it when I got overstressed with a huge workload when I was only in primary school, looking wistfully at the kids playing outside while studying for these crazy exams.
In self-directed education, in contrast, curiosity is the cornerstone. It disrupts the one-size fits all education structure and motivates people to actively seek knowledge. There are many ways to approach self-directed education: a gap year, home-school, alternative education programs, etc. Speaking from my own personal experience and observation, I think taking a gap year has been more commonly chosen among teenagers in Vietnam, even though there are still a variety of stigmas in the mindset of some people. Choosing to take a gap year sometimes can turn out to be an intimidating option as the question of “what am I going to do during an entire year?” arises. Students are also more unsure about this option because of the popular belief that high school graduates should determine their majors in college and secure their future career. However, students should be thinking that the transition from high school to college is one of the most important moments in their entire lives. Logically, it makes sense to take time.
In 2016, many prestigious universities in Vietnam reported to have hundreds of current college students dropping out of school after they decided to have enrolled in the wrong major. The failure of schools to sufficiently guide students, along with the fact that students have to declare their major during their first year of college, results in thousands of Vietnamese students unemployed after graduation. There are many benefits of taking a gap year, but I will only bring up the most obvious (and probably cliche) one: to know exactly who you are. There are a variety of options you can do during your gap year: getting an internship, doing volunteer jobs, studying languages that you like, travelling to different places and seeing how people are living there. Most importantly, you need to think about yourself: what your goals are, what you think you are good at, what you want to do for yourself and future and not for someone else’s, what makes you you, and what you want to contribute.
The questions are always hard for students to answer, as the educational experience that they have received hardly gives them enough time to fully discover the unknown aspects and capabilities inside them. With that being said, the only way for students to give answers to these questions is to experience the unfamiliarity, learning from outside class and getting to know themselves in a deeper extent.
I don’t deny that there are other factors that can affect your decision of taking gap year, and one of which (also probably the most important one) is financial support. Again, as long as you have a specific plan for your gap year and don’t end up playing video games in the basement, who says you have to go to an exotic or far-away place? The idea of taking a gap year is to throw yourself in an unfamiliar environment, in which you learn and grow both personally and intellectually. From the government side, I remember Lisa — one of the EdSurge Independent Fall 2017 cohort members shared that she got into a program funded entirely by the United States government to spend a gap year in China. Although there are many options for what students can do during the gap year, I really have this hope that its benefits for personal development will be more recognized in my country, and that there will be more government-funded programs for students.
All in all, I believe self-directed education deserves more attention (at least in my country). In every sense, it will give students the freedom to unlock the potential and other capabilities that they have not yet discovered. That’s why after every Skype conversation with my parents, all I do is to text my sister: “Don’t rush to college. Go out the world and learn!”.
Works Cited
The Alliance. “What is self-directed education”. The Alliance, 28 Oct. 2017. Web. https://www.self-directed.org/sde/
Tuoi Tre Online. “Students Dropped Out Due To Wrong Major Decision”. Tuoi Tre Online, 4 May. 2016. Web. 28 Oct, 2017. http://tuoitre.vn/sinh-vien-bo-hoc-do-chon-sai-nganh-1094884.htm
VOV. “200.000 Bachelor Candidates Face Unemployment In 2017”. Vietnam.net, 13 Feb. 2017. Web. 28 Oct, 2017. http://vietnamnet.vn/vn/kinh-doanh/thi-truong/them-200-000-cu-nhan-that-nghiep-trong-nam-2017-356094.html
