Fostering Self-Direction

Arthur W. Combs writes in Educational Leadership, "The information explosion has blasted for all time the notion that we can feed all students the same diet . . . this calls for student cooperation and acceptance of major responsibility for his own learning."

This passage comes from the article "Fostering Self-Direction," which appeared not in the recent issue of EL ("Giving Students Ownership of Learning"), but in February 1966. If the "information explosion" of that era compelled students to take more responsibility for their own learning, imagine how urgent Combs might regard the situation in 2008.

Read the article: Fostering Self-Direction (PDF)

Combs laments a system too heavily focused on students producing correct answers and instead proposes greater experimentation. Students must be encouraged to try and reminded that failure is an inevitable by-product of the positive act of experimentation itself. Perhaps most interestingly, Combs promotes a worldview that trusts "the human organism," urging educators to reject the common wisdom of humans as beasts in need of control above all else.

Combs's call for greater ownership of learning and trial and error in students is prescient, and we see similar calls today from groups such as the Partnership for 21st Century Skills. Those looking for more on what an older generation thought about this topic might explore the entire February 1966 issue, "Toward Self-Direction."

In "My Back Pages," we look at important issues through the historical lens of the Educational Leadership archives. ASCD members can access to EL issues from 1943 to the present by signing in at www.ascd.org.

Comments

[James E. Mac Shane]

Fostering Self-Direction needs to understand
that there is scientific aspects of natural human intellectual development that can present a sounder base for the educational concept than the impreciseness of fostering.

The most significant position in current educational discourse that is pointing to the need for the develop student self-direction which is also the base behind individualization. Behind this discourse is the need of objective scientific research of internally motivated human intellectual development and externally motivated human intellectual development. The research needs to cover the life long unavoidable learning span from birth thur adulthood. The research needs to be more basically focused science on comparison of those two processes.

A current scientific problem with contemporary educational research is that it only test the adult projected success perspective of the educational system. When therapeutic activities are successful it shows that the student was capable in the first place but the system didn't work.

[Patrick Groff]

I cannot think of a more senseless concept than the idea Mr.
Combs proposes, i.e., that all children should not learn the same academic knowledge and skills. At the present time it is clear how important to children is that they receive regular diets, parental supervision, habits of sleep, etc. To assume that only their formal education should be random and unfixed is highly irresponsible.

Patrick Groff, Professor of Education Emeritus, San Diego State University.