A first-person account by Dra. Patricia Restrepo describing how she discovered self-directed learning after learning the historical roots of formal schooling. Shocked by that origin, she researched alternatives, joined groups/coaching, convinced her initially-traditional husband, and began applying self-directed learning with her children (including a period away from school and travel to Miami), with the pandemic affecting their experience. This chunk serves as an introduction and personal motivation for adopting self-directed learning.
Chapters
Have you ever heard of self directed learning? Yes. No. I don't know much about it. It's my other passion, educating my children. And one day at a conference that had nothing to do with that, but was for entrepreneurs, someone asked where the academic system came from. I had no idea. But I handed my children over to the academic system because that's how I was educated. I mean, and I've loved education. And I was shocked by the answer. That it came from the last century of the industrial era to create PA for Rockefeller's industry. Exactly. Bold. After that, I couldn't sit still in my body anymore. How could I hand over my two most precious jewels to someone who was just following for X and Z? So that was the little light that opened the door for me to keep searching and searching. So I started reading books, I started going to conferences, I joined online groups, and I discovered self directed learning. Obviously, my husband was very traditional, he hadn't gotten into any of that and I was already itching to try it with the kids. And one day I put him on a talk by someone I knew would resonate with him, a very successful businessman who talked about it and talked about everything he had learned from doing self learning and how it had helped him. And so I hired a coach, I joined a study group and. And my husband told me, well, if you take the plunge, we'll talk to the kids. And one of my sons said, tomorrow. And the other one said, oh, and my friends. So I told him, you're absolutely right. We started looking. And when we started designing the other twin, he said, I want one too. So we took him out of school for a while, we went to Miami for a long time and the pandemic hit. And this, let's see, is just to give the first or basic idea of how self direction works.
