Self-Directed Education
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FHREE acknowledges that young people’s educational needs are best met when the full range of their human rights are respected. In particular, the right to consent and have a voice in all decisions that affect them, and the right to play, need not be compromised at all for educational reasons. In fact, when Self-Directed Education methods are used, the fulfillment of these rights successfully generates effective education as a by-product.

During his Feb 2019 AEROx online session, David Marshak issued a call for memes for the promotion of alternative education that would express what it IS rather than what it IS NOT.

Inspired by this challenge, the FHREE acronym was work-shopped into being by a FHREE group consisting of three people over the age of 18 and four people under the age of 18.

This group did not find value in promoting all alternative education, but specifically Self-Directed Education since that is what we treasure. Therefore, we decided to tackle the specific problem we face, that many people don’t understand how much self-direction there truly is in our form of education. We have, for example, encountered facilities that claim to be ‘Self-Directed Learning Communities’ where young people are forcibly and/or manipulatively held to their parent’s and/or government’s goals for them, without their true consent. We wanted a term that would easily and completely differentiate between the kind of education happening there, from what we do.