In Praise of Illegible Learning: Reasons for and Difficulties of Challenging Artificially-Ordered Schooling

• Main Author: Kevin Currie Knight
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Nipissing University 2019-12-01
• Series: Journal of Unschooling and Alternative Learning
• Subjects: history of education and schooling; self-directed learning (sde); illegible learning
• Online Access: https://jual.nipissingu.ca/wp-content/uploads/sites/25/2020/02/v13263.pdf

The history of American k-12 schooling can be best understood as an attempt to make illegible processes legible – that is, a process of taking informal and often localized educational practices and reorganizing them in a more formalized way so that they can be standardized and understood by those not involved in those processes. Conversely, self-directed forms of education (such as unschooling and “free”/democratic schooling), are best seen as reactions against this trend toward legibility, as attempts to reintroduce illegibility into the learning process.