The Self-Directed Learning Handbook
Challenging Adolescent Students to Excel
Chapter One
The Case for Self-Directed
Learning
NOTHING is so natural to us as learning and accomplishment. We hunger
for it from our first breath. We enter school already skilled in it and eager
for more. We pursue it, often with passion, for the rest of our lives. The
need to survive, become competent, find intimacy, and sustain self-esteem
presses us forward on all life fronts. We search for a role and work of significance;
for companionship, partner, and family; for understanding each
other and ourselves; for mastery over something and for fulfillment. Our
species is irrepressibly curious and restless; we question everything and
seek answers; we see a need or possibility and press forward to see if we
can make it real. The drive to learn can be suppressed-we can be deprived,
beaten, and drugged-but these are only frictions to the unstoppable
learning momentum that has propelled our species from its prehistoric
beginnings to its current civilized state.
Self-directed learning (SDL) is designed to nurture this momentum, to
broaden and deepen it, to help students channel and refine it. This design
has been enhanced by a ... read full excerpt from The Self-Directed Learning Handbook: Challenging Adolescent Students to Excel ebook
