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

Abstract

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.

Keywords

• history of education and schooling
• self-directed learning (sde)
• illegible learning