Why an unschooled autonomous masters degree

Ever since 2013, when I “failed” to finish a formal Master's degree and a second undergraduate degree in psychology in the same year, I have wanted an MSc in Psychology. There were many reasons, among them the need to destroy that earlier “failure”, and the wish to say I held a formal qualification at a high level in the subject I write about, work in, and love. I felt inadequate. Why would anybody take me seriously?

So every couple of weeks I would distract myself from my actual studying, writing, learning and supporting people, and scour the internet for a Masters course I might enjoy, or some seriously fast-track route that would convert my previous study into the qualification in the shortest possible time. Every time, I went back to my learning frustrated, thinking I did not have the time, the money, the neurology or the intelligence to get what I wanted. How could I learn while doing “my work”, and while raising my developing humans? I had failed before, so I must not be capable.

Then it landed. I was already doing it, and had been for a very long time. Learning is not a building, a syllabus or a qualification. My best learning certainly hasn't been. So what? What comes next?

My education so far has sometimes felt like a strange ramble through unknown woods, though an enthusiastic one, at least once I had got past the avoidance and the resistance at the front door. Let me explain.

My early education

Through mainstream education, right up to leaving school at sixteen, I genuinely felt as though I was sleepwalking. I managed. I passed. My “teachers” knew I had more to give, and some of them tried to push me. It did not work. There were moments when I excelled at something, but rarely. Mostly I did what I had to do to avoid aggro and get by. The irony is that I worked hard at home, just never on their material. I wrote stories. I designed and wrote fictional education programmes. I wrote more stories. I built better worlds in my head. I looked after the people around me. I volunteered with young children and chose to work with them on inset days. And I watched human behaviour. I believed I was only interested in things that did not matter, things that would never be useful or valuable. I did not know that I was educating myself autonomously, and that this was exactly what my future needed.

College

After school I headed to college, blindly, to study a strange combination of A levels I had very little interest in: film studies, computer studies and philosophy. I had wanted to study psychology, and was advised it was too “science-y”. That may have been because I was a “girl”. It was probably also because I had chosen to be with my friends, take the lower science paper and go for a C when I was capable of more. Lessons bored me stiff. I hated college and felt no pull to learn at all. My tutors treated me like a child and I wanted to be anywhere else. So I left, and went to work with children, who had always inspired me to do more and do better. I wanted to do better for them, and within months I was studying child development.

That college was a different story. It was brilliant. I wanted to go far beyond the learning required, and I just wanted more. I wanted to change the way children are treated and educated, and I intended to run an alternative school. I had visited the Froebel Institute, where children were respected and learned autonomously, and I have never been so inspired. I loved supporting other students and running debates on sociology, education and religion.

University

When I looked at what came next, midwifery tempted me, but I was set on the school idea and decided I needed to understand how to run a business, so I took a business degree. It sounds like a dull subject, and much of it was genuinely interesting. I stretched the learning into more alternative territory, focusing on human behaviour and organisational culture. Teaching other students and leading group work inspired me. Presenting filled me with dread, and yet it turned out to be something I could simply do.

Working

After the degree, life and family meant I had to work, and I could not find the huge investment starting a school would need. It became a “one day” project that a friend and I would return to. I worked in Human Resources for the NHS. I found projects to feed my curiosity and my need for novelty, and in the end I was very bored.

I tried to study for the professional HR qualifications my employer required for promotion, and I simply could not motivate myself.

Post-graduate

After my son was born I began studying the physiology, neuropsychology, anthropology and social context of birth in my spare time. I trained as a doula, thinking I would eventually train as a midwife. My work with mothers led me to examine what kind of parenting I wanted to support, which led back to child development, at home and in training courses that inspired me. I started a Child Psychology degree with the Open University. At the same time I was looking for more interesting work, so I quit my job and studied for a Masters in Human Resources, even though it did not really inspire me. I made it bearable by specialising in organisational culture and alternative business structures, and by supporting other students. I was, and am, in love with learning and with teaching, but the demands of my life and all the learning I was cramming into one stretch of time got the better of me. My mental health was screaming at me, I had past trauma to heal, and I had to stop, just short. I came away with a Post-graduate Diploma, but I could not clear the last hurdle that would have made it a Masters. Stopping was a gift, though at the time it felt like the ultimate failure.

Unschooling

I say I stopped. I stopped chasing qualifications. I stopped letting other people tell me what to learn and how. I never stopped learning, researching or studying. I have been studying child development and human behaviour for more than two decades. For the last six years that learning has been completely unschooled, and autonomous.

In 2017 I had the enormous honour of meeting Sophie Christophy at the APUK conference. Her own education was not unschooled, but on becoming a mother she became a scholar of children's rights, parenthood and education. She was speaking that day about consent-based education, which I had never heard of, and when I went to read her work — which is beyond awesome — I found her blog, called “My Unschooled Master of Arts”. I have never been so excited.

My neurology means this has always been the only way I can learn effectively. I just did not know what it was called. I do need guidance and structure, but I need to create it myself. I need autonomy. I also dislike status, and the enormous importance this society places on pieces of paper called “qualifications”. Human value has nothing to do with qualifications, or with job title, salary or the car you drive. Human worth lies in kindness, empathy and supporting other people. For me, self-worth also lies in gaining understanding and passing it on. My learning, by whatever means, for the purpose of gaining and sharing understanding, is intrinsically valid whether or not anyone accredits it.

Research and special interest — masters of science and arts

For six years I have been researching and studying, more intensely than before, human neurological and psychological development; the concepts of childhood and parenting, sociologically, anthropologically and historically; the treatment of children in our society, at home and in education; and autonomous motivation. More recently, for about eighteen months, I have been studying neurological differences intensely.

I do not need a course, and I do not need a qualification. I do not want to pick one area of my interest and abandon the other meanderings of my curiosity and my need for novelty. I want to follow my own motivation autonomously. I do not want to choose between an arts approach and a scientific one. I can love both. I am not right-brained or left-brained, because that is bullshit.

So here I am, choosing to study to a level I believe makes me a master of both arts and sciences in my specialist area. I am putting my own flexible structure of study in plain sight on this website, as a guidance system to keep me on track, to stay accountable to myself, and to pass on what I learn. I will blog the learning, the findings, the experiences, the videos, the essays and the writing, and I will publish my dissertation so that the work is credible and potentially replicable. All of this formalises studying I have been doing for years, and will keep doing.

Let us hope that this act of formalisation does not turn into a demand I can no longer face. I will keep you posted, and I welcome your interaction and enthusiasm. It will keep me going.