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Self-directed education is the education that derives from anyone's self-chosen activities and life experiences, regardless of their age and whether or not they are subjected to an imposed curriculum.

From biological perspectives, education has become crucial for our species' survival as our species has been increasingly dependent on cultural transmission to pass down knowledge and skills accumulated from generation to generation. In this sense, schooling, is only much shorter part of that education history and has only two centuries of history.

For a few millions years, before the agricultural age, all human beings has lived as hunter-gatherers. Study of modern day hunter-gatherer tribes that survived have found that their education are all essentially self-directed even though they are living in geographically isolated parts of the world.

Curiosity, playfulness, and sociability have been cited as the natural and primary motivators for self-directed education, and Sugata Mitra's Hole in the Wall experiments demonstrated that vividly.

Modern day self-directed education, outside of compulsory schooling, exists in the unschooling families and the democratic or free schools. Unschooling is a variety of homeschooling in which parents facilitate their children's self-chosen pursuits rather than enforce an imposed curriculum. Democratic free schooling, in this context, refers to enrollment in a school that is designed to support children's self-chosen interests and pursuits rather than direct their activities (see Democratic education). These two paths of self-directed education are becoming less distinct, as an increasing number of unschoolers spend part of their day at learning centers that are in many ways organized like democratic free schools. This trend is illustrated, for example, by the growing network of Agile Learning Centers, which in some cases are certified schools and in other cases are specifically geared toward unschoolers and other homeschoolers.

The label Self-Directed Education, capitalized, was proposed originally by the Alliance for Self-Directed Education as a means to unify advocates of unschooling and democratic free schooling, who share in the belief that children learn best when they are allowed to pursue their own interests. It refers to any educational path by which children of conventional school age are, on a day-to-day and year-to-year basis, in charge of their own education and are not required to follow an imposed curriculum as occurs in conventional schools.

Evidence of increased academic interest in Self-Directed Education is found in the growing amount of research and scholarly writing devoted to it. A review of such work is found in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Education, in a chapter entitled "Self-Directed Education—Unschooling and Democratic Schooling", which includes references to books and articles pertaining to the history, effectiveness, and theory underlying Self-Directed Education.

Advocates of Self-Directed Education hold that the appropriate primary role of adults in the education of children is not to educate them, but to provide the conditions that optimize their natural drives and abilities to educate themselves. Peter Gray, a leading researcher into Self-Directed Education, has proposed that these conditions include Research into education as it occurs in hunter-gatherer bands, at democratic free schools, and in unschooling families suggests that Self-Directed Education is most effective when these conditions are all present.
 * 1) the social expectation that education is children's responsibility (because children naturally take this responsibility if they are expected to);
 * 2) unlimited time to play, explore, and pursue one's own interests;
 * 3) opportunity to play with the tools of the culture (that is, to do one's own creative things with those tools);
 * 4) access to a variety of caring adults, who are helpers, not judges;
 * 5) free age mixing among children and adolescents (because children have more to learn from those who are older and younger than themselves than from those who are their same age);
 * 6) immersion in a stable, supportive, respectful community.