Introduction

Let’s keep this simple.

This field guide presents a new way to think about learning during your high school years.

It starts with a very basic premise.

"The purpose of learning is to help you live a good life."

This premise sets us up for everything in this book.

It’s not about getting into college. It’s not about finding a job. It’s not about graduating at the top of your class. Learning is about helping you to live a good life.

This field guide is designed to open up your thinking about school and learning and to introduce a different approach.

It can be used by homeschoolers, unschoolers, and teenagers at liberated learning centers, Sudbury schools, democratic schools, and open schools. Those students have a little more control over how they approach learning but the field guide can also be helpful to any student or parent looking for a new way to re-imagine school.

The field guide will walk you through a process for designing your own pathway through high school.

In some ways you can think of the field guide itself as a kind of school.

Even though it doesn't include a curriculum or classes, the field guide actually does some of the things you would expect a traditional school to do.

• The field guide offers an overall purpose for you to work towards
• The field guide offers you a structure that you can use to guide your journey towards that purpose
• The field guide offers you a way to think about and record your progress and accomplishments
• The field guide offers you a way to communicate what you have done to the outside world

A traditional school decides for you the purpose of your learning, it provides the structure that you are required to follow, it has a pre-built system to record your progress and determine which accomplishments are valuable, and it communicates using grades, rankings, and awards.

Using the field guide, you will see that the methods used by traditional schools aren’t the only way or even the best way to approach these problems.

The field guide won’t tell you what to learn or when and with whom to learn it. It won’t limit how you learn something or where you learn it. It doesn’t assume to know why something is important to you.

Those decisions are up to you.

The field guide doesn’t tell you when to wake up or when you can use the bathroom, either.

The field guide starts from the premise of helping you to live a good life and builds up from there. It doesn’t pretend to know what is the best way for you to live a good life or the best way for you to go about learning.

You are worthy of making those decisions yourself. The field guide is designed to help you make those decisions and give you a framework to think about learning.

It assumes you have your own interests and your own goals. It assumes that you can figure out what brings meaning and purpose to your life and that you are interested in finding a way to bring your unique gifts and strengths to the world, no matter what you discover or determine those gifts and strengths to be.

Even though there isn’t a school building or cafeteria or classes or teachers or a curriculum, this field guide is a school in the sense that it is a framework to help you learn.

In particular, it is a framework that starts with this idea …

"The purpose of learning is to help you live a good life."

This framework is a new way to think about school. It is an approach that puts you at the center.

Section 1 asks, "What is the point of school?" "What is a good life?" and "What is a Learning Journey?"

If the purpose of learning is to help you live a good life then we need to explore what it means to “live a good life” and how you can approach your learning as a journey in order to accomplish this goal.

Section 2 explains four key strategies for you to use on your Learning Journey.

Those strategies are…

1. Make Decisions
2. Explore Widely
3. Dive Deeply
4. Reflect on it

Using these four strategies, you can plan and navigate your Learning Journey and start living a good life, today.

Section 3 examines the importance of “telling your story” as part of your Learning Journey. Journeys make for good stories and it is a very powerful tool to imagine your Learning Journey as a developing story for you to tell yourself and the world.

Section 4 is full of examples, templates, prompts, and exercises. This section is meant to help flesh out and bring to life some of the ideas from the first three sections.

A couple of final points before we get started.

Nothing in this book is sacred. It is meant to open up your thinking about ways to complete your high school years. Use what works for you.

There are no checklists of things you are required to do.

It doesn’t dictate any of the details about your day to day activities.

There is no test at the end.

Everyone’s Learning Journey is unique. That is by design.

Being in charge of your Learning Journey is hard work. In a lot of ways it is harder than going to traditional school. After all, it is much easier to just follow a checklist and do what you are told.

Going on a Learning Journey isn’t for everyone.

It might sound great to be able to make your own decisions and be the one in charge but along with that freedom comes responsibility.

It is up to you to make it work. It is up to you to do the work of reflecting and reviewing where you have been and deciding what to do next. It is up to you to make all of the decisions and deal with all of the consequences.

Along the way you will most likely make mistakes, take the wrong path, change your mind, get frustrated, question yourself.

That is part of the journey, too.

There is no punishment for making a mistake or taking a wrong path. Those are opportunities to learn about yourself and find your place in the world.

If you are ready to take on this challenge, to take ownership of your learning, to craft a unique path that makes sense for you, to start living a good life. Keep reading.