Education Provider Voice 5

Je’anna Clements – Founder of a Self-Directed Education Community

Je’anna Clements (BA Psychology Hons) is a co-founder of the Rights-Centric Education network and Riverstone Village, the first Democratic, Self-Directed Education community in South Africa.

Following her degree in Philosophy, Political Science and Psychology, Je’anna worked in the music industry before entering the field of child-participation and environmental rights. She also trained as an Aware Parenting Instructor, counsellor and educational play facilitator.

She currently offers international support to adults learning to facilitate young people in Self-Directed Education (SDE), educational play, and Horizontal Communication, and also consults on facilitating SDE for the autistic PDA profile. Her workshops, courses and webinars focus on empowering adults with theory, insights, and practical skills for effective communication, collaborative play, and educational support when relating with young people in families and SDE settings.

Je’anna is an experienced summit and conference speaker and workshop facilitator, and her writing has been published by multiple initiatives, including Save The Children (Sweden), the Children, Youth and Environments journal (Univ. Colorado, USA), Tipping Points magazine (by the Alliance for Self-Directed Education) and others. She is the author of Help! My Kid Hates School, What if School Creates DYSlexia? (also now in French), the Helping the Butterfly Hatch series of books for SDE facilitators (French and German now in the pipeline), as well as the forthcoming Chalk & Cheese: Unpacking the Infamous ‘c’ word, which explores the impact of different interpretations of the word ‘compulsory’ in human rights documents and education policy around the world.

Why did you decide to set up Riverstone Village?

To provide a sanctuary for young people where their rights could be fully respected. We were the first Democratic Self-Directed Education community in South Africa, and on the continent.

Our vision was for a learning community where everyone was equal, everyone could live their lives to the full, and nobody believed they knew what anyone else ‘needed’ to learn. Each person, regardless of age or ‘ability’, had sovereignty over their own body, life, and time, subject to respect for each other and community sustainability. Eight wonderful years along, the full time setting is now on pause in 2025 while we work on the legal status of SDE in South Africa.

Why are you interested in progressive education?

I don’t see SDE as progressive, I see it as discontinuous with all other forms of education. Rather than placing children at the centre of the approach, it acknowledges that young people’s lives are their own and that they can rightfully choose where to place themselves at any given moment – which means they could even choose to participate in other types of educational offerings, but from a place of deep consent which would then make it still SDE.

In this sense SDE is a meta-level educational rights approach that encompasses many possible ways to learn rather than being just another educational approach. SDE is a civil rights issue for me, rather than a lifestyle choice or education option. I believe that deep consent in education is a non-negotiable from a human rights perspective.

Is that why you co-founded the Rights-Centric Education Network?

Yes, and no. The aim of the RCEN is to provide a peer-support community for the rights-oriented overhaul of all approaches to education, to better support the well-being of the young people we aim to serve. This means advocating for states to support rather than oppose approaches that prioritise the fulfilment of young people’s rights, as well as directly supporting anyone who is actively trying to do better. By sharing our challenges as well as examples of effective best-practice, we can all work together to take our next steps towards doing better with young people, starting from wherever we are. For example, one setting might begin with scaling down their use of corporal punishment, while another might be at the point of shifting school governance decision-making from majority-rule to sociocracy, all in the same network.

In your opinion what are the main challenges of our current school system?

That it is paternalistic and founded on the concept of children as inferior to adults and pays only lip service to their rights – from there all the other problems cascade.

What are state schools doing well?

It is important that educational resources can be accessed by everyone, so being free of charge and inclusive is key, but in reality even this is not currently being achieved by many states. There’s huge variability in public systems around the world in terms of respect for young people’s rights and the Aims of Education, some achieve more than others. Public schools are often the only option for the vast majority of young people, so it is critical that they focus on well-being and empowerment rather than just bureaucratic convenience, but unfortunately the latter tends to be the norm. Malnourished brains don’t learn easily no matter what else is in place, so school systems that ensure regular nourishing meals are a blessing and this should be a first aim to prioritise.

If you could make changes to the state education system, what would be your top priorities?

In South Africa? Get school feeding programs working reliably.

Everywhere? Structuring a series of shifts to put their education back into the hands of young people – until they are completely in charge of their own education and can actively shape the state’s offerings to suit their own needs, as well as completely opt out of state offerings as and when they choose to. The current focus on expensive school infrastructure and learning materials is understandable but unfortunate as walls and desks are some of the least necessary items when we consider the Aims of Education as outlined in human rights visions. Good quality relationships and empowerment are a far more effective focus for investment.

Is there anything else you would like to add?

The work of Dr Peter Gray, A.S. Neill, Daniel Greenberg and others offer more than 100 years of evidence that young people of all ages can indeed be trusted to self-educate with appropriate adult support, and that long-term outcomes are equal to or better than coercive and manipulative approaches. It can be hard for schooled adults to believe this, in exactly the same way that it was once hard to believe that the earth orbits the sun vs vice versa. If you can’t yet ‘see’ it, you may want to consider changing where and how you’re looking, rather than assuming there’s something to seriously debate.