Learner Agency – Thinking Beyond Individualism

Beyond Unfettered Freedom: Why True Agency Requires Collective Responsibility

A call for educators to embrace seven-generational thinking in developing learner agency

When we think about learner agency in our schools, we often fall into a familiar trap. We equate agency with unfettered freedom – letting students do whatever they like, celebrating choice and voice as ends in themselves. But this individualistic interpretation misses something crucial: true agency cannot exist without responsibility. And responsibility, as I’ve learned through years of observation and reflection, extends far beyond the individual.

The Price of Unfettered Freedom

Years ago, my wife and I had a holiday cottage in Akaroa Harbour on Banks Peninsula, East of Christchurch. This was once an abundant fishing harbour where Māori lived sustainably from the sea’s bounty for generations. But as European settlement occurred, and more people recognised the fishing opportunities, something troubling happened.

The harbour gradually became fished out. Recreational fishers and commercial operators, each acting within their individual freedom to take what they wanted or needed, collectively depleted the resource that had sustained the community for centuries. Eventually, the council had to designate half the harbour as a no-fishing zone – a sanctuary where fish could breed and replenish the stocks that unfettered freedom had nearly destroyed.

This is Garrett Hardin’s “tragedy of the commons” playing out in real life. As Hardin wrote in 1968, “each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination towards which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons.”

I see this same dynamic every time I cycle the river trail near my home. Dog owners are provided bags and bins for waste disposal, yet almost every ride reveals abandoned waste bags left carelessly on the path – the ultimate symbol of individual freedom divorced from collective responsibility. “Someone else will deal with it.” “The environment exists to serve my needs.“

Three Dimensions of Agency

In Agency by Design, my co-authors and I were deliberate in linking learner agency with responsibility from the outset. We recognised that empowering individuals to have voice and choice, while essential, becomes destructive when divorced from a sense of responsibility to something larger than ourselves.

We identified three interconnected dimensions of responsibility that must underpin any meaningful approach to agency:

Responsibility to Self: Students must learn that choices have consequences for their own wellbeing and future. This isn’t about compliance or risk aversion – it’s about developing the self-management, self-regulation, and self-direction skills that allow them to make choices aligned with their long-term flourishing. We need to provide scaffolds and frameworks that help students understand how to act responsibly on the choices they have the freedom to make.

Responsibility to Others: Individual agency that ignores its impact on others isn’t agency at all – it’s selfishness masquerading as empowerment. We live in interdependent ecosystems where our decisions inevitably affect those around us. This is why collaborative learning and authentic group work matter so much. When students experience making decisions that impact not just themselves but their peers, they begin to understand agency as collective empowerment rather than individual license.

Responsibility to the Environment We Share: This extends beyond our immediate social circles to encompass the broader systems and resources we all depend on. Just as the Akaroa fishers needed to consider the sustainability of their practices, our students need to understand how their choices affect the environments – physical, digital, social, and cultural – that sustain our communities, the very communities that they are a part of.

The Indigenous Wisdom of Seven-Generational Thinking

Roman Krznaric, in The Good Ancestor, offers a powerful critique of our short-term thinking: “We treat the future like a distant, colonial outpost, devoid of people, where we can freely dump ecological degradation, technological risk, and nuclear waste, and which we plunder as we please.“

This resonates deeply with an Apache saying Krznaric quotes: “We do not inherit our land from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children.” This perspective shift is profound—it moves us from ownership to stewardship, from consumption to sustainability.

Many Indigenous traditions, including Māori culture here in New Zealand, embrace seven-generational thinking. When making decisions about land use or resource allocation, they ask: What will the impact be not just on our children, or their children, but on their children’s children beyond them?

This long-term perspective stands in stark contrast to the growth-focused rhetoric that dominates so much of our current political, economic and educational discourse. We hear constantly about expansion, about maximizing individual achievement, about competing in global markets. But what if we asked different questions: What kind of world are we preparing our students to inherit? What kind of ancestors do we want to be?

Agency as Collective Empowerment

True agency in education isn’t about individualism – it’s about empowerment for the common good. When we promote choice and voice in our classrooms, we’re not simply reversing decades of conformity and compliance (though that’s certainly part of it). We’re cultivating citizens who understand their power to shape the world responsibly.

This means moving beyond the surface features of agency (e.g.student choice in topics, flexible seating arrangements, or project-based learning) to grapple with deeper questions about purpose and impact. It means creating learning experiences where students wrestle with real dilemmas about individual freedom versus collective responsibility. It means helping them understand that their agency exists within and because of the communities and ecosystems that sustain them.

Rethinking What We’re Preparing Students For

This conversation about collective agency becomes even more urgent when we consider what kind of future we’re actually preparing our students for. Currently, our education system operates on an increasingly obsolete promise: work hard, gain qualifications, secure a good job, accumulate personal wealth, and achieve financial security. This linear pathway assumes a stable economy built on endless growth and predictable career trajectories.

But that future is dissolving before our eyes. The idea of a job for life has largely disappeared. Even the notion that young people can choose a career path while still at school is becoming less realistic as technological disruption accelerates and entire industries transform or vanish within decades. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence and automation threaten to eliminate many of the jobs that have traditionally provided middle-class stability. That is the sort of stability that many in my generation have experienced – and we must fight hard to understand that it simply won’t be the case for our children and grandchildren – yet, sadly, I see so much of that thinking underpinning current approaches to curriculum design and determinations of the purpose of school.

Perhaps most fundamentally, the growth-based economic model that underpins this whole educational promise is proving unsustainable. As our planet’s finite resources face increasing demands from a growing global population, we’re bumping up against ecological limits that no amount of individual ambition can overcome.

This creates a profound challenge for educators: we’re preparing students for a future that may not exist while failing to prepare them for the future that likely will. Our young people will inherit a world requiring fundamentally different approaches to work, wealth, and wellbeing—approaches that prioritise sustainability over growth, collaboration over competition, and collective problem-solving over individual advancement.

This is precisely why agency as collective empowerment isn’t just pedagogically sound—it’s existentially necessary. The complex, interconnected challenges our students will face (i.e. climate change, resource depletion, social inequality, technological disruption etc.) cannot be solved by individuals acting alone, no matter how well-credentialed or motivated they might be. These are commons problems requiring ‘commons’ solutions.

A Call to Educators

As we work to embed learner agency at the heart of our educational practice, we must resist the temptation to equate agency with individualistic freedom. Instead, we must help our students (and ourselves as educators) understand agency as inherently relational and future-focused.

This requires us to lift our horizons beyond immediate learning outcomes to consider seven-generational impacts. Rather than asking “What qualifications do students need for tomorrow’s job market?” we must be asking: “What capabilities do they need to address humanity’s shared challenges? How do we prepare them to be good ancestors rather than simply successful consumers of finite resources? What does a fulfilling life look like in a world where traditional career paths have dissolved?“

The students in our classrooms today will be the ones tasked with solving the problems our generation has created or failed to address. They deserve an education that prepares them not just to compete for increasingly scarce traditional opportunities, but to collaborate in creating entirely new ways of living and working that honour both human flourishing and planetary boundaries.

The tragedy of the commons teaches us that individual freedom without collective responsibility leads to ruin. In our schools, we have the opportunity – and the obligation – to model a different way forward. We can develop forms of learner agency that honour both individual empowerment and collective flourishing.

The future is borrowing from our children. What kind of educational legacy will we leave them?

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What does responsible agency look like in your educational context? How might seven-generational thinking reshape your approach to student choice and voice? I’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences as we work together to move beyond individualistic interpretations of agency toward truly sustainable educational practices.

For an insight into one school’s journey check out my blog post “When Students Design Their Own Learning“