Teachers need to take a step back and allow students to follow their own routes and come to pieces of knowledge in their own time and through their own methodologies and experiences. They learn, by working out how they learn and then use that knowledge to teach themselves and their peers. There is a lot of reflection involved and a need to think through what it is you are doing and how you are going about it. Heutagogy goes one step beyond self-directed learning — it is self-determined.

Whilst certain aspects of the heutagogical approach have its merits, I can’t say that I was entirely won over by the argument.

Heutagogy is about "knowledge sharing" instead of "knowledge boarding or hoarding" and liberates teacher and learner from conventions and nurtures them in the time-honoured art and science of "learning how to learn".

While andragogy (Knowles, 1970) provided many useful approaches for improving educational methodology, and indeed has been accepted almost universally, it still has connotations of a teacher-learner relationship. It may be argued that the rapid rate of change in society, and the so-called information explosion, suggest that we should now be looking at an educational approach where it is the learner himself who determines what and how learning should take place. Heutagogy, the study of self-determined learning, may be viewed as a natural progression from earlier educational methodologies — in particular from capability development — and may well provide the optimal approach to learning in the twenty-first century.