12 ms·

How do unschoolers turn out? (2014)

85 points by alex_young 6y ago

clarkmoody 6y ago
The typical retort to home/un-schoolers is about "socialization." The article addresses that here: What stood out, he adds, is that “many more said they felt their social experiences were better than they would have had in school.” Sixty-nine percent were “clearly happy with their social lives,” he says, and made friends through such avenues as local homeschooling groups, organized afterschool activities, church, volunteer or youth organizations, jobs, and neighbors. In particular, “they really treasured the fact that they had friends who were older or younger, including adults. They felt this was a more normal kind of socializing experience than just being with other people your age.” For me, the last bit about having older and younger friends is something dearly missing from the typical school experience. Regimentation by age is present nowhere else in life, and I think it hinders lots of people straight out of school. Aside from not having friends your age, "adults" are also made to be the enemy through the power imbalance in a typical school. This makes it a bit harder to adjust to the real world in a subtle way that many take for granted. Early career professionals should be drawn to the most senior members of the organization to get the most knowledge they can, before that experience retires out of the company.
- aklemm 6y ago
  People have a hard time admitting that the normal school experience is often a negative socialization experience. When it's good, it's good, but it should be obvious that alternatives can also be good.
  - ido 6y ago
    Like others I had a negative experience in a "normal" school. Not because of the other pupils but because of the system and (some of) the teachers. Kids will be kids regardless (aside from problematic settings such as coming from abusive and/or broken homes). I was a curious child and school did nothing to encourage that, if anything at best it failed to discourage me from learning. It seemed to have little intent beyond keeping kids busy so parents can work & sort them from most to least competent.
  - nordsieck 6y ago
    > People have a hard time admitting that the normal school experience is often a negative socialization experience. For what it's worth, this is a very common result of shared suffering, from fraternity/sorority initiation rituals to compulsory military service.
  - Eyght 6y ago
    For the first seven years of my schooling, I had the privilege of going to classes with only 8 pupils per teacher. During this time I felt like I had a personal relationship with each of the teachers, and that my schooling was a mutual effort. From the 8th year onwards, I went to schools where we were at least 30 pupils per teacher. During this time, dealing with teachers was more like dealing with a 'school official' rather than a person, and my schooling had turned into a number of abstract criteria contained in a standardized form. Ironically, I've had a much better experience at university, where courses often has had more than a hundred students and only one professor to manage it all.
  - teekert 6y ago
    During Corona we had to home school our 7 y/o and our 3 y/o stopt going to play school (peuter speelzaal in the Netherlands). My son flourished, he was more social and at ease, showed interest in space and how the earth worked. I felt bad putting him back in school. My 3 y/o daughter though was whining constantly for the moment when play school would begin again.
    - aklemm 6y ago
      Yeah, exactly. Very similar to my experience during Covid lockdown. Our school is amazing too, but the kids really should only be there for like 4 hours rather than 7. It’s too grueling and doesn’t let them free enough. Of course, for most people life demands it.
- jariel 6y ago
  Self assessment is going to be difficult, doubly so when there is no basis of reference. 'Happiness' is not always the measure we are looking for, as school does sometimes put us in awkward positions we can learn quite a lot from. High School is a big place with a lot going on.
  - kelnos 6y ago
    > 'Happiness' is not always the measure we are looking for I think it absolutely is. Certainly we don't want "local happiness": we should not trade overall life happiness for temporary happiness. But otherwise, yes, ultimately my goal in life is to be happy. For individual tasks and events, we have to accept that some things that make us temporarily unhappy will lead to the larger goal of overall happiness, and use that as motivation to get through the unpleasant stuff.
    - jariel 6y ago
      Children who get to run around and play video games all day would be 'happy' and they really wouldn't learn a lot now would they. 'Self assessed happiness' is therefore, only one, small, indirect measure of anything important.
- hardwaregeek 6y ago
  Students are also really fixated on being in the “right” year. I took a gap year. When I recommend other people take one, they sometimes respond that they don’t want to be behind by a year, either socially or academically. What they don’t understand is that being behind or ahead is a very arbitrary idea stemming from the structure of school. It doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things if you graduate a year later. Or if you learn a subject a year later than your peers
  - threatofrain 6y ago
    You say a year but (1) colleges care how far you are in technical subjects like math, (2) you should care too because it affects what classes you take while in expensive college, (3) one year is what some students are looking at if they attempt some pedagogical plan, but others are looking at way more than one year of advancement. Without looking to extraordinary students, compare the lowest vs highest math tracks in schools, which is already an advantage in years. Sometimes advantages accumulate until you take a different pathway in life that was otherwise not a confident bet.
    - hardwaregeek 6y ago
      I'd counter that just because colleges care doesn't mean you should. Math in particular it's quite possible to pass a class without really understanding it. I'd wager that most students who took AP Calculus could not give a good definition of a limit. Indeed many math professors would much rather have students repeat calculus in college than blindly accept AP credit. Even if this allowed you to take more math classes, that wouldn't be much help if you don't know the fundamentals. Also gap years don't have any impact on the level you come into college. If anything I came into college far more advanced in CS than my peers because of my gap year.
      - deleted 6y ago
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      - clausok 6y ago
        Just like you say, I passed the AP calculus exam in high school and then when I arrived at college my advisor, who also happened to teach a freshman Calculus 1 section, told me, "I know you passed out of it, but why don't you sit in on a couple of my classes and see what you think?" I ended up staying the whole semester when it became clear that I didn't understand anything about Calculus.
- TimSchumann 6y ago
  > For me, the last bit about having older and younger friends is something dearly missing from the typical school experience. Regimentation by age is present nowhere else in life, and I think it hinders lots of people straight out of school. This hit me hard. An interaction I had with a highschool friend last week got me thinking. Much of my perception around relationships and age were colored by the fact that I went to school with the same 60 people for nearly 20 years straight (small town) and almost never interacted with anyone outside of an incredibly narrow age band. I didn't really disabuse myself of that (mostly subconscious) way of interacting with other humans until my late twenties. Wonder what I missed. Also, just realized who I was replying to. Hey Clark, long time no see, hope you're well.
  - clarkmoody 6y ago
    > Hey Clark, long time no see, hope you're well. Thanks!
  - kortilla 6y ago
    School for 20 years straight in a small town? What country is that? In the US there is usually just K-12 in a single school system.
    - deleted 6y ago
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    - TimSchumann 6y ago
      If it was an exaggeration, it was slight. I remember meeting people as a 3 year old in pre-school who I attended community college courses with.
    - dragonwriter 6y ago
      > School for 20 years straight in a small town? What country is that? In the US there is usually just K-12 in a single school system. In a single school system, sure. The same small town is also likely to have preschool of 2-3 years, and maybe a public or private community or junior college or vocational school, which gets you 2-3 + 13 + 2 = 17-18 years, not far off of 20.
- tprice7 6y ago
  The other typical retort is this: in the real world, you often have to do boring and unpleasant tasks, and unschooled children are therefore unprepared for the real world, since they spent all their time doing whatever they want. The people who make this argument overlook the fact that coercion is not required for someone to be motivated to do unpleasant tasks. If you have a goal, you will be motivated to do the tasks that help you reach that goal. It's pretty much never the case that those tasks are uniformly pleasant for any nontrivial goal. And I don't believe that coercion is required for children to form constructive goals. I know I certainly had goals as a teenager that motivated me to do much more difficult and substantial things than anything I encountered in school, and in this case the coercion was in the opposite direction.
- josh_fyi 6y ago
  School is a place where, 80% of the time, children are explicitly forbidden to socialize.
- deleted 6y ago
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- flukus 6y ago
  Something that stood out to with recent shutdowns/WFH was the amount of people that rely on work for a social life. It seems many people just carry their school habits into the professional world and study/socialize morphs into work/socialize and they never really have a community outside of that. I wouldn't be at all surprised if people home schooled as kids are coping a lot better right now.
- moltar 6y ago
  100% agree about age difference from personal experience. I grew up in Soviet Union where I was free ranging in my “hood” after school, weekends and all summer. We had a big, diverse age group of friends. I’ve learned a lot from the older guys. Both factual knowledge and just how to behave / interact / fit in (soft skills). I also see a lot of this in Vietnam where kids are just hanging out without age discrimination and they seem to be super happy.
- Melting_Harps 6y ago
  > For me, the last bit about having older and younger friends is something dearly missing from the typical school experience. Regimentation by age is present nowhere else in life, and I think it hinders lots of people straight out of school. I think this is can be hit/miss, I was in private school from k-8 grade and having such young children present can actually stunt your development. They tried to appease the 8th graders perceived level of maturity with a 'buddy system' wherein you're responsible to look after a Kindergartner. I shared a boy, who happened to have autism before it was well understood and diagnosed in children in the 90s, with a girl in my class and he was the child of a teacher on campus. I believe she was at one point my 5th grade teacher. It was very awkward to say the least, because, first: I had no interest in pretending to be a faux-parent with this girl in my class with a child not my own, a girl who I had known for the better part of 6 years and it gave me a taste of how ill-prepared I'd be in raising children and how little interest I had in it. Second, I had even less desire to have to check in with the mother of this child on matters that pertained to what I could and couldn't say/do around this child due to his condition, and ultimately it just revealed that he clearly needed better care-taking skills than any 8th graders could provide. In a way it was reason to justify good birth-control practices, but that was hardly the aim, as I wouldn't see the value in mentoring younger minds until my late 20s to early 30s. All this really did was make me look deeper into the propensity of autism in children due to paternal aging, and it made me make efforts to freeze my sperm from 29 onward to try and avoid this possibility in my children as much as I could as after 35 the rates of autism due to the father's age goes up significantly. Later as a cell biologist I came to learn about the many benefits of opting for in-vitro fertilization, versus in-vivo, to be able to detect for other maladies in the embryo, with the main issue being the ever increasing cost(s) associated with it so I decided to pro-long having children well it into my 50s in hopes of technologies that would drop the costs significantly. However, when I was in Europe working on farms in my mid to late 20s it was typical for the children to be treated like adults from a very young age as they had to participate not just in school matters, but also had a vital role to fill on the farm's daily operations. To this day I have never seen such mature children in my entire life as I did when I lived and worked on a farm in the base of the Bernese Alps. These 3 children (ages 5-11) not only ate everything on their plates without any coaxing, including the vegetables they often helped grow in the fields, but also they took on chores cleaning the kitchen and feeding, herding, and milking the cows, before and after their school work and spoke to each other in such a way that made you think that these children, who still behaved like children when playing outside, were behaving more like they were in their mid to late teens. It was astonishing to see a 5 year old girl reminding the older kids to make sure they did their homework as she helped them get ready for school, and as she walked them to the bus stop several Km away from Home at 6am and then came back, dressed herself to then worked in the greenhouse for a few hours alongside me and her Mother. It still baffles me when I think about it. It's hard to explain, and I think this more a Nurture thing then it is a Nature thing, in my experience. I entered HS at 13, and to be honest if things were not done to prevent me from it I would have entered at 12, and the idea of going into that system at that age would have been entirely disastrous because I was still unprepared and perhaps infantile in many ways about most things, despite learning how to wrench on cars I also started to learn how to cook at a professional level. I excelled in other aspects in Life, and often worked with Adults in those aforementioned fields as I felt they had much insight to offer, but I was almost entirely useless at wanting to work/hang out with people my own age for the most part as I felt they had little to offer. They often offered nothing I was interested in and I often resorted to car/chef blogs, forums and chatrooms on the Internet, and later on car meet ups, to hang out with actually interesting people after school. In my Junior year I just decided to start going to University lectures instead of my HS classes instead, and while I never made any friends on campus until my Senior year it was still a much better dynamic that suited me way better than what I had been forced into due to my age.
owenshen24 6y ago
Interesting, but only 75 responses (and selection bias) make me wary about drawing broader conclusions.
fzeroracer 6y ago
Where's the wealth/income breakdown on the families and individuals? I don't see anything in either the article or the study at hand. I feel like that's a more confounding factor than the unschooling bit, because having a certain level of income to be able to support unschooling is kind of a big deal. When you start to control for that, I feel like there would be a different trend to come out of this data. Which is to say, you'd see a large amount of selection bias from individuals whose wealth enabled a lot of what they attribute to unschooling.
- burfog 6y ago
  The cause and effect there is wrong. Saying that wealth causes success in school is like saying that an increase in the use of air conditioners causes people to go to the beach, or that Christmas shopping makes the days get shorter. There is a different factor causing both.
  - fzeroracer 6y ago
    Wealth buys your family quite a lot of relief. Not having to worry about eating, or being shamed because you eat the free lunch for poor kids, or having access to better schools and computers and so forth are all huge compounding factors for school performance. This is with ignoring that wealth quite literally buys you seats at various colleges, tutors for personalized lessons etc. Which leads into my original point that any discussion about the value of unschooling cannot be done without taking into account the income and wealth of families that went that route.
- anelson 6y ago
  All things being equal, I'm sure a random sample of children from the top SES quintile will have better educational outcomes then the bottom quintile (as measured by test scores, graduation rate, lifetime earnings, pick your metric). However my anecdotal experience based on my own background and other unschoolers I know is that unschooling specifically is not biased toward the wealthy. Rather it seems to correlate with parents who for whatever reason are willing to go far outside societal norms and the comforting embrace of social proof in the interest of doing what's best for their child. This isn't a value judgement one way or another; that statement could apply as much to an anti-vaxxer as an unschooler. The point I'm trying to make is that if a family enrolls their children in private school, hires tutors, arranges legacy admissions to $ivy_league_school, etc, no one will question the advantages they are conferring on their children. If instead they keep one parent at home and unschool their children, they will be doing so against a very strong current of social pressure, likely including their own extended family, and depending on where they live they may be acting against the will of the state itself. If anything, homeschooling in general is a way for families who lack the wealth to buy into elite education to try to provide their children with better educational opportunities than those afforded them in the local public school. It requires considerable sacrifice, particularly if it means giving up a second income and moving to a cheap place in the country to make the numbers work. Whether or not it's actually better for the children in question is ultimately up to the parents. I count my hybrid schooling/homeschooling/unschooling experience as a privilege in the sense that it's made me better than I would be otherwise. But it has nothing to do with wealth or income. I could arrange to be born 1000 times to 1000 wealthy families and not have the same advantage as I did with my poor family.
coderintherye 6y ago
I wouldn't have considered myself for this group, but I suppose technically I fit into the 3rd group, having dropped out after 9th grade, gotten a GED and worked my way through community college then university. I've gone on to have what I consider to be a very successful career and high life satisfaction. And pretty much all of my lifelong friends came from outside school settings. I'm privileged to have gotten to take this path. Just another self-reported data point.
deleted 6y ago
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jojobas 6y ago
I suspect there is a serious bias in that cohort, namely on parents being higher than average education and dedication. I know I couldn't educate my kids to university enrollment standard other than in physics, maths and such. That would cross out half their possibilities in education at least.
- iateanapple 6y ago
  > I know I couldn't educate my kids to university enrollment standard other than in physics, maths and such. Why not? And why would you have to? I got my kids an English tutor and an Arts tutor once a week to help where I couldn’t. College students are always looking for work so it didn’t cost a lot. These days the amount of subject material on YouTube would allow your kids to self learn most subjects once they have the maturity required. For example for drawing look at what self-taught artists are putting out with just an entry level Wacom tablet. The exceptions would probably be language (speaking) and topics like carpentry which are very practical.
  - jojobas 6y ago
    >Why not? And why would you have to? Well if you put it that way, of course hiring a private tutor on every subject is in now way worse than school.
    - iateanapple 6y ago
      > Well if you put it that way, of course hiring a private tutor on every subject is in now way worse than school. I’m not sure what you are expecting? Most subjects I can learn well enough to teach and help out but there are some I don’t have any talent for. I’m saying the cost to cover those gaps is minimal and it is easy and effective. I understand the ~$70/week I paid tutors is unaffordable for some - but it’s also a lot less than the $10k+/year my state spends per kid. And it’s 1:1 or 1:2 tuition instead of 1:30.
- caseysoftware 6y ago
  > I know I couldn't educate my kids to university enrollment standard Other than the elite schools, I suspect you overestimate the standards and requirements.* If you have a successful white collar career, you are at least a mediocre writer. That may be enough to pass on to your kids and get them into many schools. If you acknowledge your gaps - sounds like you have - even better, now you can fill them with anything from online courses (anywhere from free to expensive), tutoring (expensive), local community college (depends), or even trading favors with other parents with opposite skills gaps (bartering ftw). * I have a homeschooled kid looking at colleges now and the standards are lower than I expected. He passed the minimum requirements years ago.
paledot 6y ago
I unschooled K-2, was in a traditional school 3-5, then did a mix of unschooling and traditional homeschooling until high school (depending on the subject and year). I dropped out of a criminology program in my third year, ran unsuccessfully for public office, and have since been following a successful career as a programmer for 10 years. I credit unschooling with some of the things I like most about myself, but also some of the things I like least. It's my good fortune/dumb luck that one area I fixated on turned out to be in demand and high-paying, because I am constitutionally incapable of giving any focus to subjects that don't interest me. I have a particular depth and breadth of knowledge, albeit one that doesn't always coincide with things that "everyone knows". I certainly am self-reliant and able to teach myself (particularly valuable as a programmer), but I feel none of the motivation that many respondents mentioned. I have mild diagnosed ADHD; whether it's caused by unschooling I can't say. It was also intensely lonely for me, though I'm not sure I fully understood it at the time. My feeling is that I am a better person for the experience, and I wouldn't change it if I could. But I do have a sense that I rolled the dice and won. I'm not certain that I would make the same choice for my children.
- kelnos 6y ago
  Your conclusion that your unschooling worked out for you more by chance than design got me thinking more generally. While we certainly have some amount of agency in directing our own course in life, many of the things that happen to us that push us into a better or worse situation happen completely by chance. I was traditionally schooled, but, like you, believe strongly that my current success is largely attributable to the luck of my enjoying programming to an immense degree, and falling into it a few years out of college (where I studied hardware because at the time I wanted to design microprocessors, something I wasn't all that good at and ended up not enjoying). Obviously our stories make for a sample size of two, but that suggests to me that any particular method of schooling doesn't matter, as long as there's an environment in childhood and adolescence that facilitates learning.
  - paledot 6y ago
    I wouldn't say it doesn't matter, just that there are many paths to the same destination. And yes, anyone who tells you that your decisions are the primary determinant in how your life goes is a liar. 1% inspiration, 9% persperation, 90% dumb luck.
cortesoft 6y ago
> The reason for this correlation is something this survey can’t answer. “Maybe unschooling promotes creativity, or maybe dispositionally creative people or families are more likely to choose unschooling,” Gray says. “It’s probably a little bit of both.” Successful "unschooling" is a pretty privileged experience... they have to have at least one parent who is dedicated to their education and have parents who have the skills to guide their education. There is also a huge selection bias in the survey; they don't call kids who have a bad experience with this "unschoolers"... they call them drop outs.
- newacct583 6y ago
  Exactly. Not every child requires a formal education. Every child needs access to it. Most kids can't feasibly be homeschooled.
  - ido 6y ago
    Unschooling doesn't require homeschooling, there are many alternative (free/democratic) schools - in Berlin (where I live) alone there are about a dozen. It does not require more resources to run than a "normal" school, it's mostly that most parents don't want it for their kids (or are unaware of it).
    - riffraff 6y ago
      I do not understand: what are we talking about? Is "unschooling" in your interpretation just "not following a fix curriculum" ? If that's the case, and you still go to a school while unschooled (which seems oxymoronic), why would there be issues with socialization?
      - gregjor 6y ago
        You should learn what unschooling means. It’s not about curriculum or not attending any classes. I suggest Ivan Illich’s book “Deschooling Society.” As long as your frame of reference is modern formal schools you can only interpret alternatives from that perspective.
seibelj 6y ago
I believe I would have benefited greatly from some sort of alternative schooling environment. I despised school because it was so boring and structured, and also I was (and still am) a night owl that routinely stays up late on weeknights (often until 3am or so). Waking up at 630am to get my ass to school by 730 first bell was atrocious. My senior year of high school I somehow legitimately missed 35 days of school! That’s almost 2 full months! I also had all manner of tricks to come in late and leave early (cut the last class) without formal repercussions. For example, I realized that if I carried my trumpet case I could basically have my run of the school because no school officer suspected a band geek of cutting class. So I would get my trumpet, exit a side door, walk to my car, wait 5 minutes to make sure I wasn’t caught, then drive home! I did this countless times. What I did like was working and partying. I started working in 8th grade reffing soccer, then I worked retail, and since I’ve been 13 years old I’ve never been unemployed for more than a month. When I graduated college I received my diploma on a Friday and started working on Monday. I’ve never had extended time off of work in decades! On the partying side, I discovered alcohol in 9th grade and marijuana in 10th, and also did my fair share of cocaine and research chemicals during my latter high school and college years. I had a blast! And how did I turn out? Fine! Better than fine! I followed my passion into computers and all of the people who told me I would amount to nothing were very much incorrect. In summation, a one-size-fits-all approach to education is completely absurd. The fact that schools have not materially changed in over a century, where everyone sits in a chair and listens to some hack’s opinions, is ridiculous! I can remember a few amazing teachers from my pre-college days and the other 95% of them were totally forgettable. Teachers, their unions, and administrators who refuse to allow any change whatsoever are living in the past. Change happens gradually then all at once. I praise unschooling and any movement that tries to change the horrible, stale, boring education system that makes the majority of students hate learning and associate it with authority, chastisement, and being told they are failures.
asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
Selection bias is the most powerful force in education and indeed child rearing in general. It's hard to infer anything about the outcomes you might expect for a child in general from the observed outcomes of those who did choose to unschool.
- tprice7 6y ago
  Sure, but I think this at least demonstrates that unschooling deserves to be within the window of discourse. I've seen many people express the opinion that unschooling is inherently completely insane.
  - gregjor 6y ago
    Because they only have their own experience in school to judge from.
- gregjor 6y ago
  In the US at least you can try homeschooling, and if it doesn’t work for you or your child they can just return to school. In the state I lived in when unschooling three kids, Oregon, public schools allow homeschoolers to participate in sports and other activities. It’s not an all-or-nothing or permanent choice. Kids change schools all the time, which can prove just as disruptive as taking a year to try something different.
alex_young 6y ago
I would have been excluded from this survey if I knew of its existence since I attended (only) 12th grade and graduated. I was unschooled prior to this age, and I consider myself quite successful. Several have pointed to a perception that one must be of financial means to unschool your children, and at least in my case the opposite is true. However, while my parents did not have the encumbrance of wealth, they were both highly educated and valued knowledge and family highly. I consider my experience mostly positive, and credit the notion of facilitating learning when there is active interest as a basic cognitive tool useful in many areas of our society.
Konohamaru 6y ago
It's almost as if human beings have a built-in learning mechanism to recognize language, social norms, general background knowledge and social relationships that has been operative for thousands of years before school even existed. Woooooaah man, that's freaky!
zxexz 6y ago
This article, though not exactly thorough, does have some interesting anecdotes. I think an important take-away here is to realize that there are many non-conventional paths through the educational system, for better or for worse. I took a non-conventional path, and it worked out for me. From the article: "Most of those who went on to college did so without either a high school diploma or general education diploma (GED), and without taking the SAT or ACT. Several credited interviews and portfolios for their acceptance to college, but by far the most common route to a four-year college was to start at a community college (typically begun at age 16, but sometimes even younger). None of the respondents found college academically difficult, but some found the rules and conventions strange and sometimes off-putting. Young people who were used to having to find things out on their own were taken aback, and even in some cases felt insulted, “when professors assumed they had to tell them what they were supposed to learn[...]" This mirrors my experience closely (though I would say I definitely found the structure of university difficult/oppressing). Being a 14 year-old enrolling in community college was initially daunting, but it was one of the most important formative experiences of my life. Looking back at the experience, being surrounded by people from all walks of life was invaluable to me. I personally feel that community college, and numerous other 'real-life' experiences made possible through unschooling, prepared me for adulthood way better than university ever did. One of the largest failings of the conventional school system, IMO, is the lack of socialization between different age groups. YMMV; there is not a single 'magic bullet' for education, and everyone's experiences will be different. A recent post[0] here also generated a lot of discussion about unschooling/homeschooling. As a former 'unschooler', I'd like to plug my comments from that post[1]. I would love to hear from some other unschoolers on HN! I'm forever curious to hear how it worked out for others (email in profile). Side note: When I was quite young, I actually tried out the Sudbury Valley School mentioned in the article. I hated it. I know several people who went there. Some loved it, some hated it. Most are doing well, some much better than others, some not so much. Just like with unschooling, homeschooling, and conventional schooling. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23010079 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23010079 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23014490 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23014490
tbenst 6y ago
I’m not sure this even qualifies as science. Doesn’t even compare to a group of schooled children. There may indeed be positive outcomes associated with unschooling but this gives us little useful information for assessing this.
- hatmatrix 6y ago
  It's just a collection of anecdotes.
totorovirus 6y ago
I think there is a bias because giving a kid unschooling/home schooling means that the parent's are reasonably interested in educating their kids. Article has a mild opinionated view of success, which values job satisfaction. High portion of cohort has selected self-contained jobs like those which are readily convertible to a free lancer job(i.e. software developer, carpenter, entreprenuer etc). If you measure the success in social dominance and being closer to apex of hierarchy (becoming a policitian, CEO), I think schoolers would have much better performance on this because school also teaches how to take advantage in social relationships, winning a conflict or making allies.
- gregjor 6y ago
  Parents not taking an interest in the child’s education is the number one reason professional teachers cite for failure in the classroom.
dang 6y ago
If curious see also a bit from 2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9017648 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9017648
atemerev 6y ago
Well I am fine, more or less (was homeschooled in the early 90s, lived in 6 countries since then, worked as a software engineer in finance for most of the time since then, now on track for a biomedical PhD). I am, however, probably the poorest (ex) financial software engineer you ever saw... but I have serious ADHD, so there’s that.
carlita_express 6y ago
On this subject, there is a subreddit ( https://old.reddit.com/r/homeschoolrecovery https://old.reddit.com/r/homeschoolrecovery ) dedicated to those trying to mentally/socially recover from their experiences of home/un-schooling, which can highlight some of the darker experiences, marked by extreme isolation, social anxiety, and depression
- hatmatrix 6y ago
  This is good to place these biased, overwhelmingly positive results.
- iateanapple 6y ago
  > which can highlight some of the darker experiences, marked by extreme isolation, social anxiety, and depression There are high rates of social isolation, social anxiety, and depression among school kids. Close to 10% of teens have an anxiety disorder etc. What would be interesting to know is are the home schooled rates significantly higher?
  - carlita_express 6y ago
    Anecdotally, I was homeschooled and experienced all of these above, in addition to my ADHD which was ignored by my parents, who didn't have enough experience to diagnose common symptoms.
    - iateanapple 6y ago
      > Anecdotally, I was homeschooled and experienced all of these above Unfortunately they seem part of the “normal” teen experience.
      - carlita_express 6y ago
        Most “public” school teachers have experience recognizing the symptoms of ADHD that parents don’t have.
gregjor 6y ago
Relevant, one of the reasons I decided to homeschool and then go full unschooling with my three children: https://www.cantrip.org/gatto.html https://www.cantrip.org/gatto.html Also “Deschooling Society” by Ivan Illich. You start by examining and questioning what you think you know about school and education. Most of us only have our school experience to go by so we interpret any other path as inferior, subversive, deviant. There’s more than one way to get a useful education. My kids all turned out just fine, two went to college, they have careers, active social lives since very young. I think the biggest mistake parents make is thinking they can shape their children into something. They fail to see their children as individuals, separate from the parents, with their own personalities and desires. Schools by and large follow that model, trying to force children to conform and behave and learn the same things at the same time and rate as everyone else. Montessori comes closest to unschooling, but it’s quite expensive.
agentbellnorm 6y ago
Other than some interesting themes and anecdotes, I’d be very careful to draw any conclusions based on the survey. There are many intuitive reasons why unsuccessfully unschooled people would not answer this survey. A huge concern with unschooling is lack of social development, and the respondents are found through social networks. In the worst case, suicide would prevent someone from answering the survey. The title is misleading because the survey can’t possibly answer the question with a survey like this, and without addressing the issue of equal opportunity, which might be the biggest factor when designing education.
- anelson 6y ago
  Granted this survey isn't robust enough to be taken as evidence of the superiority of unschooling or even homeschooling generally. It's anecdotal, and if I had to guess I'd say the target audience is parents who have already decided to unschool and want some social validation, or at least parents leaning that way. That said, I think your huge concern is that unschooled kids are at a higher risk of insufficient or delayed social development, and a survey that recruits on social networks will biased against such socially underdeveloped children. And furthermore that those socially underdeveloped children are at a higher risk of suicide than their conventionally-educated peers such that a survey which doesn't count the dead ones is further biased. If that's a correct assessment of your concern then I'd be really interested to know upon what facts or even anecdotal experience it's based. If it's just that the idea of unschooling seems suspect, or that you can't imagine how such a system could produce better outcomes than conventional education, then you're certainly not alone in that position but I would submit that you are misinformed. In my experience the social (to say nothing of intellectual) development of the average American high school graduate was laughably primitive when I was that age 20 years ago, and nothing I've seen since makes me think it's gotten any better. As for suicide risk I find it hard to believe that an educational style that presumes a higher than average degree of parental involvement and an almost certain lack of bullying and abuse in school leads to a higher propensity to suicide. In fact I would confidently wager that, were such data available, it would show the exact opposite.
  - agentbellnorm 6y ago
jnwatson 6y ago
The problem with the term “unschooled” is that it implies hands-off teaching. It isn’t that. It is guided, self-directed learning. Couple this with the very real problem of neglected home schoolers, it is quite a problematic word. One value of the public school system is that it does meet some minimum amount of care, and it does allow home problems to be mitigated. At least kids get 1-2 meals a day at school, which some “home schooled” kids don’t get.
- dillonmckay 6y ago
  So daycare, not education?
jv22222 6y ago
I was in boarding school from the age of 9-15 in the UK. For me, it was an absolutely horrific experience. I was physically and emotionally abused and bullied for the entire time I was there due to being very obviously sensitive and an easy target. I did not do well at academics of any kind because I was mainly dealing with the emotional effects and also just didn't "get" it. My only pass was in art, which I didn't really like and was not very good at everything else was a fail. I was pretty sure that I was stupid and was not academic at all. They had a computer lab with BBC Model B and I tried some basic coding and I was not interested in it. I left school at 15 and then travelled around Europe and came back to London where I spent a few years working high street jobs (shoe shop sales, etc). Then, when I was 18 a friend of mine got me a job as a courier at a firm of architects (1987). They had Macs and I became interested because I had a go and I seemed to understand how to use them. I made a few newsletters for the company in Quark Express. Feeling kind of cocky I BS'd my way into a Tech Support position at an Apple store in London. After a year working there I was enjoying helping customers. I even made a few experiments in Hyper Card and realized I quite liked computers. A few years later "the internet" happened and I wanted to make a "chat" site, so I learned "C" because I was obsessed that I needed to learn "the absolute fastest language" to write a cgi script. (the irony, the html cgi chat script executed instantaneously but took aaaages to get around the internet and down peoples modems) Anyway, I kept coding, moved to perl, then php, then javascript, then mobile and now I love all things computers. Long story short, I was able to have a career in spite of school not because of it. For me, school was the worst experience of my life. When I look back on it I see a dark time in a sort of psychological prison that lasted for years. I find it hard to think of school in a positive light and that might be why one of my roles is being CTO of a company that's main goal is to modernize education. For me, I only started to be inquisitive and learn "anything" after I had been out of the school environment for 3 years. I no longer think I am stupid or unable to do anything academic. I plan on revisiting Math one day when I have gotten all this entrepreneurial stuff out of my system.
gregjor 6y ago
Every time the subject of homeschooling or unschooling comes up in HN the same tired arguments get trotted out: Kids will suffer socially, most parents aren't qualified to teach. There's some irony in the usually libertarian-learning HN audience defending schools, which are a system designed to deprive individuals (children) of their freedom and to limit their opportunities. These arguments are not supported by evidence or history. They are based on misconceptions about homeschooling/unschooling, and a limited frame of reference because most of us went to school and have no experience with alternatives. Unschooling does not mean locking kids up at home, depriving them of friends or opportunities to learn. It means letting children follow their own interests, at their own pace, and allowing them to participate in the larger world rather than getting locked up for 7 or 8 hours a day in a rigid and coercive environment where critical thinking and discovery are actively discouraged. It means supporting and encouraging education tailored for the child rather than forcing them into 12 years of government-mandated curriculum, standardized tests, strict regimentation, surveillance, and an often toxic environment that resembles jail more than living in the real world as productive adults. These worries strike me as similar to the argument that people can't live moral lives without religion. We know that simply isn't true. I suspect many more people on HN grew up morally without religion than grew up educated and socialized without school, so maybe some of the critics can step back a bit and examine their assumptions, and ignorance of unschooling, before posting the usual objections.
- anelson 6y ago
  ^ This! In all my travels I've only met a handful of people who were not at least skeptical or downright disparaging of home schooling, at least until they learned about my background and either politeness or exposure to contrary evidence required backtracking. I often encounter a kind of reverence toward teachers in particular and our educational establishment in general which is woefully misplaced. The structure the American education system (and maybe in other countries although I only went to school in the US) is in direct opposition to the formation of qualities like curiosity, independence, auto-didactic inquiry, and skepticism that are as vital today as literacy was a century ago. I was lucky to be raised by parents who had no respect for the establishment and chose to live in a state that did not force them to educate their children in accordance with government mandates. As a result they were free to bring us up in the way that they hoped was best for each of us. For me that ended up being unschooling.
anelson 6y ago
During my childhood I experienced the full spectrum of American education systems, including /laissez faire/ unschooling, homeschooling with a structured curriculum, a one-room country schoolhouse, urban public schools, and even a Catholic private school. I was fortunate that my parents, particularly my father, were willing to try multiple approaches to learning based on what was and wasn't working. I hated almost every moment of my public school education, and private school was only slightly better. My urban public school was little better than a gladiator academy, and even in private school the curriculum was not challenging or engaging in any way. I was an awkward child and was frequently bullied (in fairness this did teach me the importance of being willing to meet violence with violence, a lesson which fortunately I've not needed to apply since my school days). I would find every opportunity to get out of school and work on my own self-edification projects; vaguely defined "sick days" were my stock in trade. My last year of "normal" education was the 6th grade, in a public school in a small midwestern town (population: ~750). Having explored the gamut of educational styles it was clear that I learned best on my own. I spent a lot of time exploring different subjects based on what caught my interest. By the time I was 13 I had already decided I wanted to go into EE. I saved my meager allowance and over time managed to procure the entire library of Forrest M. Mims' "Engineer's mini notebooks", and could reproduce the schematics in each one practically from memory. I was already looking at how I could get into the field without waiting until I was 18 and could go to college, but then I discovered digital circuits... After extensive lobbying on my part my parents finally bought a computer in 1994 (a Gateway 2000 486 DX2 66Mhz). From then on I've been immersed in computing, at times to an obsessive degree. If you'd asked my father in 1995 if unschooling me had been a mistake, he might have shared his concerns that my humanity was slipping away as I spent every waking moment on that "damn machine". He couldn't have known at the time that I was laying the foundation for an incredibly satisfying career as a software engineer. I always assumed I'd get around to a GED and then a college degree, because it was taken as an article of faith in my family that one must, if nothing else, graduate with at lease a bachelor's degree in something. But it never happened. I started community college like many unschoolers do as a way to get around age and testing requirements in four year schools, but by then I was already working as a software engineer and I didn't see the point in taking on debt and spending a few years in a CS curriculum, so I dropped out and never looked back. I've seen some other comments here talk about the "socialization" question. My mother was very worried about this also. As others have mentioned, in the end I was better socialized than my age peers, because I had more meaningful interactions with people outside my age cohort. My coworkers, boss, in some cases even their children were all older than me, and that taught me how to act both professionally and in informal settings like happy hours and parties. On the topic of privilege, I certainly count myself privileged to have been raised by two involved parents who had the insight to let me develop outside the accepted bounds of our society. However my family were very poor for the first ten years of my life, and barely middle class during my teens. One of my parents had a serious substance abuse problem which contributed to our poverty. Whatever aspect of my background and upbringing gave me an advantage in life, it was definitely not socio-economic. Who knows if my experience reflects the superiority of one system over another, or if I would have turned out this way anyway, or some complex non-linear space in between. The key takeaway I think is that education is in no way a solved problem, and the system we have now (particularly in the US) is in no way the apotheosis of pedagogy. Just like we vigorously debate the merits of programming languages, tech stacks, type sytems, methodologies, business models, etc here on HN, how we educate ourselves and our children is at least as much of an unsolved problem. Whether or not unschooling is a good fit for a particular child or their particular parents, the movement has nonetheless done us all a great service by proving convincingly that it's OK to question the education orthodoxy, that there are is no priestly caste of teachers who possess the wisdom of the pedagogical gods. In the early 80s this was by no means apparent, and my parents took a lot of shit from a lot of people for their approach. Now my sister is free to unschool her four kids with little to no hassle from the state.
bradgranath 6y ago
My parents homeschooled me from age 4 to 17. I wish they hadn't. They didn't know what they were doing and it has caused me no end of problems. Public school is not fire and forget, but at least there is SOME oversight (for white kids anyway). My parents didn't just get away with their ineptitude, but were encouraged by WA state to continue isolating me in the name of "choice". This not as simple as "take the kid out of school and they will obviously turn into a better person because school is such a bad place". Learning to get along with your peers and interacting with authority figures is not something you can pick up by reading about it. I should know.
actfrench 6y ago
Unschooling is a very loosely defined concept. I've seen a spectrum of unschooling ranging from 1-2 hours a day with a parent/teacher of formal instruction coupled with self-directed learning and socialization to completely allowing children to do what they want whenever. A lot of it depends on the child (how self-directed they are) and the ways that the family is able to support their learning through the learning environment (often known as the child's third teacher.) Does the parent engage the children in learning all the time, engaging with them when they ask why? And guiding them to their own answers? That makes a big impact. Often unschoolers tend to be very autonomous. If they do transfer from being unschooled to schooled, teachers love them because they are self-motivated and curious. There's a lot of great books on self-directed education, though this is someone different than unschooling as a concept. I run an organization that supports families learning from home and we've reviewed a couple resources related to unschooling and homeschooling that might be helpful. The Alliance for Self-Directed Education has great research and information on unschooling: https://www.modulo.app/self-directed-education/asde https://www.modulo.app/self-directed-education/asde Free to Learn is possibly the most important book on unschooling and how kids turn out https://www.modulo.app/self-directed-education/freetolearn https://www.modulo.app/self-directed-education/freetolearn Class Dismissed gives a taste of what happens when you give kids a period of deschooling https://www.modulo.app/self-directed-education/classdismissed https://www.modulo.app/self-directed-education/classdismisse... I think what's most important to remember is that different approaches work better for different kids and that unschooling means different things to different people. Some equate unschooling with secular homeschooling. Others see it as self-directed education. Some view homeschooling as a more inclusive approach to education that reinvents the school schedule, so children are learning and socializing in a more organic way than a 9-3 school schedule.
actfrench 6y ago
Famous unschoolers https://www.unschooling.com/t/famous-unschoolers/296 https://www.unschooling.com/t/famous-unschoolers/296

85 points by alex_young 6y ago

The typical retort to home/un-schoolers is about "socialization." The article addresses that here: What stood out, he adds, is that “many more said they felt their social experiences were better than they would have had in school.” Sixty-nine percent were “clearly happy with their social lives,” he says, and made friends through such avenues as local homeschooling groups, organized afterschool activities, church, volunteer or youth organizations, jobs, and neighbors. In particular, “they really treasured the fact that they had friends who were older or younger, including adults. They felt this was a more normal kind of socializing experience than just being with other people your age.” For me, the last bit about having older and younger friends is something dearly missing from the typical school experience. Regimentation by age is present nowhere else in life, and I think it hinders lots of people straight out of school. Aside from not having friends your age, "adults" are also made to be the enemy through the power imbalance in a typical school. This makes it a bit harder to adjust to the real world in a subtle way that many take for granted. Early career professionals should be drawn to the most senior members of the organization to get the most knowledge they can, before that experience retires out of the company.

aklemm 6y ago
People have a hard time admitting that the normal school experience is often a negative socialization experience. When it's good, it's good, but it should be obvious that alternatives can also be good.
- ido 6y ago
  Like others I had a negative experience in a "normal" school. Not because of the other pupils but because of the system and (some of) the teachers. Kids will be kids regardless (aside from problematic settings such as coming from abusive and/or broken homes). I was a curious child and school did nothing to encourage that, if anything at best it failed to discourage me from learning. It seemed to have little intent beyond keeping kids busy so parents can work & sort them from most to least competent.
- nordsieck 6y ago
  > People have a hard time admitting that the normal school experience is often a negative socialization experience. For what it's worth, this is a very common result of shared suffering, from fraternity/sorority initiation rituals to compulsory military service.
- Eyght 6y ago
  For the first seven years of my schooling, I had the privilege of going to classes with only 8 pupils per teacher. During this time I felt like I had a personal relationship with each of the teachers, and that my schooling was a mutual effort. From the 8th year onwards, I went to schools where we were at least 30 pupils per teacher. During this time, dealing with teachers was more like dealing with a 'school official' rather than a person, and my schooling had turned into a number of abstract criteria contained in a standardized form. Ironically, I've had a much better experience at university, where courses often has had more than a hundred students and only one professor to manage it all.
- teekert 6y ago
  During Corona we had to home school our 7 y/o and our 3 y/o stopt going to play school (peuter speelzaal in the Netherlands). My son flourished, he was more social and at ease, showed interest in space and how the earth worked. I felt bad putting him back in school. My 3 y/o daughter though was whining constantly for the moment when play school would begin again.
  - aklemm 6y ago
    Yeah, exactly. Very similar to my experience during Covid lockdown. Our school is amazing too, but the kids really should only be there for like 4 hours rather than 7. It’s too grueling and doesn’t let them free enough. Of course, for most people life demands it.
jariel 6y ago
Self assessment is going to be difficult, doubly so when there is no basis of reference. 'Happiness' is not always the measure we are looking for, as school does sometimes put us in awkward positions we can learn quite a lot from. High School is a big place with a lot going on.
- kelnos 6y ago
  > 'Happiness' is not always the measure we are looking for I think it absolutely is. Certainly we don't want "local happiness": we should not trade overall life happiness for temporary happiness. But otherwise, yes, ultimately my goal in life is to be happy. For individual tasks and events, we have to accept that some things that make us temporarily unhappy will lead to the larger goal of overall happiness, and use that as motivation to get through the unpleasant stuff.
  - jariel 6y ago
    Children who get to run around and play video games all day would be 'happy' and they really wouldn't learn a lot now would they. 'Self assessed happiness' is therefore, only one, small, indirect measure of anything important.
hardwaregeek 6y ago
Students are also really fixated on being in the “right” year. I took a gap year. When I recommend other people take one, they sometimes respond that they don’t want to be behind by a year, either socially or academically. What they don’t understand is that being behind or ahead is a very arbitrary idea stemming from the structure of school. It doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things if you graduate a year later. Or if you learn a subject a year later than your peers
- threatofrain 6y ago
  You say a year but (1) colleges care how far you are in technical subjects like math, (2) you should care too because it affects what classes you take while in expensive college, (3) one year is what some students are looking at if they attempt some pedagogical plan, but others are looking at way more than one year of advancement. Without looking to extraordinary students, compare the lowest vs highest math tracks in schools, which is already an advantage in years. Sometimes advantages accumulate until you take a different pathway in life that was otherwise not a confident bet.
  - hardwaregeek 6y ago
    I'd counter that just because colleges care doesn't mean you should. Math in particular it's quite possible to pass a class without really understanding it. I'd wager that most students who took AP Calculus could not give a good definition of a limit. Indeed many math professors would much rather have students repeat calculus in college than blindly accept AP credit. Even if this allowed you to take more math classes, that wouldn't be much help if you don't know the fundamentals. Also gap years don't have any impact on the level you come into college. If anything I came into college far more advanced in CS than my peers because of my gap year.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - clausok 6y ago
      Just like you say, I passed the AP calculus exam in high school and then when I arrived at college my advisor, who also happened to teach a freshman Calculus 1 section, told me, "I know you passed out of it, but why don't you sit in on a couple of my classes and see what you think?" I ended up staying the whole semester when it became clear that I didn't understand anything about Calculus.
TimSchumann 6y ago
> For me, the last bit about having older and younger friends is something dearly missing from the typical school experience. Regimentation by age is present nowhere else in life, and I think it hinders lots of people straight out of school. This hit me hard. An interaction I had with a highschool friend last week got me thinking. Much of my perception around relationships and age were colored by the fact that I went to school with the same 60 people for nearly 20 years straight (small town) and almost never interacted with anyone outside of an incredibly narrow age band. I didn't really disabuse myself of that (mostly subconscious) way of interacting with other humans until my late twenties. Wonder what I missed. Also, just realized who I was replying to. Hey Clark, long time no see, hope you're well.
- clarkmoody 6y ago
  > Hey Clark, long time no see, hope you're well. Thanks!
- kortilla 6y ago
  School for 20 years straight in a small town? What country is that? In the US there is usually just K-12 in a single school system.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - TimSchumann 6y ago
    If it was an exaggeration, it was slight. I remember meeting people as a 3 year old in pre-school who I attended community college courses with.
  - dragonwriter 6y ago
    > School for 20 years straight in a small town? What country is that? In the US there is usually just K-12 in a single school system. In a single school system, sure. The same small town is also likely to have preschool of 2-3 years, and maybe a public or private community or junior college or vocational school, which gets you 2-3 + 13 + 2 = 17-18 years, not far off of 20.
tprice7 6y ago
The other typical retort is this: in the real world, you often have to do boring and unpleasant tasks, and unschooled children are therefore unprepared for the real world, since they spent all their time doing whatever they want. The people who make this argument overlook the fact that coercion is not required for someone to be motivated to do unpleasant tasks. If you have a goal, you will be motivated to do the tasks that help you reach that goal. It's pretty much never the case that those tasks are uniformly pleasant for any nontrivial goal. And I don't believe that coercion is required for children to form constructive goals. I know I certainly had goals as a teenager that motivated me to do much more difficult and substantial things than anything I encountered in school, and in this case the coercion was in the opposite direction.
josh_fyi 6y ago
School is a place where, 80% of the time, children are explicitly forbidden to socialize.
deleted 6y ago
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flukus 6y ago
Something that stood out to with recent shutdowns/WFH was the amount of people that rely on work for a social life. It seems many people just carry their school habits into the professional world and study/socialize morphs into work/socialize and they never really have a community outside of that. I wouldn't be at all surprised if people home schooled as kids are coping a lot better right now.
moltar 6y ago
100% agree about age difference from personal experience. I grew up in Soviet Union where I was free ranging in my “hood” after school, weekends and all summer. We had a big, diverse age group of friends. I’ve learned a lot from the older guys. Both factual knowledge and just how to behave / interact / fit in (soft skills). I also see a lot of this in Vietnam where kids are just hanging out without age discrimination and they seem to be super happy.
Melting_Harps 6y ago
> For me, the last bit about having older and younger friends is something dearly missing from the typical school experience. Regimentation by age is present nowhere else in life, and I think it hinders lots of people straight out of school. I think this is can be hit/miss, I was in private school from k-8 grade and having such young children present can actually stunt your development. They tried to appease the 8th graders perceived level of maturity with a 'buddy system' wherein you're responsible to look after a Kindergartner. I shared a boy, who happened to have autism before it was well understood and diagnosed in children in the 90s, with a girl in my class and he was the child of a teacher on campus. I believe she was at one point my 5th grade teacher. It was very awkward to say the least, because, first: I had no interest in pretending to be a faux-parent with this girl in my class with a child not my own, a girl who I had known for the better part of 6 years and it gave me a taste of how ill-prepared I'd be in raising children and how little interest I had in it. Second, I had even less desire to have to check in with the mother of this child on matters that pertained to what I could and couldn't say/do around this child due to his condition, and ultimately it just revealed that he clearly needed better care-taking skills than any 8th graders could provide. In a way it was reason to justify good birth-control practices, but that was hardly the aim, as I wouldn't see the value in mentoring younger minds until my late 20s to early 30s. All this really did was make me look deeper into the propensity of autism in children due to paternal aging, and it made me make efforts to freeze my sperm from 29 onward to try and avoid this possibility in my children as much as I could as after 35 the rates of autism due to the father's age goes up significantly. Later as a cell biologist I came to learn about the many benefits of opting for in-vitro fertilization, versus in-vivo, to be able to detect for other maladies in the embryo, with the main issue being the ever increasing cost(s) associated with it so I decided to pro-long having children well it into my 50s in hopes of technologies that would drop the costs significantly. However, when I was in Europe working on farms in my mid to late 20s it was typical for the children to be treated like adults from a very young age as they had to participate not just in school matters, but also had a vital role to fill on the farm's daily operations. To this day I have never seen such mature children in my entire life as I did when I lived and worked on a farm in the base of the Bernese Alps. These 3 children (ages 5-11) not only ate everything on their plates without any coaxing, including the vegetables they often helped grow in the fields, but also they took on chores cleaning the kitchen and feeding, herding, and milking the cows, before and after their school work and spoke to each other in such a way that made you think that these children, who still behaved like children when playing outside, were behaving more like they were in their mid to late teens. It was astonishing to see a 5 year old girl reminding the older kids to make sure they did their homework as she helped them get ready for school, and as she walked them to the bus stop several Km away from Home at 6am and then came back, dressed herself to then worked in the greenhouse for a few hours alongside me and her Mother. It still baffles me when I think about it. It's hard to explain, and I think this more a Nurture thing then it is a Nature thing, in my experience. I entered HS at 13, and to be honest if things were not done to prevent me from it I would have entered at 12, and the idea of going into that system at that age would have been entirely disastrous because I was still unprepared and perhaps infantile in many ways about most things, despite learning how to wrench on cars I also started to learn how to cook at a professional level. I excelled in other aspects in Life, and often worked with Adults in those aforementioned fields as I felt they had much insight to offer, but I was almost entirely useless at wanting to work/hang out with people my own age for the most part as I felt they had little to offer. They often offered nothing I was interested in and I often resorted to car/chef blogs, forums and chatrooms on the Internet, and later on car meet ups, to hang out with actually interesting people after school. In my Junior year I just decided to start going to University lectures instead of my HS classes instead, and while I never made any friends on campus until my Senior year it was still a much better dynamic that suited me way better than what I had been forced into due to my age.

owenshen24 6y ago

Interesting, but only 75 responses (and selection bias) make me wary about drawing broader conclusions.

fzeroracer 6y ago

Where's the wealth/income breakdown on the families and individuals? I don't see anything in either the article or the study at hand. I feel like that's a more confounding factor than the unschooling bit, because having a certain level of income to be able to support unschooling is kind of a big deal. When you start to control for that, I feel like there would be a different trend to come out of this data. Which is to say, you'd see a large amount of selection bias from individuals whose wealth enabled a lot of what they attribute to unschooling.

burfog 6y ago
The cause and effect there is wrong. Saying that wealth causes success in school is like saying that an increase in the use of air conditioners causes people to go to the beach, or that Christmas shopping makes the days get shorter. There is a different factor causing both.
- fzeroracer 6y ago
  Wealth buys your family quite a lot of relief. Not having to worry about eating, or being shamed because you eat the free lunch for poor kids, or having access to better schools and computers and so forth are all huge compounding factors for school performance. This is with ignoring that wealth quite literally buys you seats at various colleges, tutors for personalized lessons etc. Which leads into my original point that any discussion about the value of unschooling cannot be done without taking into account the income and wealth of families that went that route.
anelson 6y ago
All things being equal, I'm sure a random sample of children from the top SES quintile will have better educational outcomes then the bottom quintile (as measured by test scores, graduation rate, lifetime earnings, pick your metric). However my anecdotal experience based on my own background and other unschoolers I know is that unschooling specifically is not biased toward the wealthy. Rather it seems to correlate with parents who for whatever reason are willing to go far outside societal norms and the comforting embrace of social proof in the interest of doing what's best for their child. This isn't a value judgement one way or another; that statement could apply as much to an anti-vaxxer as an unschooler. The point I'm trying to make is that if a family enrolls their children in private school, hires tutors, arranges legacy admissions to $ivy_league_school, etc, no one will question the advantages they are conferring on their children. If instead they keep one parent at home and unschool their children, they will be doing so against a very strong current of social pressure, likely including their own extended family, and depending on where they live they may be acting against the will of the state itself. If anything, homeschooling in general is a way for families who lack the wealth to buy into elite education to try to provide their children with better educational opportunities than those afforded them in the local public school. It requires considerable sacrifice, particularly if it means giving up a second income and moving to a cheap place in the country to make the numbers work. Whether or not it's actually better for the children in question is ultimately up to the parents. I count my hybrid schooling/homeschooling/unschooling experience as a privilege in the sense that it's made me better than I would be otherwise. But it has nothing to do with wealth or income. I could arrange to be born 1000 times to 1000 wealthy families and not have the same advantage as I did with my poor family.

coderintherye 6y ago

I wouldn't have considered myself for this group, but I suppose technically I fit into the 3rd group, having dropped out after 9th grade, gotten a GED and worked my way through community college then university. I've gone on to have what I consider to be a very successful career and high life satisfaction. And pretty much all of my lifelong friends came from outside school settings. I'm privileged to have gotten to take this path. Just another self-reported data point.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

jojobas 6y ago

I suspect there is a serious bias in that cohort, namely on parents being higher than average education and dedication. I know I couldn't educate my kids to university enrollment standard other than in physics, maths and such. That would cross out half their possibilities in education at least.

iateanapple 6y ago
> I know I couldn't educate my kids to university enrollment standard other than in physics, maths and such. Why not? And why would you have to? I got my kids an English tutor and an Arts tutor once a week to help where I couldn’t. College students are always looking for work so it didn’t cost a lot. These days the amount of subject material on YouTube would allow your kids to self learn most subjects once they have the maturity required. For example for drawing look at what self-taught artists are putting out with just an entry level Wacom tablet. The exceptions would probably be language (speaking) and topics like carpentry which are very practical.
- jojobas 6y ago
  >Why not? And why would you have to? Well if you put it that way, of course hiring a private tutor on every subject is in now way worse than school.
  - iateanapple 6y ago
    > Well if you put it that way, of course hiring a private tutor on every subject is in now way worse than school. I’m not sure what you are expecting? Most subjects I can learn well enough to teach and help out but there are some I don’t have any talent for. I’m saying the cost to cover those gaps is minimal and it is easy and effective. I understand the ~$70/week I paid tutors is unaffordable for some - but it’s also a lot less than the $10k+/year my state spends per kid. And it’s 1:1 or 1:2 tuition instead of 1:30.
caseysoftware 6y ago
> I know I couldn't educate my kids to university enrollment standard Other than the elite schools, I suspect you overestimate the standards and requirements.* If you have a successful white collar career, you are at least a mediocre writer. That may be enough to pass on to your kids and get them into many schools. If you acknowledge your gaps - sounds like you have - even better, now you can fill them with anything from online courses (anywhere from free to expensive), tutoring (expensive), local community college (depends), or even trading favors with other parents with opposite skills gaps (bartering ftw). * I have a homeschooled kid looking at colleges now and the standards are lower than I expected. He passed the minimum requirements years ago.

paledot 6y ago

I unschooled K-2, was in a traditional school 3-5, then did a mix of unschooling and traditional homeschooling until high school (depending on the subject and year). I dropped out of a criminology program in my third year, ran unsuccessfully for public office, and have since been following a successful career as a programmer for 10 years. I credit unschooling with some of the things I like most about myself, but also some of the things I like least. It's my good fortune/dumb luck that one area I fixated on turned out to be in demand and high-paying, because I am constitutionally incapable of giving any focus to subjects that don't interest me. I have a particular depth and breadth of knowledge, albeit one that doesn't always coincide with things that "everyone knows". I certainly am self-reliant and able to teach myself (particularly valuable as a programmer), but I feel none of the motivation that many respondents mentioned. I have mild diagnosed ADHD; whether it's caused by unschooling I can't say. It was also intensely lonely for me, though I'm not sure I fully understood it at the time. My feeling is that I am a better person for the experience, and I wouldn't change it if I could. But I do have a sense that I rolled the dice and won. I'm not certain that I would make the same choice for my children.

kelnos 6y ago
Your conclusion that your unschooling worked out for you more by chance than design got me thinking more generally. While we certainly have some amount of agency in directing our own course in life, many of the things that happen to us that push us into a better or worse situation happen completely by chance. I was traditionally schooled, but, like you, believe strongly that my current success is largely attributable to the luck of my enjoying programming to an immense degree, and falling into it a few years out of college (where I studied hardware because at the time I wanted to design microprocessors, something I wasn't all that good at and ended up not enjoying). Obviously our stories make for a sample size of two, but that suggests to me that any particular method of schooling doesn't matter, as long as there's an environment in childhood and adolescence that facilitates learning.
- paledot 6y ago
  I wouldn't say it doesn't matter, just that there are many paths to the same destination. And yes, anyone who tells you that your decisions are the primary determinant in how your life goes is a liar. 1% inspiration, 9% persperation, 90% dumb luck.

cortesoft 6y ago

> The reason for this correlation is something this survey can’t answer. “Maybe unschooling promotes creativity, or maybe dispositionally creative people or families are more likely to choose unschooling,” Gray says. “It’s probably a little bit of both.” Successful "unschooling" is a pretty privileged experience... they have to have at least one parent who is dedicated to their education and have parents who have the skills to guide their education. There is also a huge selection bias in the survey; they don't call kids who have a bad experience with this "unschoolers"... they call them drop outs.

newacct583 6y ago
Exactly. Not every child requires a formal education. Every child needs access to it. Most kids can't feasibly be homeschooled.
- ido 6y ago
  Unschooling doesn't require homeschooling, there are many alternative (free/democratic) schools - in Berlin (where I live) alone there are about a dozen. It does not require more resources to run than a "normal" school, it's mostly that most parents don't want it for their kids (or are unaware of it).
  - riffraff 6y ago
    I do not understand: what are we talking about? Is "unschooling" in your interpretation just "not following a fix curriculum" ? If that's the case, and you still go to a school while unschooled (which seems oxymoronic), why would there be issues with socialization?
    - gregjor 6y ago
      You should learn what unschooling means. It’s not about curriculum or not attending any classes. I suggest Ivan Illich’s book “Deschooling Society.” As long as your frame of reference is modern formal schools you can only interpret alternatives from that perspective.

seibelj 6y ago

I believe I would have benefited greatly from some sort of alternative schooling environment. I despised school because it was so boring and structured, and also I was (and still am) a night owl that routinely stays up late on weeknights (often until 3am or so). Waking up at 630am to get my ass to school by 730 first bell was atrocious. My senior year of high school I somehow legitimately missed 35 days of school! That’s almost 2 full months! I also had all manner of tricks to come in late and leave early (cut the last class) without formal repercussions. For example, I realized that if I carried my trumpet case I could basically have my run of the school because no school officer suspected a band geek of cutting class. So I would get my trumpet, exit a side door, walk to my car, wait 5 minutes to make sure I wasn’t caught, then drive home! I did this countless times. What I did like was working and partying. I started working in 8th grade reffing soccer, then I worked retail, and since I’ve been 13 years old I’ve never been unemployed for more than a month. When I graduated college I received my diploma on a Friday and started working on Monday. I’ve never had extended time off of work in decades! On the partying side, I discovered alcohol in 9th grade and marijuana in 10th, and also did my fair share of cocaine and research chemicals during my latter high school and college years. I had a blast! And how did I turn out? Fine! Better than fine! I followed my passion into computers and all of the people who told me I would amount to nothing were very much incorrect. In summation, a one-size-fits-all approach to education is completely absurd. The fact that schools have not materially changed in over a century, where everyone sits in a chair and listens to some hack’s opinions, is ridiculous! I can remember a few amazing teachers from my pre-college days and the other 95% of them were totally forgettable. Teachers, their unions, and administrators who refuse to allow any change whatsoever are living in the past. Change happens gradually then all at once. I praise unschooling and any movement that tries to change the horrible, stale, boring education system that makes the majority of students hate learning and associate it with authority, chastisement, and being told they are failures.

asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago

Selection bias is the most powerful force in education and indeed child rearing in general. It's hard to infer anything about the outcomes you might expect for a child in general from the observed outcomes of those who did choose to unschool.

tprice7 6y ago
Sure, but I think this at least demonstrates that unschooling deserves to be within the window of discourse. I've seen many people express the opinion that unschooling is inherently completely insane.
- gregjor 6y ago
  Because they only have their own experience in school to judge from.
gregjor 6y ago
In the US at least you can try homeschooling, and if it doesn’t work for you or your child they can just return to school. In the state I lived in when unschooling three kids, Oregon, public schools allow homeschoolers to participate in sports and other activities. It’s not an all-or-nothing or permanent choice. Kids change schools all the time, which can prove just as disruptive as taking a year to try something different.

alex_young 6y ago

I would have been excluded from this survey if I knew of its existence since I attended (only) 12th grade and graduated. I was unschooled prior to this age, and I consider myself quite successful. Several have pointed to a perception that one must be of financial means to unschool your children, and at least in my case the opposite is true. However, while my parents did not have the encumbrance of wealth, they were both highly educated and valued knowledge and family highly. I consider my experience mostly positive, and credit the notion of facilitating learning when there is active interest as a basic cognitive tool useful in many areas of our society.

Konohamaru 6y ago

It's almost as if human beings have a built-in learning mechanism to recognize language, social norms, general background knowledge and social relationships that has been operative for thousands of years before school even existed. Woooooaah man, that's freaky!

zxexz 6y ago

This article, though not exactly thorough, does have some interesting anecdotes. I think an important take-away here is to realize that there are many non-conventional paths through the educational system, for better or for worse. I took a non-conventional path, and it worked out for me. From the article: "Most of those who went on to college did so without either a high school diploma or general education diploma (GED), and without taking the SAT or ACT. Several credited interviews and portfolios for their acceptance to college, but by far the most common route to a four-year college was to start at a community college (typically begun at age 16, but sometimes even younger). None of the respondents found college academically difficult, but some found the rules and conventions strange and sometimes off-putting. Young people who were used to having to find things out on their own were taken aback, and even in some cases felt insulted, “when professors assumed they had to tell them what they were supposed to learn[...]" This mirrors my experience closely (though I would say I definitely found the structure of university difficult/oppressing). Being a 14 year-old enrolling in community college was initially daunting, but it was one of the most important formative experiences of my life. Looking back at the experience, being surrounded by people from all walks of life was invaluable to me. I personally feel that community college, and numerous other 'real-life' experiences made possible through unschooling, prepared me for adulthood way better than university ever did. One of the largest failings of the conventional school system, IMO, is the lack of socialization between different age groups. YMMV; there is not a single 'magic bullet' for education, and everyone's experiences will be different. A recent post[0] here also generated a lot of discussion about unschooling/homeschooling. As a former 'unschooler', I'd like to plug my comments from that post[1]. I would love to hear from some other unschoolers on HN! I'm forever curious to hear how it worked out for others (email in profile). Side note: When I was quite young, I actually tried out the Sudbury Valley School mentioned in the article. I hated it. I know several people who went there. Some loved it, some hated it. Most are doing well, some much better than others, some not so much. Just like with unschooling, homeschooling, and conventional schooling. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23010079 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23010079 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23014490 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23014490

tbenst 6y ago

I’m not sure this even qualifies as science. Doesn’t even compare to a group of schooled children. There may indeed be positive outcomes associated with unschooling but this gives us little useful information for assessing this.

hatmatrix 6y ago
It's just a collection of anecdotes.

totorovirus 6y ago

I think there is a bias because giving a kid unschooling/home schooling means that the parent's are reasonably interested in educating their kids. Article has a mild opinionated view of success, which values job satisfaction. High portion of cohort has selected self-contained jobs like those which are readily convertible to a free lancer job(i.e. software developer, carpenter, entreprenuer etc). If you measure the success in social dominance and being closer to apex of hierarchy (becoming a policitian, CEO), I think schoolers would have much better performance on this because school also teaches how to take advantage in social relationships, winning a conflict or making allies.

gregjor 6y ago
Parents not taking an interest in the child’s education is the number one reason professional teachers cite for failure in the classroom.

dang 6y ago

If curious see also a bit from 2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9017648 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9017648

atemerev 6y ago

Well I am fine, more or less (was homeschooled in the early 90s, lived in 6 countries since then, worked as a software engineer in finance for most of the time since then, now on track for a biomedical PhD). I am, however, probably the poorest (ex) financial software engineer you ever saw... but I have serious ADHD, so there’s that.

carlita_express 6y ago

On this subject, there is a subreddit ( https://old.reddit.com/r/homeschoolrecovery https://old.reddit.com/r/homeschoolrecovery ) dedicated to those trying to mentally/socially recover from their experiences of home/un-schooling, which can highlight some of the darker experiences, marked by extreme isolation, social anxiety, and depression

hatmatrix 6y ago
This is good to place these biased, overwhelmingly positive results.
iateanapple 6y ago
> which can highlight some of the darker experiences, marked by extreme isolation, social anxiety, and depression There are high rates of social isolation, social anxiety, and depression among school kids. Close to 10% of teens have an anxiety disorder etc. What would be interesting to know is are the home schooled rates significantly higher?
- carlita_express 6y ago
  Anecdotally, I was homeschooled and experienced all of these above, in addition to my ADHD which was ignored by my parents, who didn't have enough experience to diagnose common symptoms.
  - iateanapple 6y ago
    > Anecdotally, I was homeschooled and experienced all of these above Unfortunately they seem part of the “normal” teen experience.
    - carlita_express 6y ago
      Most “public” school teachers have experience recognizing the symptoms of ADHD that parents don’t have.

gregjor 6y ago

Relevant, one of the reasons I decided to homeschool and then go full unschooling with my three children: https://www.cantrip.org/gatto.html https://www.cantrip.org/gatto.html Also “Deschooling Society” by Ivan Illich. You start by examining and questioning what you think you know about school and education. Most of us only have our school experience to go by so we interpret any other path as inferior, subversive, deviant. There’s more than one way to get a useful education. My kids all turned out just fine, two went to college, they have careers, active social lives since very young. I think the biggest mistake parents make is thinking they can shape their children into something. They fail to see their children as individuals, separate from the parents, with their own personalities and desires. Schools by and large follow that model, trying to force children to conform and behave and learn the same things at the same time and rate as everyone else. Montessori comes closest to unschooling, but it’s quite expensive.

agentbellnorm 6y ago

Other than some interesting themes and anecdotes, I’d be very careful to draw any conclusions based on the survey. There are many intuitive reasons why unsuccessfully unschooled people would not answer this survey. A huge concern with unschooling is lack of social development, and the respondents are found through social networks. In the worst case, suicide would prevent someone from answering the survey. The title is misleading because the survey can’t possibly answer the question with a survey like this, and without addressing the issue of equal opportunity, which might be the biggest factor when designing education.

anelson 6y ago
Granted this survey isn't robust enough to be taken as evidence of the superiority of unschooling or even homeschooling generally. It's anecdotal, and if I had to guess I'd say the target audience is parents who have already decided to unschool and want some social validation, or at least parents leaning that way. That said, I think your huge concern is that unschooled kids are at a higher risk of insufficient or delayed social development, and a survey that recruits on social networks will biased against such socially underdeveloped children. And furthermore that those socially underdeveloped children are at a higher risk of suicide than their conventionally-educated peers such that a survey which doesn't count the dead ones is further biased. If that's a correct assessment of your concern then I'd be really interested to know upon what facts or even anecdotal experience it's based. If it's just that the idea of unschooling seems suspect, or that you can't imagine how such a system could produce better outcomes than conventional education, then you're certainly not alone in that position but I would submit that you are misinformed. In my experience the social (to say nothing of intellectual) development of the average American high school graduate was laughably primitive when I was that age 20 years ago, and nothing I've seen since makes me think it's gotten any better. As for suicide risk I find it hard to believe that an educational style that presumes a higher than average degree of parental involvement and an almost certain lack of bullying and abuse in school leads to a higher propensity to suicide. In fact I would confidently wager that, were such data available, it would show the exact opposite.
- agentbellnorm 6y ago

jnwatson 6y ago

The problem with the term “unschooled” is that it implies hands-off teaching. It isn’t that. It is guided, self-directed learning. Couple this with the very real problem of neglected home schoolers, it is quite a problematic word. One value of the public school system is that it does meet some minimum amount of care, and it does allow home problems to be mitigated. At least kids get 1-2 meals a day at school, which some “home schooled” kids don’t get.

dillonmckay 6y ago
So daycare, not education?

jv22222 6y ago

I was in boarding school from the age of 9-15 in the UK. For me, it was an absolutely horrific experience. I was physically and emotionally abused and bullied for the entire time I was there due to being very obviously sensitive and an easy target. I did not do well at academics of any kind because I was mainly dealing with the emotional effects and also just didn't "get" it. My only pass was in art, which I didn't really like and was not very good at everything else was a fail. I was pretty sure that I was stupid and was not academic at all. They had a computer lab with BBC Model B and I tried some basic coding and I was not interested in it. I left school at 15 and then travelled around Europe and came back to London where I spent a few years working high street jobs (shoe shop sales, etc). Then, when I was 18 a friend of mine got me a job as a courier at a firm of architects (1987). They had Macs and I became interested because I had a go and I seemed to understand how to use them. I made a few newsletters for the company in Quark Express. Feeling kind of cocky I BS'd my way into a Tech Support position at an Apple store in London. After a year working there I was enjoying helping customers. I even made a few experiments in Hyper Card and realized I quite liked computers. A few years later "the internet" happened and I wanted to make a "chat" site, so I learned "C" because I was obsessed that I needed to learn "the absolute fastest language" to write a cgi script. (the irony, the html cgi chat script executed instantaneously but took aaaages to get around the internet and down peoples modems) Anyway, I kept coding, moved to perl, then php, then javascript, then mobile and now I love all things computers. Long story short, I was able to have a career in spite of school not because of it. For me, school was the worst experience of my life. When I look back on it I see a dark time in a sort of psychological prison that lasted for years. I find it hard to think of school in a positive light and that might be why one of my roles is being CTO of a company that's main goal is to modernize education. For me, I only started to be inquisitive and learn "anything" after I had been out of the school environment for 3 years. I no longer think I am stupid or unable to do anything academic. I plan on revisiting Math one day when I have gotten all this entrepreneurial stuff out of my system.

gregjor 6y ago

Every time the subject of homeschooling or unschooling comes up in HN the same tired arguments get trotted out: Kids will suffer socially, most parents aren't qualified to teach. There's some irony in the usually libertarian-learning HN audience defending schools, which are a system designed to deprive individuals (children) of their freedom and to limit their opportunities. These arguments are not supported by evidence or history. They are based on misconceptions about homeschooling/unschooling, and a limited frame of reference because most of us went to school and have no experience with alternatives. Unschooling does not mean locking kids up at home, depriving them of friends or opportunities to learn. It means letting children follow their own interests, at their own pace, and allowing them to participate in the larger world rather than getting locked up for 7 or 8 hours a day in a rigid and coercive environment where critical thinking and discovery are actively discouraged. It means supporting and encouraging education tailored for the child rather than forcing them into 12 years of government-mandated curriculum, standardized tests, strict regimentation, surveillance, and an often toxic environment that resembles jail more than living in the real world as productive adults. These worries strike me as similar to the argument that people can't live moral lives without religion. We know that simply isn't true. I suspect many more people on HN grew up morally without religion than grew up educated and socialized without school, so maybe some of the critics can step back a bit and examine their assumptions, and ignorance of unschooling, before posting the usual objections.

anelson 6y ago
^ This! In all my travels I've only met a handful of people who were not at least skeptical or downright disparaging of home schooling, at least until they learned about my background and either politeness or exposure to contrary evidence required backtracking. I often encounter a kind of reverence toward teachers in particular and our educational establishment in general which is woefully misplaced. The structure the American education system (and maybe in other countries although I only went to school in the US) is in direct opposition to the formation of qualities like curiosity, independence, auto-didactic inquiry, and skepticism that are as vital today as literacy was a century ago. I was lucky to be raised by parents who had no respect for the establishment and chose to live in a state that did not force them to educate their children in accordance with government mandates. As a result they were free to bring us up in the way that they hoped was best for each of us. For me that ended up being unschooling.

anelson 6y ago

During my childhood I experienced the full spectrum of American education systems, including /laissez faire/ unschooling, homeschooling with a structured curriculum, a one-room country schoolhouse, urban public schools, and even a Catholic private school. I was fortunate that my parents, particularly my father, were willing to try multiple approaches to learning based on what was and wasn't working. I hated almost every moment of my public school education, and private school was only slightly better. My urban public school was little better than a gladiator academy, and even in private school the curriculum was not challenging or engaging in any way. I was an awkward child and was frequently bullied (in fairness this did teach me the importance of being willing to meet violence with violence, a lesson which fortunately I've not needed to apply since my school days). I would find every opportunity to get out of school and work on my own self-edification projects; vaguely defined "sick days" were my stock in trade. My last year of "normal" education was the 6th grade, in a public school in a small midwestern town (population: ~750). Having explored the gamut of educational styles it was clear that I learned best on my own. I spent a lot of time exploring different subjects based on what caught my interest. By the time I was 13 I had already decided I wanted to go into EE. I saved my meager allowance and over time managed to procure the entire library of Forrest M. Mims' "Engineer's mini notebooks", and could reproduce the schematics in each one practically from memory. I was already looking at how I could get into the field without waiting until I was 18 and could go to college, but then I discovered digital circuits... After extensive lobbying on my part my parents finally bought a computer in 1994 (a Gateway 2000 486 DX2 66Mhz). From then on I've been immersed in computing, at times to an obsessive degree. If you'd asked my father in 1995 if unschooling me had been a mistake, he might have shared his concerns that my humanity was slipping away as I spent every waking moment on that "damn machine". He couldn't have known at the time that I was laying the foundation for an incredibly satisfying career as a software engineer. I always assumed I'd get around to a GED and then a college degree, because it was taken as an article of faith in my family that one must, if nothing else, graduate with at lease a bachelor's degree in something. But it never happened. I started community college like many unschoolers do as a way to get around age and testing requirements in four year schools, but by then I was already working as a software engineer and I didn't see the point in taking on debt and spending a few years in a CS curriculum, so I dropped out and never looked back. I've seen some other comments here talk about the "socialization" question. My mother was very worried about this also. As others have mentioned, in the end I was better socialized than my age peers, because I had more meaningful interactions with people outside my age cohort. My coworkers, boss, in some cases even their children were all older than me, and that taught me how to act both professionally and in informal settings like happy hours and parties. On the topic of privilege, I certainly count myself privileged to have been raised by two involved parents who had the insight to let me develop outside the accepted bounds of our society. However my family were very poor for the first ten years of my life, and barely middle class during my teens. One of my parents had a serious substance abuse problem which contributed to our poverty. Whatever aspect of my background and upbringing gave me an advantage in life, it was definitely not socio-economic. Who knows if my experience reflects the superiority of one system over another, or if I would have turned out this way anyway, or some complex non-linear space in between. The key takeaway I think is that education is in no way a solved problem, and the system we have now (particularly in the US) is in no way the apotheosis of pedagogy. Just like we vigorously debate the merits of programming languages, tech stacks, type sytems, methodologies, business models, etc here on HN, how we educate ourselves and our children is at least as much of an unsolved problem. Whether or not unschooling is a good fit for a particular child or their particular parents, the movement has nonetheless done us all a great service by proving convincingly that it's OK to question the education orthodoxy, that there are is no priestly caste of teachers who possess the wisdom of the pedagogical gods. In the early 80s this was by no means apparent, and my parents took a lot of shit from a lot of people for their approach. Now my sister is free to unschool her four kids with little to no hassle from the state.

bradgranath 6y ago

My parents homeschooled me from age 4 to 17. I wish they hadn't. They didn't know what they were doing and it has caused me no end of problems. Public school is not fire and forget, but at least there is SOME oversight (for white kids anyway). My parents didn't just get away with their ineptitude, but were encouraged by WA state to continue isolating me in the name of "choice". This not as simple as "take the kid out of school and they will obviously turn into a better person because school is such a bad place". Learning to get along with your peers and interacting with authority figures is not something you can pick up by reading about it. I should know.

actfrench 6y ago

Unschooling is a very loosely defined concept. I've seen a spectrum of unschooling ranging from 1-2 hours a day with a parent/teacher of formal instruction coupled with self-directed learning and socialization to completely allowing children to do what they want whenever. A lot of it depends on the child (how self-directed they are) and the ways that the family is able to support their learning through the learning environment (often known as the child's third teacher.) Does the parent engage the children in learning all the time, engaging with them when they ask why? And guiding them to their own answers? That makes a big impact. Often unschoolers tend to be very autonomous. If they do transfer from being unschooled to schooled, teachers love them because they are self-motivated and curious. There's a lot of great books on self-directed education, though this is someone different than unschooling as a concept. I run an organization that supports families learning from home and we've reviewed a couple resources related to unschooling and homeschooling that might be helpful. The Alliance for Self-Directed Education has great research and information on unschooling: https://www.modulo.app/self-directed-education/asde https://www.modulo.app/self-directed-education/asde Free to Learn is possibly the most important book on unschooling and how kids turn out https://www.modulo.app/self-directed-education/freetolearn https://www.modulo.app/self-directed-education/freetolearn Class Dismissed gives a taste of what happens when you give kids a period of deschooling https://www.modulo.app/self-directed-education/classdismissed https://www.modulo.app/self-directed-education/classdismisse... I think what's most important to remember is that different approaches work better for different kids and that unschooling means different things to different people. Some equate unschooling with secular homeschooling. Others see it as self-directed education. Some view homeschooling as a more inclusive approach to education that reinvents the school schedule, so children are learning and socializing in a more organic way than a 9-3 school schedule.

actfrench 6y ago

Famous unschoolers https://www.unschooling.com/t/famous-unschoolers/296 https://www.unschooling.com/t/famous-unschoolers/296