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> The reason for this correlation is something this survey can’t answer. “Maybe unschooling promotes creativity, or maybe dispositionally creative people or fam

> 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.
      - ido 6y ago
        Correct. Also that was partially my point that there is no problem with socialization in free schools as kids attend with other kids doing the same.
    - ido 6y ago
      It is not about my interpretation. Please search the web for unschooling (you can e.g. read the wikipedia article[0]) and you will very quickly learn what is meant by that & why there is no oxymoron. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unschooling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unschooling
      - riffraff 6y ago
        I did that before posting, but the wikipedia page says > unschooling is often considered a subset of homeschooling And further down > Unschooling is a form of home education, which is the education of children at home rather than in a school. which is why I asked what your interpretation of it is.
        ido 6y ago
        Yeah sorry I guess that article is a bit confused - the first sentence is good IMO: an informal learning that advocates learner-chosen activities as a primary means for learning. The salient point is that kids want to learn on their own & you should try to see what interests them and direct them to productive ways to learn more/support them instead of selecting the subjects for them. The free schools I know do not have a fixed curriculum but provide various classes that the kids can elect from. The teachers are also open to suggestions and ask the kids what they want to learn/do. They have no grades & all kids (generally grades 1 to 6) are together in mixed-aged groups. There are also far fewer kids per adult but that may just be a function of these being private schools. So there is no requirement to do that at home but I guess that is the most common form in the Anglophone countries (in German speaking ones it's the other way around).
- gregjor 6y ago
  Not supported by numerous studies. Not supported by thousands of years of history either.
  - riffraff 6y ago
    for thousands of years the majority of people didn't know how to read, I am not sure that's an argument for kids not needing access to schools.
    - gregjor 6y ago
      For most of human history people either had nothing to read, or they didn’t need to read to grow into productive adults. Instead they would listen to stories and learn skills from parents and other adults in their community. I was refuting the claim that formal schooling is necessary to get an education. I would agree that reading is a fundamental skill in modern society. Children can learn to read young and very quickly, with just a little help. I could read books at 4 (I was not unschooled or homeschooled, but I wanted to read). My kids learned to read before 5 and it wasn’t that hard to teach them. We kept lots of books on all kinds of subjects in the house and if our kids wanted to learn more about something we got more books or took them to the library. If they got very interested we found mentors, tutors, other kids (of all ages) with the same interest.
      - newacct583 6y ago
        > I was refuting the claim that formal schooling is necessary to get an education. Which was a claim that no one made.
  - newacct583 6y ago
    Which studies are you referring to that argue for the abolition of public education? Again, clearly homeschooling can work. Equally clearly it can't work for everyone. FWIW: how were literacy rates during those thousands of years where peasants were responsible for schooling their own kids? And symmetrically: which culture was it where the members of the literate aristocracy schooled their own children instead of using tutors/monasteries/etc...? That argument is just silly on its face.
beer_cub 6y ago
Never heard of this Unschool term, but I was certainly Unschooled for my entire life until 18 when I went to community college and spent 4 years learning how to be a person around other people. I ended up getting a MA in the humanities, but my education led me to believe that my Unschooling as we're calling it now, was neglect. I suffered a great deal, and have tried to discourage homeschooling to any of my friends now that I'm in my 30s.
- nostrebored 6y ago
  Unschooling doesn't imply a lack of involvement but rather a lack of structured teaching. Unschooled adults I've met all had very busy social lives as children.
  - napoleond 6y ago
    Your comment seems like a variation of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman. The parent commenter says "I personally experienced X and it was not great for me" and then you say "what you experienced could not have been X, because X is always great for people."
    - Thorrez 6y ago
      I don't think nostrebored said beer_cub's experience could not have been unschooling. nostrebored instead said that some unschooling is different than beer_cub's experience, and gave the anecdote that everyone nostrebored met had a different experience than beer_cub.
    - kelnos 6y ago
      I don't think this holds true here. If parents neglect a child, they're not going to do well, full stop. "Neglect" is what the parent specifically called his experience. Unschooling cannot be successful in an environment where the parent is neglecting the child; the article even addresses this with three examples from their study where the parents quickly failed in their task to guide their child's education, self-directed or not.
totorovirus 6y ago
I agree with this. It should have measured the correlation between parents' degree of formal education, attitude to raising their kids.
jimmygrapes 6y ago
I've never commented before so I had to make an account for this. Hopefully it doesn't get flagged, but that's the risk of lurking I guess. The rest of this post is anecdotal and perhaps fairly unusual, so forgive the lack of citations. I'm 1995 I moved from Canada to the United States. Up until then I had been in the public school system since kindergarten. After 1995, I was "unschooled" from late 1995 to 2001, and I have to take exception to your idea that it is a privileged experience. I'll spare you the details but the summary is that my mom was more worried about the physical and mental abuse I encountered in public school (U.S. 5th grade, around 10 years old average and the first year of "middle school") at the hands of my supposed peers, primarily based on physical appearance and "foreign" + "new kid" status. So after this very brief stint in American public school I was told by my mom that I would be doing "homeschooling" instead of getting my face rearranged for being white (whoops, spoiler). Interesting fact: my mom had no idea how to homeschool. We had food stamps, sometimes, but usually it was just living off of combinations of flour, water, and salt. She became "religious" in order to get food boxes and a hope of networking to get work. We lived in rooms most of you would consider closets. Her version of "unschooling" was to tell me that I need to learn math, science, history, and English, that way I could get a job when I grow up. She walked with me to the nearest library, and got me a library card, and told me (paraphrased due to memory): "read until you figure out what to do" her tone implying that I should learn the topics she mentioned. I did. I also worked; I didn't have a computer at home (yet) but I knew how to use VCRs to record cable, and I could move furniture (even as a 10-11 year old), so my mom's church network got me a few dollars a week to save for myself. I saved up and bought a Commodore 64 from Goodwill after a big fight about "useless shit." I taught myself BASIC, at first from a library book that showed how to draw Christmas trees and math problems (original leetcode I guess), then from the help files. When I wasn't doing that, I was reading science fiction. Absolutely no educational material. My mom soon made enough to get a 386 Acer PC on credit, and I learned QBASIC with its infinitely more helpful help system. The computer had a modem and by late 1995 my mom had learned about ISPs from her friends at church. She called the owner of the local ISP and essentially traded me for internet access; I would go to their "office" (a repurposed shipping container) to answer tech support emails, and at home we could dial in for free. This is where "unschooling" truly began. I had Microsoft Encarta that came with the PC, I had a book called Internet For Dummies, and I had virtually unlimited access to information. I also ate once every 2 days, and it was rice and shitty meat more often than not. I won't say where I am today, but I will say that it all worked out for the both of us. Hope that helps someone.

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.
    - ido 6y ago
      Correct. Also that was partially my point that there is no problem with socialization in free schools as kids attend with other kids doing the same.
  - ido 6y ago
    It is not about my interpretation. Please search the web for unschooling (you can e.g. read the wikipedia article[0]) and you will very quickly learn what is meant by that & why there is no oxymoron. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unschooling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unschooling
    - riffraff 6y ago
      I did that before posting, but the wikipedia page says > unschooling is often considered a subset of homeschooling And further down > Unschooling is a form of home education, which is the education of children at home rather than in a school. which is why I asked what your interpretation of it is.
      - ido 6y ago
        Yeah sorry I guess that article is a bit confused - the first sentence is good IMO: an informal learning that advocates learner-chosen activities as a primary means for learning. The salient point is that kids want to learn on their own & you should try to see what interests them and direct them to productive ways to learn more/support them instead of selecting the subjects for them. The free schools I know do not have a fixed curriculum but provide various classes that the kids can elect from. The teachers are also open to suggestions and ask the kids what they want to learn/do. They have no grades & all kids (generally grades 1 to 6) are together in mixed-aged groups. There are also far fewer kids per adult but that may just be a function of these being private schools. So there is no requirement to do that at home but I guess that is the most common form in the Anglophone countries (in German speaking ones it's the other way around).
gregjor 6y ago
Not supported by numerous studies. Not supported by thousands of years of history either.
- riffraff 6y ago
  for thousands of years the majority of people didn't know how to read, I am not sure that's an argument for kids not needing access to schools.
  - gregjor 6y ago
    For most of human history people either had nothing to read, or they didn’t need to read to grow into productive adults. Instead they would listen to stories and learn skills from parents and other adults in their community. I was refuting the claim that formal schooling is necessary to get an education. I would agree that reading is a fundamental skill in modern society. Children can learn to read young and very quickly, with just a little help. I could read books at 4 (I was not unschooled or homeschooled, but I wanted to read). My kids learned to read before 5 and it wasn’t that hard to teach them. We kept lots of books on all kinds of subjects in the house and if our kids wanted to learn more about something we got more books or took them to the library. If they got very interested we found mentors, tutors, other kids (of all ages) with the same interest.
    - newacct583 6y ago
      > I was refuting the claim that formal schooling is necessary to get an education. Which was a claim that no one made.
- newacct583 6y ago
  Which studies are you referring to that argue for the abolition of public education? Again, clearly homeschooling can work. Equally clearly it can't work for everyone. FWIW: how were literacy rates during those thousands of years where peasants were responsible for schooling their own kids? And symmetrically: which culture was it where the members of the literate aristocracy schooled their own children instead of using tutors/monasteries/etc...? That argument is just silly on its face.

beer_cub 6y ago

Never heard of this Unschool term, but I was certainly Unschooled for my entire life until 18 when I went to community college and spent 4 years learning how to be a person around other people. I ended up getting a MA in the humanities, but my education led me to believe that my Unschooling as we're calling it now, was neglect. I suffered a great deal, and have tried to discourage homeschooling to any of my friends now that I'm in my 30s.

nostrebored 6y ago
Unschooling doesn't imply a lack of involvement but rather a lack of structured teaching. Unschooled adults I've met all had very busy social lives as children.
- napoleond 6y ago
  Your comment seems like a variation of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman. The parent commenter says "I personally experienced X and it was not great for me" and then you say "what you experienced could not have been X, because X is always great for people."
  - Thorrez 6y ago
    I don't think nostrebored said beer_cub's experience could not have been unschooling. nostrebored instead said that some unschooling is different than beer_cub's experience, and gave the anecdote that everyone nostrebored met had a different experience than beer_cub.
  - kelnos 6y ago
    I don't think this holds true here. If parents neglect a child, they're not going to do well, full stop. "Neglect" is what the parent specifically called his experience. Unschooling cannot be successful in an environment where the parent is neglecting the child; the article even addresses this with three examples from their study where the parents quickly failed in their task to guide their child's education, self-directed or not.

totorovirus 6y ago

I agree with this. It should have measured the correlation between parents' degree of formal education, attitude to raising their kids.

jimmygrapes 6y ago

I've never commented before so I had to make an account for this. Hopefully it doesn't get flagged, but that's the risk of lurking I guess. The rest of this post is anecdotal and perhaps fairly unusual, so forgive the lack of citations. I'm 1995 I moved from Canada to the United States. Up until then I had been in the public school system since kindergarten. After 1995, I was "unschooled" from late 1995 to 2001, and I have to take exception to your idea that it is a privileged experience. I'll spare you the details but the summary is that my mom was more worried about the physical and mental abuse I encountered in public school (U.S. 5th grade, around 10 years old average and the first year of "middle school") at the hands of my supposed peers, primarily based on physical appearance and "foreign" + "new kid" status. So after this very brief stint in American public school I was told by my mom that I would be doing "homeschooling" instead of getting my face rearranged for being white (whoops, spoiler). Interesting fact: my mom had no idea how to homeschool. We had food stamps, sometimes, but usually it was just living off of combinations of flour, water, and salt. She became "religious" in order to get food boxes and a hope of networking to get work. We lived in rooms most of you would consider closets. Her version of "unschooling" was to tell me that I need to learn math, science, history, and English, that way I could get a job when I grow up. She walked with me to the nearest library, and got me a library card, and told me (paraphrased due to memory): "read until you figure out what to do" her tone implying that I should learn the topics she mentioned. I did. I also worked; I didn't have a computer at home (yet) but I knew how to use VCRs to record cable, and I could move furniture (even as a 10-11 year old), so my mom's church network got me a few dollars a week to save for myself. I saved up and bought a Commodore 64 from Goodwill after a big fight about "useless shit." I taught myself BASIC, at first from a library book that showed how to draw Christmas trees and math problems (original leetcode I guess), then from the help files. When I wasn't doing that, I was reading science fiction. Absolutely no educational material. My mom soon made enough to get a 386 Acer PC on credit, and I learned QBASIC with its infinitely more helpful help system. The computer had a modem and by late 1995 my mom had learned about ISPs from her friends at church. She called the owner of the local ISP and essentially traded me for internet access; I would go to their "office" (a repurposed shipping container) to answer tech support emails, and at home we could dial in for free. This is where "unschooling" truly began. I had Microsoft Encarta that came with the PC, I had a book called Internet For Dummies, and I had virtually unlimited access to information. I also ate once every 2 days, and it was rice and shitty meat more often than not. I won't say where I am today, but I will say that it all worked out for the both of us. Hope that helps someone.