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I was homeschooled until the age of around 10, and then my family adopted a new approach called "lifestyle of learning", which is just another way of saying "un

• hereme888 6y ago
  That's impressive, and sounds like what I was thinking for my future children. I just have no idea where to start. Got any resources for me to learn how to do these things for my children?
  • xtagon 6y ago
    My story is similar to that of the parent comment and I would say the most important thing is to be supportive of the activities and interests that your future children are driven towards. If they're into computers, let them tinker with computers. If they like to take things apart, give them your old electrical components and teach them about electrical safety and soldering. If they like making things, show them some cool DIY videos on YouTube. Whatever it is, if they're into it and you support them, then all that time spent is practice doing something they love, regardless of whether or not it ends up being a career.
    • hereme888 6y ago
      Thanks. May I ask what its like for job interviews?
      • lostcolony 6y ago
        What do you mean? If you mean for entry level service level stuff, like high schoolers would take, I can't speak to it (I couldn't really find anything when I looked, but I think that was attributable to the general difficulty of finding a first job. No one asked me what high school I was attending/had attended), but for post-college, no one ever asked me about high school. As to getting into college, I had to take the SATs, same as everyone. I did better than most. I started at community college (which I believe everyone should do, both because financially it makes sense, and because it helps acclimate you to the realities involved. For home/unschoolers, having deadlines and having to learn to 'work the system' are both necessary), then went to university. Graduated highest honors.
        • hereme888 6y ago
          Ok, I was assuming the entire education was self-taught/unschooled. But in this case it was unschooled until the person chose to go to traditional college and get a certifiable degree. I was wondering about someone who went the whole way without traditional schooling.
          • lostcolony 6y ago
            Ah, can't speak to that. Certainly, there are fields you can not work in without a degree, certification, or licensing, even if self-taught. But there are also plenty you can enter with only the knowledge you've learned on your own. Software is a good one; there are plenty of places that will hire a developer even without a degree.
      • xtagon 6y ago
        Nerve-wracking because homeschooling teaches you nothing about career readiness without experience, but that's basically true whether or not you got to spend most of your childhood experimenting with things you actually end up enjoying. For me part of it was luck (lucky that someone took a chance on me and I grew into it from there), but looking back I think putting yourself into a position where you get to practice doing something you're actually passionate about will end up bleeding through into a natural progression/networking. For example, if programming is your hobby before it's your job, by the time you're wanting to interview for a job you will probably already be in some kind of club/group, local makerspace, have friends online who are into game mods, etc. to help get your foot in the door and that's all before you're even college-aged.
• Goronmon 6y ago
  What about careers other than software development though? I'm definitely not criticizing your choices at all, but its interesting to me that both your brother and yourself ended up doing software development. Do you feel you would have a different option of "unschooling" if you had tried to be successful in a different career path?
  • throwawaygh 6y ago
    Or even software in the next few years/decades when regulations catch up and having a 16 year old do contract work becomes too large a liability.
  • gamechangr 6y ago
    I was home schooled 1-6th grade, then went to Junior High. I was WAYYYYYY ahead. I think most home school kids are at least a grade ahead.
• joncp 6y ago
  It sounds like you and your brother are highly intelligent and maybe didn't really need school to absorb the stuff you needed. I wonder how that approach would work with a more average child.
  • ramraj07 6y ago
    Intelligence is not hereditary for the most part, and there's a huge environmental component to it. Clearly this household had the right mix of freedom and strictness to encourage development of creative intelligent thinking. Probably rubs off of adults with same attitudes. Of course it's not 100% I'm pretty sure if OP had more siblings one of them would be bound to be dumb as a rock.
    • zepto 6y ago
      Your comment seems at odds with the current research: “the most recent studies showing heritability for IQ as high as 80%.” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ
      • bawolff 6y ago
        But is IQ (beyond a minimum level) really correlated with the type of success being discussed here?
        • radu_floricica 6y ago
          Both brothers are software engineers, so I'd say IQ is relevant for this particular discussion thread. Whether it's relevant for the main topic... that's an interesting question. Very much so. But I don't dare speculate, and I don't have data.
      • TameAntelope 6y ago
        He might be of the opinion that IQ != intelligence, or that IQ is a bad measurement of intelligence.
• ohazi 6y ago
  I can see homeschooling being potentially more interesting/engaging for a certain kind of student after the basics are out of the way, but this: > He didn't even learn how to read until he was around 10. to me, is fucking terrifying. All of the people I know who did better on their own than in a classroom were able to do so because they could gobble up half a library in a weekend. I think you need to be able to read abnormally well for this unschooling concept to work as intended, and so good reading skills is one of the few things that I absolutely would not compromise on.
  • abfan1127 6y ago
    having met a ton of fully grown adults who have offspring, near as I can tell, most people are functionally illiterate. While they probably can read, most choose not to read anything longer than a tweet. I coach in a local sports league. I send an email at the beginning of each season with nice bulleted sections about schedules, uniforms, etc. After I send that email, I spend the next week answering questions to responses to replies from that email. All answers are in that email they are responding to. TLDR - just because someone can read, doesn't mean they will, and my experience is that they won't.
    • ohazi 6y ago
      A hurried parent not bothering to read a syllabus is not equivalent to a curious kid blitzing through every single Wikipedia article about dinosaurs. Both require literacy, but one of these things is fun, while the other is a chore.
      • abfan1127 6y ago
        the OP inferred that not reading until 10 was suboptimal. I argue that effectively, most people don't read in adulthood. So, if he's frightened by a 10yo not reading, he's in for a rude awakening when he gets to interface with adults. Perhaps they are unrelated. perhaps I drew a wrong conclusion. But perhaps they aren't hurried, they are just lazy.
        • 6y ago
• mdorazio 6y ago
  Note that missing from your assessment here is an honest analysis of the alternative. I.e. where would you and your brother have ended up if you had stayed in school and gone the traditional college path? You say you're making $150k now as a software engineer, but there's a damn good chance if you had stayed in school and gotten a CS degree in college you would be making a lot more than that now (and earlier in your career as well). As others have mentioned, you also have to consider how few career paths offer the kind of "no formal training" entry bar that programming does. What if your brother had hated computers and realized at age 22 that he wanted to be a doctor? He'd be years behind his peers.
  • Foober223 6y ago
    > honest analysis An honest comparison can't be made unless he gives up some details of what he's made throughout his life, and his geographic location for fair salary comparisons. But... from a glance his outcome blows most college grads out of the water. Even compared to comp sci grads with good outcomes. He was earning income at age 13 and full time income at age 16. The traditional school/college route will have you start work at maybe age 23. With debt. For most geographic areas in the US, 150k is a serious salary, the apex. It would be hard to increase with paper/certs/degrees. Geography change may be the only reliable way to bump it, but then you'd have to subtract the increased housing costs (million dollar shacks) to compare.
    • garden_hermit 6y ago
      The counterfactual is still useful to think about, because what works for the poster may not work for the modal person. There is a big self-selection problem—if the poster wasn't a successful software engineer, we wouldn't be hearing about their life on an HN post. We are also engaging with their comment, because they are exceptionl and have an interesting life story—who read this article but didn't comment? And whose comments were ignored because their story was less interesting? This person is clearly successful, but the question is whether their unique schooling experience was causal to their success, and we honestly have no idea. This person may have been equally, or maybe even more successful had they did typical schooling and college. Or maybe not. We also don't know if this person's experience translates to other children—does everyone benefit? Or are there hundreds of less successful unschooled children for every one success?
• sharadov 6y ago
  I've noticed this with my son who has an ADHD diagnosis. Pre-covid I constantly heard from school, that he was not paying attention, getting distracted. But since Covid, his output has been phenomenal - his reading/math has improved, he does really well one on one, we have a nanny working with him,. And I've never seen him happier. I know homeschool would benefit him immensely in the long run from an intellectual standpoint, but am afraid that he will miss out on all the social aspects.
  • eloff 6y ago
    Get him into sports or other after school group activities. Much healthier social environment than school anyway. Lookup two sigma problem. Kids with a 1 on 1 tutor do two standard deviations better than school. That's an insane advantage if you can find a way to make it work.
    • sharadov 6y ago
      He's doing soccer and parkour lessons. On top of that, we end up going to the park pretty much every day and play tennis/soccer. He loves his sports, and is very athletic in general.
  • waterhouse 6y ago
    > am afraid that he will miss out on all the social aspects. Consider carefully and closely what those social aspects are. Check that your perception matches reality. For example, in the classroom, 90+% of the time students are supposed to be quiet, or to interact with the teacher (usually answering a question—in front of, but not with, the other students). Most of the social part of school is interacting with friends at recess and lunch, and sports and non-class activities. Furthermore, the parts of school that are social are not necessarily good: for some people, they consist of being rejected or even bullied, and making them suffer that for years may lead to socially avoidant habits, anxiety, or other long-term issues. As eloff suggests, sports and other activities are a good way to get good socialization. Since the activity is voluntary, all the kids can be expected to share at least one interest with your kid. Also, if your kid meets some people he likes, then what are called "play dates" (at young ages) or "hanging out" (at older ages) can lead to deep, long-term friendships. I left high school at the end of tenth grade, but continued going to the math club and attending an after-school math contest class, and hanging around in the math department's common room with others who had a free period before that class. The school was happy to allow it because I was good at the contests, and it made the school look better to let me participate. I got about as much socialization from that as I did when actually attending school, and I was happy with that.
• aaron695 6y ago
  Assuming you a male, along with your brother, looking at IQ graphs there would be equivalent males on the dumb side, who arguably would be in prison right now if they did what you did. Also without you at a normal school some students might be worse off. Not your problem of course, but it is at a societal level.
• walshemj 6y ago
  Going to be hard in the current time to get through the gate keepers who are looking for a small number of ivy league universities. Your going to be screened out by a liberal arts graduate with a 2:2 in HR
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• rvba 6y ago
  In my opinion the conclusion is much different: "Unschooling" works as long as you can find a job in IT. What is much harder now due to tons of people doing those bootcamps.
  • throwawaygh 6y ago
    Exactly. Careers with a low barrier to entry will eventually settle on low wages. Despite what many believe, programming has a quite low barrier to entry. Supply was artificially suppressed because college was the only place someone would teach you to program, so programmers either had college degrees or were self-starters (comparatively rare). But the trade schools are finally catching up to demand. The era of 160k dev jobs without very advanced/complementary skills/knowledge are quickly coming to an end.
• Digital28 6y ago
  This sounds almost identical to how I was raised, even down to the age of transitioning between the two styles, and I was doing contract web development work by 13, too, before cramming for the GED and ranking 99th percentile in science. I'm now working in AI with a startup of my own. I honestly can't say I've ever met (or even heard about) anyone with such a similar story -- care to chat sometime?
  • sjg007 6y ago
    I went to public school and was fixing computers for $$ at age 12, doing web dev at 16 and running a company installing Ethernet cards in college students computers at 18. That was all outside of school.
• lazyasciiart 6y ago
  I'm not sure what you're describing by "a base of traditional education", because my definition would include learning to read pretty early. Do you mean taking the GED?
• lopmotr 6y ago
  I'd say for most students, the vast majority of time they spend in school, they're not learning anything. The content of curriculums are usually quite short and can be crammed in a few weeks by a dedicated and intelligent enough student. For students that need more time, they often disengage anyway and all the time in the world won't help them learn using the same techniques. I used to be a math teacher, and when a student failed the final exam, I'd spend a few hours one on one, then they could take another exam. The students that pissed around all term and bombed the first attempt often quickly picked up most of it in the 1-1 sessions and passed the 2nd attempt. I jokingly suggested to my boss that maybe we should scrap classes and just divide up my hours on 1-1 sessions with every student for greater efficiency.
  • ta1234567890 6y ago
    > scrap classes and just divide up my hours on 1-1 sessions with every student for greater efficiency. If done right, that could be one of the best and biggest revolutions in education. It would be amazing if there was a whole school/system doing it.
    • lopmotr 6y ago
      I think we know how to solve all education problems technically. It's just that the solutions are impractical. Sometimes personalized (expensive management) or require a smart and quick thinking teacher which doesn't scale well, or require hard work doing preparation which teachers don't have the time, motivation, or skill to do, or they are simply effective and leave the kids with nowhere to go while their parents are at work.
• Fumtumi 6y ago
  Did you ever think about where you could be today if you would have had 'normal' education? I read your text and i would think you made it despite being home schooled and not because of it. I assuming this because i was going to school but lazy and if i could go back, i would do things differently. You don't even know what you missed and you don't even know where you could be today; And while it did work for you well, it does sound that your brother struggled more .