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My impression has always been that "unschooling" is mostly an indicator of wealth, and so it'll correlate well with future success. If both parents have to wor

My impression has always been that "unschooling" is mostly an indicator of wealth, and so it'll correlate well with future success. If both parents have to work a regular day job, there's nobody at home to teach the kids so unschooling is not possible. And if only one parent stays at home, they will also yearn for some free time and push for getting the kids signed up for school. The only situation where I can imagine the parents being enthusiastic about unschooling is if they are independently wealthy and can afford to spend lots of time with their kids, when other people would have to work. And obviously, plenty of personalized attention from the parents will make the kids learn a lot faster than your typical 1 teacher 30 students class. Plus, once you assume that all unschooling parents are much wealthier than regular people, it kind of makes sense that they will have very different opinions about life in general, due to their very different experience of it. Regular folks will go to a public playground and complain about the dog shit there. Rich folks will just buy a playground for their backyard and hire a gardener to keep it tidy. To outsiders, that wealth discrepancy would then look like a religion, because all of the unschoolers have a shared untypical worldview.

whimsicalism 6y ago
The NYT article claims that 'the psychologists Peter Gray and Gina Riley published a 2013 survey of about 230 unschooling families, they found “a wide range in terms of socioeconomic strata.”'. I followed the link and the source is... flimsy at best. The lack of numbers here is conspicuous, especially when combined with the fact that most of the respondents were stay-at-home moms, not something super common among the American working-class. I do not think the rise of this phenomenon is unrelated to the increasing number of affluent, young white parents raising their children in urban cores while remaining afraid of the school system.
watwut 6y ago
I think it is not so much money, but more whether mom is content being stay at home mom being completely fully dedicated to family, being content being dependent on husband and without being independent source of income. That is situation that can get you quite trapped it the things go wrong. It is also quite isolating situation, some women don't like basically working alone all the time or have own aspirations and dreams.

whimsicalism 6y ago

The NYT article claims that 'the psychologists Peter Gray and Gina Riley published a 2013 survey of about 230 unschooling families, they found “a wide range in terms of socioeconomic strata.”'. I followed the link and the source is... flimsy at best. The lack of numbers here is conspicuous, especially when combined with the fact that most of the respondents were stay-at-home moms, not something super common among the American working-class. I do not think the rise of this phenomenon is unrelated to the increasing number of affluent, young white parents raising their children in urban cores while remaining afraid of the school system.

watwut 6y ago

I think it is not so much money, but more whether mom is content being stay at home mom being completely fully dedicated to family, being content being dependent on husband and without being independent source of income. That is situation that can get you quite trapped it the things go wrong. It is also quite isolating situation, some women don't like basically working alone all the time or have own aspirations and dreams.