6 ms·

Just so everyone is clear, she was unschooled, which is pretty different from conventional homeschooling. There's no curriculum at all, kids drive their own lea

Just so everyone is clear, she was unschooled, which is pretty different from conventional homeschooling. There's no curriculum at all, kids drive their own learning. If they want to play video games all day they are welcome to. If they want to sleep till noon that is fine. As unlikely as it seems to someone who has been through conventional schooling, what actually happens in these cases is the child's natural curiosity is not squashed by rote work. As a result they drive their own learning, motivated by the natural curiosity of all humans. It is hypothesized that punishment and boring tasks are needed to squash this natural state, and some like educational reformer John Galt [edit: sorry, I meant John Gatto; freudian slip there] even claim that doing so is the purpose of conventional modern classroom schooling which was established in the late 19th century to create an underclass of unquestioning factory workers who can obey directions from authority figures. Regardless of how this all happens, unschoolers tend to be the most interesting and well educated people around. This idea is very threatening to most people, so reactions are often hostile when they are encountered and it is frequently claimed that each achieving unschooler is an aberration.

JVirissimo 15y ago
I think you mean John Gatto rather than John Galt, but it was a somewhat fitting mistake.
- droithomme 15y ago
  Thanks, you are correct!
  - whatusername 15y ago
    And it was also close to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Holt_%28educator%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Holt_%28educator%29
- hendzen 15y ago
  Who is John Galt?
  - Confusion 15y ago
    The main character of 'Atlas Shrugged' by Ayn Rand. A very popular (in the US) book that is somewhat controversial, mainly because a number of admirers take it all too seriously.
    - JVirissimo 15y ago
      "Who is John Galt?" is expression of helplessness and despair in 'Atlas Shrugged' by Ayn Rand. A very popular (in the US) book that is somewhat controversial, mainly because a number of admirers take it too seriously.
      - Confusion 15y ago
        Ah, I did not know that. My knowledge of Ayn Rand's work is from secondary literature addressing Objectivism.
baby 15y ago
I think what people are pointing out is the lack of social learning when unschooled. In school you learn how to make friends, how to avoid enemies, how to live with other people, how to interact with different people...
- learc83 15y ago
  From my experience social knowledge gained at school doesn't map very well to the real world. In every environment I've been in (except for my first part time job) the social interaction was vastly different from what I experienced in school.
  - sopooneo 15y ago
    Yes, I remember in my first real job, even though it was a crappy job, I was ecstatic about the fact that, with very few exceptions people were basically polite. There was no outright bullying. Is this adult life? I thought. Great!
    - zeroonetwothree 15y ago
      That's true, although arguably it's just because adults are better at hiding it, whereas kids/teens act more overtly.
- InclinedPlane 15y ago
  You learn the same things in prison, why don't we just put kids in prison for a few years?
  - bitops 15y ago
    You must not have grown up in the US. They do, it's just called "middle school".
    - InclinedPlane 15y ago
      Exactly, that's my point.
Retric 15y ago
I wonder about unschooling. I went though a more traditional home school experience 20 years ago that basically consisted of my reading all the traditional textbooks in something like 2-4 hours a day over the first 2-3 months, a few enrichment activity's like field trips and then keeping myself entertained the rest of the time. I learned a lot of things out of curiosity and boredom, but I clearly missed a few basic areas of from the traditional school experience. Primarily grammar, spelling, rote history, and I avoided taking any tests outside of annual state mandated standardized tests. So, I can see how things might work out with even less direction, but it seems like most people would miss out on some of the basics. I mean is it really an issue to say, here is the 5th grade history textbook you should probably read at some time in the next 6 months? Or even go to enough Shakespeare's plays that the language stops seeming strange and you can fall down laughing watching ask you like it?
- kingkilr 15y ago
  I unschooled (was unschooled?) from my sophomore year of high school through college. That's, without a doubt, hugely different from doing it through elementary school I think, but I'm happy to answer any questions.
  - Retric 15y ago
    How much if any direction where you given? How where the required standardized tests dealt with? How does unschooling fit in with collage / graduate school / scholarships? Also, why did you go with unschooling over the other options? O, and thanks for taking the time to answer a few questions.
    - kingkilr 15y ago
      I took a calculus course at a local community college, and my dad recommended a bunch of economics resources to me, but for programming (which was really the brunt of what I taught myself) I basically went it alone. I also spent considerable time volunteering with one of the presidential campaign's IT departments. By the time I left high school I didn't (as far as I know) have any required testing. I took the SATs/ACTs/SAT IIs the same as any other student. Wherever possible I applied using a college's home school form, and I wrote supplemental essays wherever possible explaining why I left my high school (especially important since I had awful grades at the time I left). I received an academic scholarship from the school I ultimately chose to attend, I assume because of my SAT/ACT scores. I left my high school because I was extremely unhappy with it during my sophomore year. No option besides teaching myself things ever occurred to me.
sopooneo 15y ago
It seams to me this strategy will hit high and low. For exceptional people, it will produce the best possible results. For those of us less elite, it would produced worse results than traditional schooling.
- pbhjpbhj 15y ago
  >For those of us less elite, it would produced worse results than traditional schooling. Worse by what measure? It depends what you want to do with yourself to some extent I think. For example, I've a young friend who's a very gifted artist and has a lot of encouragement in that direction (from her graphic designer mother); however, I consider her to be a bit behind in the 'hard' subjects. Her ancient history is pretty good and she knows Greek mythology better than anyone I know. I'd go for a mixture of home-/un-schooling if it weren't for lack of resources at home. If it were possible I'd also send my lad to school a couple of days a week too - so some school days; some homeschool and some open, student led education.
- dfxm12 15y ago
  Here's the real question: Does it matter how we teach exceptional people? Does traditional school hinder our ability to "unschool" ourselves? I think not. Exceptional people will be exceptional no matter what...
  - HappyPerson 15y ago
    I disagree that exceptional people will be exceptional people no matter what. I am pretty sure most will agree that if we keep a baby in a dark closet, supplying only enough nutrition to stay alive, that baby will not likely turn into anyone typically considered exceptional. What environment one grows up in does affect the odds of whether a person will someday be considered exceptional or not, and not always in the ways people might think. For example, many would think having living, middle-class parents would be a help on the path to eminence, and yet, not necessarily so...Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in the book "Creativity" notes that about three out of ten men and two out of ten women in his sample of eminently creative Americans (he calls them "exceptional") were orphaned before they reached their teens (and this study was conducted long after it was common for young people to lose their parents). One theory is that this allows the young person to feel a great sense of liberation to be and do anything and at the same time, perhaps feel a tremendous burden to live up to the expectations attributed to a missing parent (having a parent just leave rather than die also seems to help give one an edge here). Now it was also true that there were many example of a warm and stimulating family environment to conclude that hardship or conflict was necessary to give someone a creative urge, but what was noticed was that exceptional individuals either had the warm and stimulating environment or a very deprived and challenging one...what appeared to be missing was the common middle ground. Social class is a similar scenario. Only about 10% of the eminent people came from a middle-class childhood (which in America, is represented by way more than 10%, often I think more like 50% of the population). About 30% of the eminent people in M.H.'s study had parents who were farmers, poor immigrants, or blue collar workers, but the parents didn't identify with their lower-class position and had high aspirations for their children to move up in the world. Then about 34% had fathers who held an intellectual occupation (professor, writer, orchestra conductor, or research scientist). The remaining quarter were brought up with parents who were lawyers, physicians, or wealthy businessmen (and the general population has way fewer such people, as people here likely realize). A quote on page 172 in the book reads: "Clearly it helps to be born in a family where intellectual behavior is practiced, or in a family that values education as an avenue of mobility - but not in a family that is comfortably middle-class." Here is seems the author has concluded that there can be no intellectual behavior practiced or value of education as an avenue of mobility in a family that is comfortably middle-class, for which I would disagree. But I do believe having the contacts that the upper class tend to have and the drive to have more than one has grown up with or to better the world or such are factors that contribute to how exceptional one becomes or is noticed as having become. Another quote, this time from page 173: "It is quite strange how little effect school-even high school-seems to have had on the lives of creative people. Often one senses that, if anything, school threatened to extinguish the interest and curiosity that the child had discovered outside its walls." Choose your walls wisely. Or choose to stay outside of walls.
svdad 15y ago
Having thought about (un|home|normal) schooling for my own kids, it seems like unschooling in particular depends very much on who the parents are. Is it underestimating people to say that most kids wouldn't engage in anything like what this girl did? Nor obviously would they have the opportunities to do primary research in biology with a family friend, but even aside from that, doesn't unschooling put a huge emphasis on the parents providing opportunities for the kid to express whatever natural curiosity he has? And this depends on the parents having the education and financial resources to do it. Not being hostile at all, I'm genuinely interested -- trying to figure out myself what's the right thing to do for two little boys of my own.
- aorshan 15y ago
  I absolutely agree. I feel that without the proper parental support a student (do you still call a person who is unschooled a student?) would end up not getting very far. As a personal example I know that neither of my parents would have been able to discuss mathematics and biology with me in the same way this girl's parents did with her.
- eurleif 15y ago
  I was unschooled. My parents are great, college-educated, knowledgeable people, but they're not preeminent scholars or trained teachers. They pretty much let me do what I wanted, and there were definitely times growing when I slacked off and did nothing remotely of value. However, I was always interested in computer programming, and I devoted a lot of time to learning it. My parents helped me get books and other resources, and I learned a lot from online material as well. I launched a startup almost three years ago, when I was 18. It's doing very well. I'm lucky that I happened to get into programming. It's cheap, (relatively) easy to learn on one's own, and it also helped me to learn bits of other fields. I honestly don't know how I would have turned out if I had gotten into something else, so this might be a testament to programming rather than to unschooling.
  - eropple 15y ago
    How well-rounded are you outside of computer programming? Hard sciences, humanities, etc. I ask the question because to me it seems like hyperfocus is a significant danger to the unschooling concept. In particular, I can see a real possibility that an unschooled child with a heavy computer focus and a lack of parental guidance could very easily lock in on computers and neglect potentially "boring" but incredibly helpful topics. I'm thinking largely of the humanities here; you can get away without understanding, say, chemistry [1], but it seems difficult (in my circles, at least) to be taken seriously without a decent command of English--a skill that I think is refined largely from reading, because I've never met someone who could speak and write well who didn't enjoy reading--and it seems like it'd be difficult to really understand the world around you without a decent grasp of history. In neither case does Wikipedia really cover it; I think that a level of internalization of such things is necessary (it becomes harder to evaluate political statements without at least a high-level understanding of where they come from, which has driven my own recent forays into economics and sociology). For similar over-focusing reasons, I'm generally but not completely skeptical of the "don't go to college" argument sometimes espoused here on HN; the focus on matters of immediacy--the get-a-job skills--strikes me as a good way of turning out someone with a few strong skills in a few areas and a generally fuzzy understanding of topics unrelated to their focus area. I am, however, even less fond of the idea of "max out your subject matter, take the bare minimum outside your degree area"--I have a hunch that a self-directed person is more likely to stumble into well-roundedness than somebody whose academic drive is constrained to do-your-job topics. [1] - Not to say chemistry's a useless subject by any means, I actually draw on it sometimes in my day-to-day life. But knowledge of the hard sciences, physics possibly excepted, are a little less impactful overall.
zeroonetwothree 15y ago
Yes, obviously it's impossible to be curious if you attend a typical school.
wccrawford 15y ago
I had read about unschooling, but hadn't heard this about the rote work, etc. I think it's interesting because in school, I absolutely refused to do homework unless it was absolutely necessary to pass the class. Instead of being a straight-A student, I often got B's and C's, and even an F a couple times. I was also in a special 'gifted' class in elementary school that took me out of regular classes once a week and taught us other things. (One of which was programming, which is where my career went!) We still had to do all our normal class work, and since we missed 20% of the in-class lectures, that meant a lot of catch-up each week, which was a lot more interesting than sitting in class and listening. I have a feeling, after reading your post, that those things are related to my continued love of learning. I also have a feeling that unschooling would have been even better for me, but at least I didn't get burnt out young.
tocomment 15y ago
How does unschooling work? Do you still have to pass standardized tests, do you apply for a GED at some point? How do you clear this with the state? Are this issues with getting into a college? What if a child is not interested at all in an important skill, at some point wouldn't you have to force them to work on it? E.g., Algebra.
- HappyPerson 15y ago
  It varies by state as to whether there are standardized tests required. Our state didn't (still doesn't, far as I know) require testing, but required students to either be under an umbrella school (like the private school served for our son for early on) or to come in to meet with teachers I think it was twice a year for a portfolio review. The teachers we had for our reviews were incredibly supportive of our son and our homeschooling him. The meeting place was a huge internal room with no windows, and one time, there was a power outage and we were all in pitch blackness. Our son was 8 at the time and had brought it a Lego Mindstorms creation of his and he felt around on the table for his remote control for it and had the lights on it turned on in no time and was using that light to escort people out. One of the teachers asked for our son's autograph and said, "You'll be on the cover of magazines in no time!" He never applied for a GED. At age 8, he took the SAT to see if he could qualify for a CTY engineering summer course that could also give Johns Hopkins college credit (for an extra price), and his scores not only qualified him for that course and all the other CTY courses, but had the state U close to us interested in him. They asked to meet with him as soon as they saw his scores, and handed him an application when he met with them, which he filled out and mailed as soon as he got back home, and within a week, his admission was in our mailbox. This was not at all what I expected when we approved of his taking the SAT so young, nor anything I was particularly comfortable with happening (and we did hold him off till he turned 9, at least), but he had been asking to attend college math and engineering courses since he was 6, and had we to do things over again, I actually think we'd have been better off letting him start college at 6, bizarre that I know that sounds. We never had the issue with our son not being interested in learning an important skill. Instead, we had the issue of his wanting to learn skills before we were feeling it was worth his learning them. For example, he wanted to learn calculus when he was 7. I typically bought him whatever books he wanted, but this was one where I drew the line. But then he became the top fundraiser in the state for a Multiple Sclerosis read-a-thon (his third year in a row doing so) and one of the prizes was a $50 Borders gift certificate and he used that to buy himself a calculus book. When he took calculus at the university at age 9 (as that is the level the college placement test put him at, must to we parents' shock), he was one of the top students in his class of over 160 students, and he had never even taken anything past algebra I formally before taking that calculus class. But his lack of having had geometry/algebraII/trig/precalc prior to college did not cause him problems in math down the road; he earned one of his bachelor's degree in math at age 13, and took a mix of five college upper level and graduate level courses one semester in modern algebra and number theory, math analysis II, and three other math subjects plus an upper level CS while doing a paid internship off campus and still got a 4.0 that semester (he also did fine in graduate-level math courses at MIT and Harvard). And math is probably the area where most think a linear progression is key, but for some, it actually doesn't appear to be.
iterationx 15y ago
So you're point is homeschooling couldn't produce this result? This kid was home schooled and he got in at 12. http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2003/demaine-0226.html http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2003/demaine-0226.html

JVirissimo 15y ago

I think you mean John Gatto rather than John Galt, but it was a somewhat fitting mistake.

droithomme 15y ago
Thanks, you are correct!
- whatusername 15y ago
  And it was also close to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Holt_%28educator%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Holt_%28educator%29
hendzen 15y ago
Who is John Galt?
- Confusion 15y ago
  The main character of 'Atlas Shrugged' by Ayn Rand. A very popular (in the US) book that is somewhat controversial, mainly because a number of admirers take it all too seriously.
  - JVirissimo 15y ago
    "Who is John Galt?" is expression of helplessness and despair in 'Atlas Shrugged' by Ayn Rand. A very popular (in the US) book that is somewhat controversial, mainly because a number of admirers take it too seriously.
    - Confusion 15y ago
      Ah, I did not know that. My knowledge of Ayn Rand's work is from secondary literature addressing Objectivism.

baby 15y ago

I think what people are pointing out is the lack of social learning when unschooled. In school you learn how to make friends, how to avoid enemies, how to live with other people, how to interact with different people...

learc83 15y ago
From my experience social knowledge gained at school doesn't map very well to the real world. In every environment I've been in (except for my first part time job) the social interaction was vastly different from what I experienced in school.
- sopooneo 15y ago
  Yes, I remember in my first real job, even though it was a crappy job, I was ecstatic about the fact that, with very few exceptions people were basically polite. There was no outright bullying. Is this adult life? I thought. Great!
  - zeroonetwothree 15y ago
    That's true, although arguably it's just because adults are better at hiding it, whereas kids/teens act more overtly.
InclinedPlane 15y ago
You learn the same things in prison, why don't we just put kids in prison for a few years?
- bitops 15y ago
  You must not have grown up in the US. They do, it's just called "middle school".
  - InclinedPlane 15y ago
    Exactly, that's my point.

Retric 15y ago

I wonder about unschooling. I went though a more traditional home school experience 20 years ago that basically consisted of my reading all the traditional textbooks in something like 2-4 hours a day over the first 2-3 months, a few enrichment activity's like field trips and then keeping myself entertained the rest of the time. I learned a lot of things out of curiosity and boredom, but I clearly missed a few basic areas of from the traditional school experience. Primarily grammar, spelling, rote history, and I avoided taking any tests outside of annual state mandated standardized tests. So, I can see how things might work out with even less direction, but it seems like most people would miss out on some of the basics. I mean is it really an issue to say, here is the 5th grade history textbook you should probably read at some time in the next 6 months? Or even go to enough Shakespeare's plays that the language stops seeming strange and you can fall down laughing watching ask you like it?

kingkilr 15y ago
I unschooled (was unschooled?) from my sophomore year of high school through college. That's, without a doubt, hugely different from doing it through elementary school I think, but I'm happy to answer any questions.
- Retric 15y ago
  How much if any direction where you given? How where the required standardized tests dealt with? How does unschooling fit in with collage / graduate school / scholarships? Also, why did you go with unschooling over the other options? O, and thanks for taking the time to answer a few questions.
  - kingkilr 15y ago
    I took a calculus course at a local community college, and my dad recommended a bunch of economics resources to me, but for programming (which was really the brunt of what I taught myself) I basically went it alone. I also spent considerable time volunteering with one of the presidential campaign's IT departments. By the time I left high school I didn't (as far as I know) have any required testing. I took the SATs/ACTs/SAT IIs the same as any other student. Wherever possible I applied using a college's home school form, and I wrote supplemental essays wherever possible explaining why I left my high school (especially important since I had awful grades at the time I left). I received an academic scholarship from the school I ultimately chose to attend, I assume because of my SAT/ACT scores. I left my high school because I was extremely unhappy with it during my sophomore year. No option besides teaching myself things ever occurred to me.

sopooneo 15y ago

It seams to me this strategy will hit high and low. For exceptional people, it will produce the best possible results. For those of us less elite, it would produced worse results than traditional schooling.

pbhjpbhj 15y ago
>For those of us less elite, it would produced worse results than traditional schooling. Worse by what measure? It depends what you want to do with yourself to some extent I think. For example, I've a young friend who's a very gifted artist and has a lot of encouragement in that direction (from her graphic designer mother); however, I consider her to be a bit behind in the 'hard' subjects. Her ancient history is pretty good and she knows Greek mythology better than anyone I know. I'd go for a mixture of home-/un-schooling if it weren't for lack of resources at home. If it were possible I'd also send my lad to school a couple of days a week too - so some school days; some homeschool and some open, student led education.
dfxm12 15y ago
Here's the real question: Does it matter how we teach exceptional people? Does traditional school hinder our ability to "unschool" ourselves? I think not. Exceptional people will be exceptional no matter what...
- HappyPerson 15y ago
  I disagree that exceptional people will be exceptional people no matter what. I am pretty sure most will agree that if we keep a baby in a dark closet, supplying only enough nutrition to stay alive, that baby will not likely turn into anyone typically considered exceptional. What environment one grows up in does affect the odds of whether a person will someday be considered exceptional or not, and not always in the ways people might think. For example, many would think having living, middle-class parents would be a help on the path to eminence, and yet, not necessarily so...Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in the book "Creativity" notes that about three out of ten men and two out of ten women in his sample of eminently creative Americans (he calls them "exceptional") were orphaned before they reached their teens (and this study was conducted long after it was common for young people to lose their parents). One theory is that this allows the young person to feel a great sense of liberation to be and do anything and at the same time, perhaps feel a tremendous burden to live up to the expectations attributed to a missing parent (having a parent just leave rather than die also seems to help give one an edge here). Now it was also true that there were many example of a warm and stimulating family environment to conclude that hardship or conflict was necessary to give someone a creative urge, but what was noticed was that exceptional individuals either had the warm and stimulating environment or a very deprived and challenging one...what appeared to be missing was the common middle ground. Social class is a similar scenario. Only about 10% of the eminent people came from a middle-class childhood (which in America, is represented by way more than 10%, often I think more like 50% of the population). About 30% of the eminent people in M.H.'s study had parents who were farmers, poor immigrants, or blue collar workers, but the parents didn't identify with their lower-class position and had high aspirations for their children to move up in the world. Then about 34% had fathers who held an intellectual occupation (professor, writer, orchestra conductor, or research scientist). The remaining quarter were brought up with parents who were lawyers, physicians, or wealthy businessmen (and the general population has way fewer such people, as people here likely realize). A quote on page 172 in the book reads: "Clearly it helps to be born in a family where intellectual behavior is practiced, or in a family that values education as an avenue of mobility - but not in a family that is comfortably middle-class." Here is seems the author has concluded that there can be no intellectual behavior practiced or value of education as an avenue of mobility in a family that is comfortably middle-class, for which I would disagree. But I do believe having the contacts that the upper class tend to have and the drive to have more than one has grown up with or to better the world or such are factors that contribute to how exceptional one becomes or is noticed as having become. Another quote, this time from page 173: "It is quite strange how little effect school-even high school-seems to have had on the lives of creative people. Often one senses that, if anything, school threatened to extinguish the interest and curiosity that the child had discovered outside its walls." Choose your walls wisely. Or choose to stay outside of walls.

svdad 15y ago

Having thought about (un|home|normal) schooling for my own kids, it seems like unschooling in particular depends very much on who the parents are. Is it underestimating people to say that most kids wouldn't engage in anything like what this girl did? Nor obviously would they have the opportunities to do primary research in biology with a family friend, but even aside from that, doesn't unschooling put a huge emphasis on the parents providing opportunities for the kid to express whatever natural curiosity he has? And this depends on the parents having the education and financial resources to do it. Not being hostile at all, I'm genuinely interested -- trying to figure out myself what's the right thing to do for two little boys of my own.

aorshan 15y ago
I absolutely agree. I feel that without the proper parental support a student (do you still call a person who is unschooled a student?) would end up not getting very far. As a personal example I know that neither of my parents would have been able to discuss mathematics and biology with me in the same way this girl's parents did with her.
eurleif 15y ago
I was unschooled. My parents are great, college-educated, knowledgeable people, but they're not preeminent scholars or trained teachers. They pretty much let me do what I wanted, and there were definitely times growing when I slacked off and did nothing remotely of value. However, I was always interested in computer programming, and I devoted a lot of time to learning it. My parents helped me get books and other resources, and I learned a lot from online material as well. I launched a startup almost three years ago, when I was 18. It's doing very well. I'm lucky that I happened to get into programming. It's cheap, (relatively) easy to learn on one's own, and it also helped me to learn bits of other fields. I honestly don't know how I would have turned out if I had gotten into something else, so this might be a testament to programming rather than to unschooling.
- eropple 15y ago
  How well-rounded are you outside of computer programming? Hard sciences, humanities, etc. I ask the question because to me it seems like hyperfocus is a significant danger to the unschooling concept. In particular, I can see a real possibility that an unschooled child with a heavy computer focus and a lack of parental guidance could very easily lock in on computers and neglect potentially "boring" but incredibly helpful topics. I'm thinking largely of the humanities here; you can get away without understanding, say, chemistry [1], but it seems difficult (in my circles, at least) to be taken seriously without a decent command of English--a skill that I think is refined largely from reading, because I've never met someone who could speak and write well who didn't enjoy reading--and it seems like it'd be difficult to really understand the world around you without a decent grasp of history. In neither case does Wikipedia really cover it; I think that a level of internalization of such things is necessary (it becomes harder to evaluate political statements without at least a high-level understanding of where they come from, which has driven my own recent forays into economics and sociology). For similar over-focusing reasons, I'm generally but not completely skeptical of the "don't go to college" argument sometimes espoused here on HN; the focus on matters of immediacy--the get-a-job skills--strikes me as a good way of turning out someone with a few strong skills in a few areas and a generally fuzzy understanding of topics unrelated to their focus area. I am, however, even less fond of the idea of "max out your subject matter, take the bare minimum outside your degree area"--I have a hunch that a self-directed person is more likely to stumble into well-roundedness than somebody whose academic drive is constrained to do-your-job topics. [1] - Not to say chemistry's a useless subject by any means, I actually draw on it sometimes in my day-to-day life. But knowledge of the hard sciences, physics possibly excepted, are a little less impactful overall.

zeroonetwothree 15y ago

Yes, obviously it's impossible to be curious if you attend a typical school.

wccrawford 15y ago

I had read about unschooling, but hadn't heard this about the rote work, etc. I think it's interesting because in school, I absolutely refused to do homework unless it was absolutely necessary to pass the class. Instead of being a straight-A student, I often got B's and C's, and even an F a couple times. I was also in a special 'gifted' class in elementary school that took me out of regular classes once a week and taught us other things. (One of which was programming, which is where my career went!) We still had to do all our normal class work, and since we missed 20% of the in-class lectures, that meant a lot of catch-up each week, which was a lot more interesting than sitting in class and listening. I have a feeling, after reading your post, that those things are related to my continued love of learning. I also have a feeling that unschooling would have been even better for me, but at least I didn't get burnt out young.

tocomment 15y ago

How does unschooling work? Do you still have to pass standardized tests, do you apply for a GED at some point? How do you clear this with the state? Are this issues with getting into a college? What if a child is not interested at all in an important skill, at some point wouldn't you have to force them to work on it? E.g., Algebra.

HappyPerson 15y ago
It varies by state as to whether there are standardized tests required. Our state didn't (still doesn't, far as I know) require testing, but required students to either be under an umbrella school (like the private school served for our son for early on) or to come in to meet with teachers I think it was twice a year for a portfolio review. The teachers we had for our reviews were incredibly supportive of our son and our homeschooling him. The meeting place was a huge internal room with no windows, and one time, there was a power outage and we were all in pitch blackness. Our son was 8 at the time and had brought it a Lego Mindstorms creation of his and he felt around on the table for his remote control for it and had the lights on it turned on in no time and was using that light to escort people out. One of the teachers asked for our son's autograph and said, "You'll be on the cover of magazines in no time!" He never applied for a GED. At age 8, he took the SAT to see if he could qualify for a CTY engineering summer course that could also give Johns Hopkins college credit (for an extra price), and his scores not only qualified him for that course and all the other CTY courses, but had the state U close to us interested in him. They asked to meet with him as soon as they saw his scores, and handed him an application when he met with them, which he filled out and mailed as soon as he got back home, and within a week, his admission was in our mailbox. This was not at all what I expected when we approved of his taking the SAT so young, nor anything I was particularly comfortable with happening (and we did hold him off till he turned 9, at least), but he had been asking to attend college math and engineering courses since he was 6, and had we to do things over again, I actually think we'd have been better off letting him start college at 6, bizarre that I know that sounds. We never had the issue with our son not being interested in learning an important skill. Instead, we had the issue of his wanting to learn skills before we were feeling it was worth his learning them. For example, he wanted to learn calculus when he was 7. I typically bought him whatever books he wanted, but this was one where I drew the line. But then he became the top fundraiser in the state for a Multiple Sclerosis read-a-thon (his third year in a row doing so) and one of the prizes was a $50 Borders gift certificate and he used that to buy himself a calculus book. When he took calculus at the university at age 9 (as that is the level the college placement test put him at, must to we parents' shock), he was one of the top students in his class of over 160 students, and he had never even taken anything past algebra I formally before taking that calculus class. But his lack of having had geometry/algebraII/trig/precalc prior to college did not cause him problems in math down the road; he earned one of his bachelor's degree in math at age 13, and took a mix of five college upper level and graduate level courses one semester in modern algebra and number theory, math analysis II, and three other math subjects plus an upper level CS while doing a paid internship off campus and still got a 4.0 that semester (he also did fine in graduate-level math courses at MIT and Harvard). And math is probably the area where most think a linear progression is key, but for some, it actually doesn't appear to be.

iterationx 15y ago

So you're point is homeschooling couldn't produce this result? This kid was home schooled and he got in at 12. http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2003/demaine-0226.html http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2003/demaine-0226.html