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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

by 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.
- diwank 15y ago
  I have had 'normal' schooling for the most part of my life. Two years back, I got into web dev. Made an app or two. Now working on others. I learnt everything about it on my own. For the first time in my life, I REALLY understood the meaning of an effective pitch and the value of expression. I taught myself to write well, to be able to communicate with the developer community, do a lot of math and well, coding. I spent time learning how to sketch too. I had so much fun studying the boring subjects - arts, writing etc. In fact, the 'boring' subjects were made boring only for lack of application! Had I gone the 'normal' way: I don't know whether I'd have been better off but what I do know is that I could never have learnt so much. It's really circumstantial. What works for someone may not work at all for someone else. So, there cannot be a fair comparison, so to speak.
- eurleif 15y ago
  Well, I wasn't trying to argue against going to college. I went to college for a year, and I would have stayed longer, but it wasn't practical to do that while running my site as it continued to grow. I would definitely like to go back at some point. I'm not clueless about the world around me, but I'm not as well-rounded as I would like to be. However, I'm not sure I would have fared better if I had gone to an American public high school.

by eurleif 15y ago

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.

diwank 15y ago
I have had 'normal' schooling for the most part of my life. Two years back, I got into web dev. Made an app or two. Now working on others. I learnt everything about it on my own. For the first time in my life, I REALLY understood the meaning of an effective pitch and the value of expression. I taught myself to write well, to be able to communicate with the developer community, do a lot of math and well, coding. I spent time learning how to sketch too. I had so much fun studying the boring subjects - arts, writing etc. In fact, the 'boring' subjects were made boring only for lack of application! Had I gone the 'normal' way: I don't know whether I'd have been better off but what I do know is that I could never have learnt so much. It's really circumstantial. What works for someone may not work at all for someone else. So, there cannot be a fair comparison, so to speak.
eurleif 15y ago
Well, I wasn't trying to argue against going to college. I went to college for a year, and I would have stayed longer, but it wasn't practical to do that while running my site as it continued to grow. I would definitely like to go back at some point. I'm not clueless about the world around me, but I'm not as well-rounded as I would like to be. However, I'm not sure I would have fared better if I had gone to an American public high school.