How do unschoolers turn out? (2014)
kqed.org
kqed.org
What stood out, he adds, is that “many more said they felt their social experiences were better than they would have had in school.” Sixty-nine percent were “clearly happy with their social lives,” he says, and made friends through such avenues as local homeschooling groups, organized afterschool activities, church, volunteer or youth organizations, jobs, and neighbors. In particular, “they really treasured the fact that they had friends who were older or younger, including adults. They felt this was a more normal kind of socializing experience than just being with other people your age.”
For me, the last bit about having older and younger friends is something dearly missing from the typical school experience. Regimentation by age is present nowhere else in life, and I think it hinders lots of people straight out of school.
Aside from not having friends your age, "adults" are also made to be the enemy through the power imbalance in a typical school. This makes it a bit harder to adjust to the real world in a subtle way that many take for granted. Early career professionals should be drawn to the most senior members of the organization to get the most knowledge they can, before that experience retires out of the company.
For what it's worth, this is a very common result of shared suffering, from fraternity/sorority initiation rituals to compulsory military service.
Ironically, I've had a much better experience at university, where courses often has had more than a hundred students and only one professor to manage it all.
I was a curious child and school did nothing to encourage that, if anything at best it failed to discourage me from learning. It seemed to have little intent beyond keeping kids busy so parents can work & sort them from most to least competent.
The people who make this argument overlook the fact that coercion is not required for someone to be motivated to do unpleasant tasks. If you have a goal, you will be motivated to do the tasks that help you reach that goal. It's pretty much never the case that those tasks are uniformly pleasant for any nontrivial goal. And I don't believe that coercion is required for children to form constructive goals. I know I certainly had goals as a teenager that motivated me to do much more difficult and substantial things than anything I encountered in school, and in this case the coercion was in the opposite direction.
This hit me hard. An interaction I had with a highschool friend last week got me thinking. Much of my perception around relationships and age were colored by the fact that I went to school with the same 60 people for nearly 20 years straight (small town) and almost never interacted with anyone outside of an incredibly narrow age band. I didn't really disabuse myself of that (mostly subconscious) way of interacting with other humans until my late twenties. Wonder what I missed.
Also, just realized who I was replying to. Hey Clark, long time no see, hope you're well.
Thanks!
In a single school system, sure. The same small town is also likely to have preschool of 2-3 years, and maybe a public or private community or junior college or vocational school, which gets you 2-3 + 13 + 2 = 17-18 years, not far off of 20.
Sometimes advantages accumulate until you take a different pathway in life that was otherwise not a confident bet.
Also gap years don't have any impact on the level you come into college. If anything I came into college far more advanced in CS than my peers because of my gap year.
I wouldn't be at all surprised if people home schooled as kids are coping a lot better right now.
I grew up in Soviet Union where I was free ranging in my “hood” after school, weekends and all summer.
We had a big, diverse age group of friends. I’ve learned a lot from the older guys. Both factual knowledge and just how to behave / interact / fit in (soft skills).
I also see a lot of this in Vietnam where kids are just hanging out without age discrimination and they seem to be super happy.
I think this is can be hit/miss, I was in private school from k-8 grade and having such young children present can actually stunt your development. They tried to appease the 8th graders perceived level of maturity with a 'buddy system' wherein you're responsible to look after a Kindergartner. I shared a boy, who happened to have autism before it was well understood and diagnosed in children in the 90s, with a girl in my class and he was the child of a teacher on campus. I believe she was at one point my 5th grade teacher.
It was very awkward to say the least, because, first: I had no interest in pretending to be a faux-parent with this girl in my class with a child not my own, a girl who I had known for the better part of 6 years and it gave me a taste of how ill-prepared I'd be in raising children and how little interest I had in it. Second, I had even less desire to have to check in with the mother of this child on matters that pertained to what I could and couldn't say/do around this child due to his condition, and ultimately it just revealed that he clearly needed better care-taking skills than any 8th graders could provide. In a way it was reason to justify good birth-control practices, but that was hardly the aim, as I wouldn't see the value in mentoring younger minds until my late 20s to early 30s.
All this really did was make me look deeper into the propensity of autism in children due to paternal aging, and it made me make efforts to freeze my sperm from 29 onward to try and avoid this possibility in my children as much as I could as after 35 the rates of autism due to the father's age goes up significantly. Later as a cell biologist I came to learn about the many benefits of opting for in-vitro fertilization, versus in-vivo, to be able to detect for other maladies in the embryo, with the main issue being the ever increasing cost(s) associated with it so I decided to pro-long having children well it into my 50s in hopes of technologies that would drop the costs significantly.
However, when I was in Europe working on farms in my mid to late 20s it was typical for the children to be treated like adults from a very young age as they had to participate not just in school matters, but also had a vital role to fill on the farm's daily operations.
To this day I have never seen such mature children in my entire life as I did when I lived and worked on a farm in the base of the Bernese Alps. These 3 children (ages 5-11) not only ate everything on their plates without any coaxing, including the vegetables they often helped grow in the fields, but also they took on chores cleaning the kitchen and feeding, herding, and milking the cows, before and after their school work and spoke to each other in such a way that made you think that these children, who still behaved like children when playing outside, were behaving more like they were in their mid to late teens.
It was astonishing to see a 5 year old girl reminding the older kids to make sure they did their homework as she helped them get ready for school, and as she walked them to the bus stop several Km away from Home at 6am and then came back, dressed herself to then worked in the greenhouse for a few hours alongside me and her Mother. It still baffles me when I think about it.
It's hard to explain, and I think this more a Nurture thing then it is a Nature thing, in my experience. I entered HS at 13, and to be honest if things were not done to prevent me from it I would have entered at 12, and the idea of going into that system at that age would have been entirely disastrous because I was still unprepared and perhaps infantile in many ways about most things, despite learning how to wrench on cars I also started to learn how to cook at a professional level.
I excelled in other aspects in Life, and often worked with Adults in those aforementioned fields as I felt they had much insight to offer, but I was almost entirely useless at wanting to work/hang out with people my own age for the most part as I felt they had little to offer. They often offered nothing I was interested in and I often resorted to car/chef blogs, forums and chatrooms on the Internet, and later on car meet ups, to hang out with actually interesting people after school. In my Junior year I just decided to start going to University lectures instead of my HS classes instead, and while I never made any friends on campus until my Senior year it was still a much better dynamic that suited me way better than what I had been forced into due to my age.
'Happiness' is not always the measure we are looking for, as school does sometimes put us in awkward positions we can learn quite a lot from. High School is a big place with a lot going on.
I think it absolutely is. Certainly we don't want "local happiness": we should not trade overall life happiness for temporary happiness. But otherwise, yes, ultimately my goal in life is to be happy. For individual tasks and events, we have to accept that some things that make us temporarily unhappy will lead to the larger goal of overall happiness, and use that as motivation to get through the unpleasant stuff.
'Self assessed happiness' is therefore, only one, small, indirect measure of anything important.
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.
Neglect is just, unfortunately, neglect, and I'm sorry you had to go through that.
I really hope you won't continue discouraging homeschooling for your friends' kids. It can clearly be a great experience for a child, if the parents are dedicated to putting in the work to make it so.
Most homeschoolers consider unschooling no better than letting a child choose what to eat for dinner. Candy instead of veggies? Sure, if that's what you want, your body knows best! Most homeschoolers (parents) are far more deliberate in their choice of curriculum and the need for children to get used to spending some of their time doing what they need to do, not just always doing what they feel like doing. It's just that, if done right, the "doing what you have to do" time is actually useful work, not just "draw a picture of each science word and be creative!" tedious, time-wasting busywork. And with this increased efficiency (if it works), kids can end up with more time to do what they feel like than kids in regular school. That doesn't make it "unschooling", though, because that's the dessert, not the whole meal.
Unschooled adults I've met all had very busy social lives as children.
No. The parent commenter clearly mentioned “Never heard of this Unschool term”.
The parent commenter then went on to talk about their experience with a different topic - essentially lack of schooling.
Just because the names sound related doesn’t mean they are the same thing.
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.
Your story is exactly why I always talk to my non-tech friends about how critical the Internet was for those of us that could learn on our own at a young age, and its Life defining experiences like this that make this place worth coming back to.
In moments of struggle we find out who and what we really are, and while my situation was no where near as difficult as yours, for many of us the Internet and the access to all of the information you could take came to be how we made sense of what was otherwise an insurmountable challenge due to circumstance(s) beyond one's control.
If you have time, consider reading Permanent Record by Edward Snowden, the way he describes his experiences is so typical of the People who I have come to have a near instant bond/connection with as they often have a similar story as your own.
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.
This was a breakthrough moment for me also. The local ISP offered shell or SLIP accounts, but SLIP was more expensive so I had a shell account. Mosaic was still buggy back then and it required the Win32s extensions to run on 16-bit Windows so I didn't bother. Gopher and FTP were the centers of my world.
My book was Navigating the Internet by Richard Gibbs.
Do you ever wonder if you would've ended up in the same place if you'd had an easier or more privileged upbringing? I'm convinced that most of my hardships growing up were essential factors in how I ended up. If I came up today with high speed Internet and a comfortable middle class life with a new smartphone every two years and a computer that I don't have to share with four other siblings, I might not have found the things that I'm so passionate about that I'll do anything just to pursue them.
If that's the case, and you still go to a school while unschooled (which seems oxymoronic), why would there be issues with socialization?
> 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.
an informal learning that advocates learner-chosen
activities as a primary means for learning.
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).
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.
The reason "homeschooling can't work for everyone" is mainly economic and social, not because public schools have a magic technique for teaching. Many parents need schools for day care so they can work, and many parents don't have the patience, time, or interest to help their kids educate themselves. Public schools have the same problem at a much larger scale: plenty of kids drop out or graduate with poor educations, for a variety of social and economic reasons. As I mentioned already the number one reason teachers give for poor student performance is lack of parental involvement. It should be obvious that parents who choose to directly take charge of their child's education have shown their commitment to parental involvement in that process.
For most of human history formal education didn't exist, and literacy was not a requirement for functioning in society. Children learned necessary skills from their parents and the wider community. If they needed to learn carpentry they apprenticed with a carpenter. Elites could afford to educate their children, but those educations were more for maintaining social status (dancing, fencing, manners, music, poetry, etc.). Education in the modern sense was not available nor particularly valued or needed until, well, modern times -- post-industrial revolution. Compulsory education is even more recent, though Plato advocated compulsory education for social control (as opposed to valuing education for its own sake).
If you're referring to the aristocracy sending their children to monasteries or tutors, you should look into that history. One of the main reasons some children ended up studying at monasteries or nunneries was primogeniture, in effect getting "extra" children out of the way without making them learn a trade. Aristocratic children were schooled in necessary skills (skills we today would not accept as a well-rounded education) not because they would ever have to get a job, but so they could make a good marriage with another aristocrat. Pretty much by definition aristocrats don't have to work so education was a luxury and social currency.
Homeschooling doesn't mean the parents do everything. Homeschoolers typically engage tutors, mentors, classes, etc. I couldn't teach my kids everything, they had tutors for things like music, other adults for subjects I don't know enough about, classes at colleges as they got older. It's possible to pick and choose, lots of ways to learn that don't fit into the mold of formal schooling. Most adults will admit when pressed that they learned their most valuable life and job skills outside of formal school. You only need about 50 hours to teach a child to read, write, and do basic arithmetic. Once they can read they can direct their own learning with some guidance. Kids learn very naturally on their own. School is one environment for accomplishing that but it has a lot of baggage and not a great success rate (except in terms of providing taxpayer-subsidized day care and lessons in conformity). Other learning environments also work.
Unschooling at its core means teaching children how to learn on their own, a skill more valuable than any subject in a formal curriculum. And that's a skill schools actively discourage, because it would interfere with the whole program.
Public school is a critically important piece of social infrastructure that should be available to all, everywhere, irrespective of anyone's feelings about homeschooling.
I don't think you disagree, so yay.
Public school is compulsory, and not necessarily about providing an education. Whether everyone is entitled to free/subsidized daycare that may also throw off some education is open to debate. To me the important point is to untangle formal compulsory public schools from education, because although they overlap somewhat they aren’t the same thing.
I think parents should have the right to homeschool or unschool their kids as long as they aren’t endangering their children. Personally I think homeschooling to enforce religious indoctrination is close to abuse, but I’m reluctant to force parents away from that. The majority of homeschoolers in the USA are religious homeschoolers. They also fight the legal battles for homeschooler rights, which us secular homeschoolers benefit from. The state is reluctant to give up control of our children, as every homeschooling parent knows. And that has nothing to do with education no matter how it gets presented.
I know that homeschooling and unschooling are impractical for many parents, which is regrettable, because they only have the option of putting their kids in school and hoping for the best. Parents who have the time, patience, and interest in getting the most out of public schools — those whom teachers call “engaged” parents — could probably dispense with school altogether.
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.
Which was a claim that no one made.
I credit unschooling with some of the things I like most about myself, but also some of the things I like least. It's my good fortune/dumb luck that one area I fixated on turned out to be in demand and high-paying, because I am constitutionally incapable of giving any focus to subjects that don't interest me. I have a particular depth and breadth of knowledge, albeit one that doesn't always coincide with things that "everyone knows". I certainly am self-reliant and able to teach myself (particularly valuable as a programmer), but I feel none of the motivation that many respondents mentioned. I have mild diagnosed ADHD; whether it's caused by unschooling I can't say. It was also intensely lonely for me, though I'm not sure I fully understood it at the time.
My feeling is that I am a better person for the experience, and I wouldn't change it if I could. But I do have a sense that I rolled the dice and won. I'm not certain that I would make the same choice for my children.
I was traditionally schooled, but, like you, believe strongly that my current success is largely attributable to the luck of my enjoying programming to an immense degree, and falling into it a few years out of college (where I studied hardware because at the time I wanted to design microprocessors, something I wasn't all that good at and ended up not enjoying). Obviously our stories make for a sample size of two, but that suggests to me that any particular method of schooling doesn't matter, as long as there's an environment in childhood and adolescence that facilitates learning.
I went trought the normal school system and I also feel like I am pathologically unable to do anything I don't consider to be fun. I get away with it because I just barely made all the tests. But it caused me some stress, my bachelors, masters and PhD theses were finished over the weekend by skipping a lot of sleep. I do things in the end because the thought: "if others can do it, I surely should also be able to do it", motivates me to kick my own ass into action apparently. My brother is just as smart but never motivates himself in the end (near a deadline). In stead he drop the ball. He ended up an alcoholic and is now recovering, trying to find a way of life without stress. I feel I just escaped that by a small margin.
Next to school I did play a lot with computers but despite this fact I went into biology. It was fun and I'm good at memorizing books by stuffing them into my brain 1 night before a test so I did well.
Now, at 38 I managed to go from biology to data science to bioinformatics to software development. And I finally feel like I want to get to work, not because of deadlines but because I feel like I'm building something really cool.
I wonder how I would have done in your system. I don't care much for my titles, I saw many people blindly do what their professor told them and got PhDs without creativity. Sure you have to be baseline smart, but motivation trumps IQ imo (at least when IQ is above a certain minimum, which I recon is really not as high as you would think).
I almost hope my son makes it through school with minimal effort so that he has time to focus on fun things. Things that interest him naturally. I feel we lost trust in self motivation and build a pretty shitty system as an insurance against not being able to motivate oneself. But this system, at least for some, is very demotivating (my son included).
I know I couldn't educate my kids to university enrollment standard other than in physics, maths and such. That would cross out half their possibilities in education at least.
Other than the elite schools, I suspect you overestimate the standards and requirements.*
If you have a successful white collar career, you are at least a mediocre writer. That may be enough to pass on to your kids and get them into many schools. If you acknowledge your gaps - sounds like you have - even better, now you can fill them with anything from online courses (anywhere from free to expensive), tutoring (expensive), local community college (depends), or even trading favors with other parents with opposite skills gaps (bartering ftw).
* I have a homeschooled kid looking at colleges now and the standards are lower than I expected. He passed the minimum requirements years ago.
Often you don't have to educate kids if they don't see education as a chore.
Restricting things like television and access to video games can lead to boredom. Boredom is a gift that leads to socialization or exploration.
Many of these 'elite schools' are possible to transfer into, and a bigger predictor of success than prior learning is wanting to explore.
But they've all been able to learn when faced with a problem. Most learning up to high school is pretty decidedly useless. Most high school subjects, like math, are taught very inefficiently and a student can catch up.
Beyond that, community college transfers to prestigious universities are common. The most important piece is the ability to learn and understanding that not knowing specific subjects will be limiting in the long run.
Transferring from there to other schools in the US was pretty straightforward and there weren't any application essays until grad school.
If you're well educated and have plenty of time and desire to educate your children they'll do well, school or not.
I disagree that parents must have lots of education, because unschooling lets the child direct their interests, and it’s easy to find other parents, tutors, resources to fill in. Neither my wife nor I could teach music but two of our unschooled kids learned to play instruments competently, for example. Music lessons didn’t cost any more than paying for school sports equipment. I agree that unschooling and homeschooling require time and patience, but that’s true of raising children in general.
I had a very special physics teacher for a few years. I know for a fact my parents couldn't replace him however hard they tried (physics wasn't high on their priority list so they probably wouldn't try any harder than the "normal" standard). I could have been something else but I know I wouldn't be what I am.
The point of this approach to education isn't to say that teachers are unnecessary or that parents possess all of the knowledge that their children will need. It's that children have an innate curiosity that is woefully underutilized by conventional educational systems, which if encouraged can lead to the counter-intuitive result in which children teach themselves or seek out mentors on their own.
In my particular case, we were a weekly fixture at our local small town library, which fed my curiosity about chemistry and to some extent electrical engineering. Thankfully dial-up ISPs started to pop up around the time I was getting seriously into computers, so I was able to download an freeware C compiler and...well I'm posting on HN so it's obvious how that turned out.
Might I have had a similarly inspiring programming teacher at our local public school? I suppose it's possible. Might I have turned out just as intellectually curious and confident after years of public middle and high school? I doubt it but who knows. Was I in any way limited by the bounds of my parents' knowledge or ability to each? Not in the slightest.
Your parents probably could have hired that special physics teacher as a tutor to supplement his likely terrible teacher’s salary. I wasn’t especially rich raising my kids and I could afford tutors, classes, activities for them. There’s a big community of homeschoolers who pitch in together to fill in the gaps. I used to give free programming classes to kids, other homeschooling parents taught music, sports, math, etc.
The biggest misconception about homeschooling is that the children are isolated and deprived of social contact and access to adults who can teach and mentor them. That may be true for people in rural areas, and it’s certainly true for religious fundamentalists who keep their children out of a society they view as dangerous or immoral. But there’s a big world of secular homeschoolers (in the US, at least) and if my kids wanted to study physics — not my expertise — I could have found tutors and classes for them. They could have attended college classes as teenagers in Oregon at least.
Why not? And why would you have to?
I got my kids an English tutor and an Arts tutor once a week to help where I couldn’t.
College students are always looking for work so it didn’t cost a lot.
These days the amount of subject material on YouTube would allow your kids to self learn most subjects once they have the maturity required.
For example for drawing look at what self-taught artists are putting out with just an entry level Wacom tablet.
The exceptions would probably be language (speaking) and topics like carpentry which are very practical.
Well if you put it that way, of course hiring a private tutor on every subject is in now way worse than school.
I’m not sure what you are expecting?
Most subjects I can learn well enough to teach and help out but there are some I don’t have any talent for.
I’m saying the cost to cover those gaps is minimal and it is easy and effective.
I understand the ~$70/week I paid tutors is unaffordable for some - but it’s also a lot less than the $10k+/year my state spends per kid.
And it’s 1:1 or 1:2 tuition instead of 1:30.
These arguments are not supported by evidence or history. They are based on misconceptions about homeschooling/unschooling, and a limited frame of reference because most of us went to school and have no experience with alternatives. Unschooling does not mean locking kids up at home, depriving them of friends or opportunities to learn. It means letting children follow their own interests, at their own pace, and allowing them to participate in the larger world rather than getting locked up for 7 or 8 hours a day in a rigid and coercive environment where critical thinking and discovery are actively discouraged. It means supporting and encouraging education tailored for the child rather than forcing them into 12 years of government-mandated curriculum, standardized tests, strict regimentation, surveillance, and an often toxic environment that resembles jail more than living in the real world as productive adults.
These worries strike me as similar to the argument that people can't live moral lives without religion. We know that simply isn't true. I suspect many more people on HN grew up morally without religion than grew up educated and socialized without school, so maybe some of the critics can step back a bit and examine their assumptions, and ignorance of unschooling, before posting the usual objections.
In all my travels I've only met a handful of people who were not at least skeptical or downright disparaging of home schooling, at least until they learned about my background and either politeness or exposure to contrary evidence required backtracking.
I often encounter a kind of reverence toward teachers in particular and our educational establishment in general which is woefully misplaced. The structure the American education system (and maybe in other countries although I only went to school in the US) is in direct opposition to the formation of qualities like curiosity, independence, auto-didactic inquiry, and skepticism that are as vital today as literacy was a century ago.
I was lucky to be raised by parents who had no respect for the establishment and chose to live in a state that did not force them to educate their children in accordance with government mandates. As a result they were free to bring us up in the way that they hoped was best for each of us. For me that ended up being unschooling.
Two of my three children easily got to self-sufficiency. My youngest, 21 now, has not. Ironically that’s mainly because he chose to go to school, first public high school and then college. He has slowed his path to self-sufficiency by putting himself in a system that imposes arbitrary requirements (credits, tests) and timetables for graduation geared to group conformity and performance. And he still has to work hard on his own to actually learn anything. I support his decisions (and pay for them) but I can’t help but think he could be self-sufficient already, more or less, if he hadn’t added the drag and friction of school to his life. I would understand if he needed credentials for medicine or law or teaching, but I think he could have learned Spanish faster by living abroad for a couple of years rather than going to classes. I did suggest that but I have to eat my own dog food and respect his choices, at least for another year or two.
As a parent of three I viewed my main responsibilities as making sure they survived into adulthood, and grew into self-sufficient productive adults. Part of self-sufficiency is taking responsibility for yourself, not relying on parents or schools or government to decide everything for you and solve all of your problems. Taking responsibility for yourself also means having the confidence and skill to learn something on your own, which may involve tutors, mentors, classes, practice, but the key skill is the ability to learn something on your own rather than believing formal schooling is the only way to learn something.
The goal of public school comes down mainly to enforcing conformity. That happens through standardized curriculum, regimented classrooms sorted by age, rigid rules, clocks, tests, grades. That process may also educate children but that's almost more of a side-effect. We've all had standout teachers who actually engaged us and taught us something, but they stand out in our memories because they are the exceptions. Imagine having access to many more adults and older children who could give that experience. That's what unschooling is about.
Homeschooling can and does fail for some kids. As a long-time participant in the "homeschooling community" I saw the failures mainly resulting from parents trying to brainwash their kids or actively keep them away from ("safe" from) the "real world," often for religious reasons. Public schools also can and often do fail, both in terms of providing a useful education and in terms of enforcing conformity and obedience. Nothing is perfect, but it doesn't make sense to limit your choices, or your child's opportunities, out of a misplaced loyalty or blind belief in public schools, their mission, their competency, on the off-chance your child will get nothing but great teachers.
There are many intuitive reasons why unsuccessfully unschooled people would not answer this survey.
A huge concern with unschooling is lack of social development, and the respondents are found through social networks.
In the worst case, suicide would prevent someone from answering the survey.
The title is misleading because the survey can’t possibly answer the question with a survey like this, and without addressing the issue of equal opportunity, which might be the biggest factor when designing education.
That said, I think your huge concern is that unschooled kids are at a higher risk of insufficient or delayed social development, and a survey that recruits on social networks will biased against such socially underdeveloped children. And furthermore that those socially underdeveloped children are at a higher risk of suicide than their conventionally-educated peers such that a survey which doesn't count the dead ones is further biased.
If that's a correct assessment of your concern then I'd be really interested to know upon what facts or even anecdotal experience it's based. If it's just that the idea of unschooling seems suspect, or that you can't imagine how such a system could produce better outcomes than conventional education, then you're certainly not alone in that position but I would submit that you are misinformed.
In my experience the social (to say nothing of intellectual) development of the average American high school graduate was laughably primitive when I was that age 20 years ago, and nothing I've seen since makes me think it's gotten any better. As for suicide risk I find it hard to believe that an educational style that presumes a higher than average degree of parental involvement and an almost certain lack of bullying and abuse in school leads to a higher propensity to suicide. In fact I would confidently wager that, were such data available, it would show the exact opposite.
But I am not claiming to answer a research question. To answer the research question, you need a better method.
I am just pointing out the bias.
Why would that be a factor at all?
I definitely think desireability needs to be part of the conversation.
There are high rates of social isolation, social anxiety, and depression among school kids.
Close to 10% of teens have an anxiety disorder etc.
What would be interesting to know is are the home schooled rates significantly higher?
Unfortunately they seem part of the “normal” teen experience.
Public school is not fire and forget, but at least there is SOME oversight (for white kids anyway).
My parents didn't just get away with their ineptitude, but were encouraged by WA state to continue isolating me in the name of "choice".
This not as simple as "take the kid out of school and they will obviously turn into a better person because school is such a bad place".
Learning to get along with your peers and interacting with authority figures is not something you can pick up by reading about it.
I should know.
Several have pointed to a perception that one must be of financial means to unschool your children, and at least in my case the opposite is true. However, while my parents did not have the encumbrance of wealth, they were both highly educated and valued knowledge and family highly.
I consider my experience mostly positive, and credit the notion of facilitating learning when there is active interest as a basic cognitive tool useful in many areas of our society.
I've gone on to have what I consider to be a very successful career and high life satisfaction. And pretty much all of my lifelong friends came from outside school settings.
I'm privileged to have gotten to take this path.
Just another self-reported data point.
https://www.cantrip.org/gatto.html
Also “Deschooling Society” by Ivan Illich.
You start by examining and questioning what you think you know about school and education. Most of us only have our school experience to go by so we interpret any other path as inferior, subversive, deviant. There’s more than one way to get a useful education.
My kids all turned out just fine, two went to college, they have careers, active social lives since very young.
I think the biggest mistake parents make is thinking they can shape their children into something. They fail to see their children as individuals, separate from the parents, with their own personalities and desires. Schools by and large follow that model, trying to force children to conform and behave and learn the same things at the same time and rate as everyone else. Montessori comes closest to unschooling, but it’s quite expensive.
Article has a mild opinionated view of success, which values job satisfaction. High portion of cohort has selected self-contained jobs like those which are readily convertible to a free lancer job(i.e. software developer, carpenter, entreprenuer etc). If you measure the success in social dominance and being closer to apex of hierarchy (becoming a policitian, CEO), I think schoolers would have much better performance on this because school also teaches how to take advantage in social relationships, winning a conflict or making allies.
I also had all manner of tricks to come in late and leave early (cut the last class) without formal repercussions. For example, I realized that if I carried my trumpet case I could basically have my run of the school because no school officer suspected a band geek of cutting class. So I would get my trumpet, exit a side door, walk to my car, wait 5 minutes to make sure I wasn’t caught, then drive home! I did this countless times.
What I did like was working and partying. I started working in 8th grade reffing soccer, then I worked retail, and since I’ve been 13 years old I’ve never been unemployed for more than a month. When I graduated college I received my diploma on a Friday and started working on Monday. I’ve never had extended time off of work in decades!
On the partying side, I discovered alcohol in 9th grade and marijuana in 10th, and also did my fair share of cocaine and research chemicals during my latter high school and college years. I had a blast!
And how did I turn out? Fine! Better than fine! I followed my passion into computers and all of the people who told me I would amount to nothing were very much incorrect.
In summation, a one-size-fits-all approach to education is completely absurd. The fact that schools have not materially changed in over a century, where everyone sits in a chair and listens to some hack’s opinions, is ridiculous! I can remember a few amazing teachers from my pre-college days and the other 95% of them were totally forgettable.
Teachers, their unions, and administrators who refuse to allow any change whatsoever are living in the past. Change happens gradually then all at once. I praise unschooling and any movement that tries to change the horrible, stale, boring education system that makes the majority of students hate learning and associate it with authority, chastisement, and being told they are failures.
For me, it was an absolutely horrific experience. I was physically and emotionally abused and bullied for the entire time I was there due to being very obviously sensitive and an easy target.
I did not do well at academics of any kind because I was mainly dealing with the emotional effects and also just didn't "get" it. My only pass was in art, which I didn't really like and was not very good at everything else was a fail. I was pretty sure that I was stupid and was not academic at all.
They had a computer lab with BBC Model B and I tried some basic coding and I was not interested in it.
I left school at 15 and then travelled around Europe and came back to London where I spent a few years working high street jobs (shoe shop sales, etc).
Then, when I was 18 a friend of mine got me a job as a courier at a firm of architects (1987). They had Macs and I became interested because I had a go and I seemed to understand how to use them. I made a few newsletters for the company in Quark Express.
Feeling kind of cocky I BS'd my way into a Tech Support position at an Apple store in London. After a year working there I was enjoying helping customers. I even made a few experiments in Hyper Card and realized I quite liked computers.
A few years later "the internet" happened and I wanted to make a "chat" site, so I learned "C" because I was obsessed that I needed to learn "the absolute fastest language" to write a cgi script.
(the irony, the html cgi chat script executed instantaneously but took aaaages to get around the internet and down peoples modems)
Anyway, I kept coding, moved to perl, then php, then javascript, then mobile and now I love all things computers.
Long story short, I was able to have a career in spite of school not because of it.
For me, school was the worst experience of my life. When I look back on it I see a dark time in a sort of psychological prison that lasted for years.
I find it hard to think of school in a positive light and that might be why one of my roles is being CTO of a company that's main goal is to modernize education.
For me, I only started to be inquisitive and learn "anything" after I had been out of the school environment for 3 years.
I no longer think I am stupid or unable to do anything academic. I plan on revisiting Math one day when I have gotten all this entrepreneurial stuff out of my system.
Couple this with the very real problem of neglected home schoolers, it is quite a problematic word.
One value of the public school system is that it does meet some minimum amount of care, and it does allow home problems to be mitigated. At least kids get 1-2 meals a day at school, which some “home schooled” kids don’t get.
Does the parent engage the children in learning all the time, engaging with them when they ask why? And guiding them to their own answers? That makes a big impact.
Often unschoolers tend to be very autonomous. If they do transfer from being unschooled to schooled, teachers love them because they are self-motivated and curious.
There's a lot of great books on self-directed education, though this is someone different than unschooling as a concept.
I run an organization that supports families learning from home and we've reviewed a couple resources related to unschooling and homeschooling that might be helpful.
The Alliance for Self-Directed Education has great research and information on unschooling:
https://www.modulo.app/self-directed-education/asde
Free to Learn is possibly the most important book on unschooling and how kids turn out https://www.modulo.app/self-directed-education/freetolearn
Class Dismissed gives a taste of what happens when you give kids a period of deschooling https://www.modulo.app/self-directed-education/classdismisse...
I think what's most important to remember is that different approaches work better for different kids and that unschooling means different things to different people.
Some equate unschooling with secular homeschooling. Others see it as self-directed education.
Some view homeschooling as a more inclusive approach to education that reinvents the school schedule, so children are learning and socializing in a more organic way than a 9-3 school schedule.
a bit from 2015: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9017648
I feel like that's a more confounding factor than the unschooling bit, because having a certain level of income to be able to support unschooling is kind of a big deal. When you start to control for that, I feel like there would be a different trend to come out of this data. Which is to say, you'd see a large amount of selection bias from individuals whose wealth enabled a lot of what they attribute to unschooling.
This is with ignoring that wealth quite literally buys you seats at various colleges, tutors for personalized lessons etc.
Which leads into my original point that any discussion about the value of unschooling cannot be done without taking into account the income and wealth of families that went that route.
Rather it seems to correlate with parents who for whatever reason are willing to go far outside societal norms and the comforting embrace of social proof in the interest of doing what's best for their child. This isn't a value judgement one way or another; that statement could apply as much to an anti-vaxxer as an unschooler. The point I'm trying to make is that if a family enrolls their children in private school, hires tutors, arranges legacy admissions to $ivy_league_school, etc, no one will question the advantages they are conferring on their children. If instead they keep one parent at home and unschool their children, they will be doing so against a very strong current of social pressure, likely including their own extended family, and depending on where they live they may be acting against the will of the state itself.
If anything, homeschooling in general is a way for families who lack the wealth to buy into elite education to try to provide their children with better educational opportunities than those afforded them in the local public school. It requires considerable sacrifice, particularly if it means giving up a second income and moving to a cheap place in the country to make the numbers work. Whether or not it's actually better for the children in question is ultimately up to the parents.
I count my hybrid schooling/homeschooling/unschooling experience as a privilege in the sense that it's made me better than I would be otherwise. But it has nothing to do with wealth or income. I could arrange to be born 1000 times to 1000 wealthy families and not have the same advantage as I did with my poor family.
From the article: "Most of those who went on to college did so without either a high school diploma or general education diploma (GED), and without taking the SAT or ACT. Several credited interviews and portfolios for their acceptance to college, but by far the most common route to a four-year college was to start at a community college (typically begun at age 16, but sometimes even younger).
None of the respondents found college academically difficult, but some found the rules and conventions strange and sometimes off-putting. Young people who were used to having to find things out on their own were taken aback, and even in some cases felt insulted, “when professors assumed they had to tell them what they were supposed to learn[...]"
This mirrors my experience closely (though I would say I definitely found the structure of university difficult/oppressing). Being a 14 year-old enrolling in community college was initially daunting, but it was one of the most important formative experiences of my life. Looking back at the experience, being surrounded by people from all walks of life was invaluable to me. I personally feel that community college, and numerous other 'real-life' experiences made possible through unschooling, prepared me for adulthood way better than university ever did. One of the largest failings of the conventional school system, IMO, is the lack of socialization between different age groups. YMMV; there is not a single 'magic bullet' for education, and everyone's experiences will be different.
A recent post[0] here also generated a lot of discussion about unschooling/homeschooling. As a former 'unschooler', I'd like to plug my comments from that post[1].
I would love to hear from some other unschoolers on HN! I'm forever curious to hear how it worked out for others (email in profile).
Side note: When I was quite young, I actually tried out the Sudbury Valley School mentioned in the article. I hated it. I know several people who went there. Some loved it, some hated it. Most are doing well, some much better than others, some not so much. Just like with unschooling, homeschooling, and conventional schooling.
I hated almost every moment of my public school education, and private school was only slightly better. My urban public school was little better than a gladiator academy, and even in private school the curriculum was not challenging or engaging in any way. I was an awkward child and was frequently bullied (in fairness this did teach me the importance of being willing to meet violence with violence, a lesson which fortunately I've not needed to apply since my school days). I would find every opportunity to get out of school and work on my own self-edification projects; vaguely defined "sick days" were my stock in trade.
My last year of "normal" education was the 6th grade, in a public school in a small midwestern town (population: ~750). Having explored the gamut of educational styles it was clear that I learned best on my own.
I spent a lot of time exploring different subjects based on what caught my interest. By the time I was 13 I had already decided I wanted to go into EE. I saved my meager allowance and over time managed to procure the entire library of Forrest M. Mims' "Engineer's mini notebooks", and could reproduce the schematics in each one practically from memory. I was already looking at how I could get into the field without waiting until I was 18 and could go to college, but then I discovered digital circuits...
After extensive lobbying on my part my parents finally bought a computer in 1994 (a Gateway 2000 486 DX2 66Mhz). From then on I've been immersed in computing, at times to an obsessive degree. If you'd asked my father in 1995 if unschooling me had been a mistake, he might have shared his concerns that my humanity was slipping away as I spent every waking moment on that "damn machine". He couldn't have known at the time that I was laying the foundation for an incredibly satisfying career as a software engineer.
I always assumed I'd get around to a GED and then a college degree, because it was taken as an article of faith in my family that one must, if nothing else, graduate with at lease a bachelor's degree in something. But it never happened. I started community college like many unschoolers do as a way to get around age and testing requirements in four year schools, but by then I was already working as a software engineer and I didn't see the point in taking on debt and spending a few years in a CS curriculum, so I dropped out and never looked back.
I've seen some other comments here talk about the "socialization" question. My mother was very worried about this also. As others have mentioned, in the end I was better socialized than my age peers, because I had more meaningful interactions with people outside my age cohort. My coworkers, boss, in some cases even their children were all older than me, and that taught me how to act both professionally and in informal settings like happy hours and parties.
On the topic of privilege, I certainly count myself privileged to have been raised by two involved parents who had the insight to let me develop outside the accepted bounds of our society. However my family were very poor for the first ten years of my life, and barely middle class during my teens. One of my parents had a serious substance abuse problem which contributed to our poverty. Whatever aspect of my background and upbringing gave me an advantage in life, it was definitely not socio-economic.
Who knows if my experience reflects the superiority of one system over another, or if I would have turned out this way anyway, or some complex non-linear space in between. The key takeaway I think is that education is in no way a solved problem, and the system we have now (particularly in the US) is in no way the apotheosis of pedagogy. Just like we vigorously debate the merits of programming languages, tech stacks, type sytems, methodologies, business models, etc here on HN, how we educate ourselves and our children is at least as much of an unsolved problem.
Whether or not unschooling is a good fit for a particular child or their particular parents, the movement has nonetheless done us all a great service by proving convincingly that it's OK to question the education orthodoxy, that there are is no priestly caste of teachers who possess the wisdom of the pedagogical gods. In the early 80s this was by no means apparent, and my parents took a lot of shit from a lot of people for their approach. Now my sister is free to unschool her four kids with little to no hassle from the state.