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Comment by t0mbstone | Hacker News Reader

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

Basically, I was allowed to skip schoolwork, as long as I was doing something productive.

I hated schoolwork, so I started spending all my spare time tinkering with stuff on the computer. I wasn't allowed to play video games (since they aren't productive), but I was allowed to BUILD video games. I was also allowed to build web sites and do programming.

By the age of 13, I was doing contract web development work, and by the age of 16, I was employed full time at a local web development company.

My parents wouldn't let me get a drivers license and car until I had at least passed the GED, so I spent a couple of months cramming for it by studying a 2 inch thick book about how to pass the GED. I passed it without too much trouble (I think I got a 98% in math, if I remember correctly).

My career has developed across multiple companies over the last 20 years, and I'm currently making around $150K a year as a software engineer. I never did go to college.

They took "unschooling" even further with my younger brother. He didn't even learn how to read until he was around 10. He ended up having to cram for his GED to get a drivers license, too. He ultimately ended up getting a job as a waiter, then as bank teller, then put himself through college and got a degree. He now owns a house worth around $400K and has a career as a software engineer at the banking company that initially hired him as a teller.

TL;DR: "Unschooling" worked for my family because they combined it with at least a base of traditional education.

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I can see homeschooling being potentially more interesting/engaging for a certain kind of student after the basics are out of the way, but this:

> He didn't even learn how to read until he was around 10.

to me, is fucking terrifying.

All of the people I know who did better on their own than in a classroom were able to do so because they could gobble up half a library in a weekend. I think you need to be able to read abnormally well for this unschooling concept to work as intended, and so good reading skills is one of the few things that I absolutely would not compromise on.

> to me, is fucking terrifying.

Why? It takes 40 contact hours to teach a nine year old to read, according to John Taylor Gatto. You can teach all of primary school Math in the same time to a 12 year old. What’s the point of doing it earlier? There are little or no compounding gains from doing so. Countries that start teaching reading at 4 don’t do better than those that wait until 7. See France versus Germany or Finland.

The entire point of the zone of proximal development is that you can spend weeks teaching something to a six year old that a nine year old will pick up in an afternoon because they’re just more developed.

I taught a 5 year old to read to a 15 year old level in 20 contact hours for reference. Still room for improvement qualitatively but I think an observing scientist would say that they can read well, but not smoothly like an adult.

My teacher daughter was shocked she could read at 5,diring our first meeting she asked us : "do you know she can read?" I replied, "yes I know", she followed up with a "like an adult" almost frightened haha. Well I did tell her that she could read and write, I guess she was used of parents bullshitting on their kids achievements.

Remove a screen and a kid can have crazy skills.

Screens are really the opium of the people.

I grew up before screens, and we didn't have crazy skills.

TV has been there as a main parenting tool from at least the 80s. Unless your parents were mixing alcohol with your milk, you had better skills than this current era one.

I grew up in rural UK in the 70's - TV was only available for ~4 hours per day (total - no breakfast TV, no daytime TV, just in the evenings). And because of where we lived, half of that was in Welsh, which we didn't understand.

I watched maybe half an hour of TV per day, at most. And that would have been "educational" programs like Blue Peter. I remember coming home from school and waiting for TV to start broadcasting - staring at that weird test pattern with the girl and the clown head, willing it to start quicker. Though we did get The Clangers and Magic Roundabout, and weird stuff like The Tomorrow People that I never understood.

I spent my days riding my bike up and down the lane, building treehouses, rambling through the countryside, playing with Lego, plastic Airfix kits, all of that.

Still no superpowers.

> to me, is fucking terrifying.

The non-intuitive thing about basic reading and math skills is this:

If you delay the learning, you learn it much more quickly.

So the (ordinary, with no developmental issues) kid who doesn't read until 10, can exceed his or her peers in just a couple years.

The very unfortunate corollary, however, is this:

The kid with developmental issues might go undiagnosed for a longer time than necessary, with long-lasting repercussions and follow-on effects. It's even possible to reinforce a mild issue and turn it into a larger one.

This then becomes a classical optimization problem. Optimize for the common case for broad benefit, or optimize for the rare case with significant negative effects. There is no right answer for everyone.

// If you delay the learning, you learn it much more quickly.

Is there any source for this?

Older children learn things faster than younger children, why would reading be an exception?

This is not true for everything, like speaking. If you don't learn language in the critical period, you will never master it.

A friend of mine had children that went to Steiner schools and they weren't taught to read until they were 7, and he said they could read adult level books by 9.

It appears there's evidence that this is true in general[1] (though the author suggests they could go even faster if they updated their methods further)

I also remember reading in a Tony Buzan book his speculation that learning to read too early interfered with the, what he claims, is the natural eidetic memory potential in children. I don't have any of his books here to find the reference, unfortunately. Perhaps there's something in it, perhaps not.

[1] https://theconversation.com/steiner-schools-should-adopt-mod...

I personally learned to read as early as I could recall (around four) but lacked much attention span to actually crack open a book then and found being read to more fun. Not as a matter of personal bragging but to point out that kids in absense of formal teaching methods may absorb many things.

Immersion learning is used and studied mostly for foreign languages but I wonder about how effective it proves in general for small children given vs trying to teach them actively and leaving them to observe it. It may be a fringe case technique when directly teaching them is ironically less effective or even more effective when it does work but unreliable.

I learned to read at a similar age, and quickly started reading (relatively) long, complex books. I have difficulty focusing on things, but I think the many hours spent on focused reading at an early age helped significantly; I would probably be in a much worse state now if not for that.

Just providing another perspective.

I think a safer approach would be "home after schooling" or to follow this new terminology "unafterschooling".

Basically give kids time for unstructured learning using the hours after school/after homework study time that are currently effectively used up toiling at zero sum, super structured activities strictly aimed at getting into college.

So you're going to send kids to 7 or so hours of being pressured into paying attention to stuff they're generally not that interested in learning, then some amount of time doing mostly make-work activities, and you expect them to be interested in exploring learning opportunities in the minimal remaining bits of time? (And for older grades, they're also getting up well before their bodies want to.)

Would you be able to sustain enough interest to really delve into something when you're that tired out?

Structured activities still work, because the motivation is largely external. I reserve judgement as to how good that is for the kids doing them, but I will agree that it's a workable setup.

IMHO, you can't go halfway. Either you fill up their time with supposedly educational/socializing opportunities, or you give them enough time and space to explore based on intrinsic motivation. With your "unafterschooling", your kids will naturally use it for playtime or zombie screen time. One, or possibly both, of those is likely to be the best possible use of that time, so that's ok; just don't expect them to pick up new skills when you've stacked the odds against it.

(Yes, I'm biased. I'm homeschooling -- not unschooling -- my kids, and there was a major readjustment period to get free of the "school attitude" before things started to click. We couldn't have done that when school was still in their headspace.)

High Schooler here. I've been teaching myself Vulkan and am writing a videogame, but I'm so exhausted on weekdays from my course-load that I only work on it on weekends and breaks. I wish I could put more time into it but trying to program after 6+ hours of school and then homework is a nightmare, and that code usually ends up being buggier than my normal output, with low productivity.

This is great, but I think, learning Vulkan and writing a video game can be hard within the same project. Don't burn out.

If you want a suggestion, I'd keep learning Vulkan on a side, but chose a higher-level graphics library for actually programming a game. Just to keep yourself interested and to see progress quicker. There are so many decisions and design choices in making a good game, so keeping graphics simple and small can give you more creative freedom. (If that's your final goal.)

I spent years of my precious spare time making games from junior high through college. Lost out on some social development, and made too many fan projects based on other people's IP.

I'd recommend trying to keep life balanced. If it refreshes you then enjoy. Just don't burn out on it or get stuck in perfectionism. Find that happy zone where you can feel productive or entertained or have something to share.

That's awesome - I think that would be the ideal as it pretty much replicates life after you graduate from college as a software engineer.

As the other two comments allude to, I think the keys are using it as a learning process to learn time management (i.e. avoid burn-out and over committing) and how to make it social (i.e. find other classmates to work on it with you).

I agree - homeschooling by parents who are able to, experienced and motivated is by far the best option. Not all parents have that ability/motivation.

I think the key is to not have it get into a 7 hours of structured school plus 4 hours of structured after school extracurriculars (i.e. sports, piano or any other competitive zero sum activities etc.) where an 'adult' is telling what activities to complete. Basically in such a schedule in no part of the day has the child done any activity where they thought for themselves.

Would much rather give them time in their remaining 4 hours to provide some structure on how to research an area/project for focus and create something self directed.

> (And for older grades, they're also getting up well before their bodies want to.)

So true. There's nothing about the school start time that makes sense other than enabling parents to go to work afterwards.

Though I feel the same about my morning standup as a 38 year old...

Huh, most of the time I went to school in Germany it was 4 and a half hours (6 time slots, 45 minutes each)

Kids learn through play and curiosity. I learned vast amounts after school from video games, and I read before going to sleep.

Personally I could have used more socialization, but there is plenty of time after school to learn.

I would have thought this too until the pandemic forced my wife and I to see exactly what our first grader was “learning” at the 10/10 school. It was shockingly below his abilities, hyperbolically shocking. Forcing him to do that work and then expecting him to do actually enriching work is at best unfair. We’re trying to figure out what to do next but both private and homeschooling are asking a lot :p

I noticed the same thing. COVID and at-home-Zoom schooling has been an eye opener about the curriculum for my seven year old. When I have a work break, I occasionally sit in her learning area and watch. She's so bored as they again and again go over subjects she already mastered last year. She learned how to open another window and tile them, so now she does her entire slate of homework in parallel on the side while the class re-does single-digit addition because a few kids still don't know it.

Not sure how much of this are special challenges specific to remote learning and Zoom and how much of it is just that the curriculum has to be tailored towards the slowest learners.

In other words, a 1970s childhood.

Agreed, I would expect that early child literacy is pretty critical for this. Now once you get to age 10, you can pretty much just start reading random books (or anything really) and start picking up new vocab and grammar skills quickly, and probably turn out alright. But if you can't read period, that's not going to happen.

If anything, I would say the focus on unschooling when it comes to early childhood should be read early and read often. Interestingly, this seems to play into the larger controversy of intensive phonics instruction vs. the less structured "whole language approach."

>> He didn't even learn how to read until he was around 10.

> to me, is fucking terrifying.

I could barely read at age 10, and I was in public school! That's why my parents took me out and homeschooled me. Which fixed the problem in a few months with intensive one-on-one phonics from my mom that the school system just wasn't going to do.

A lot of nordic countries don't teach reading until 7 or so

Just want to say that 3 years difference at that age is not like 3 years difference when you are in your 20s or 30s.

When is reading taught in the USA? In Europe, first grade is usually when you are 7 years old, so normally that's when it is taught. Sure, nowadays kids tend to learn it earlier but not through organized means.

My daughter started kindergarten this year and they are teaching reading. She’s 5, but she’s among the youngest in her grade, with the older kids having turned 6 already. Keep in mind this is all very simple books in the “See Spot Run” category of difficulty for the most part.

She actually had already started learning some reading at 4 when she was in preschool. It was mostly just sounding out letters but at that point kids can start to sound out simple words too. Preschool is elective though so plenty of kids won’t start that young.

I am getting up there in years, but when I was young, they were also teaching us reading in kindergarten. I can recall, with certainty, these folks…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Letter_People
…and I am fairly sure they had us reading short stories in first grade. (But only fairly certain; I could read short stories halfway through kindergarten, so that could be coloring my recollection.)

turning 25 this week…in base-16.

I was a pretty rubbish reader until 3rd or 4th grade when Legend of the Seven Stars came out for SNES and my sister eventually got tired of reading the dialogue for me. So that would put me in the 10 year old range.

Sibling of someone like you here -- I absolutely got fed up with reading Animal Crossing dialogue for my sister, and I maintain that's the only reason she finally learned to read.

Motivation is one thing -- necessity is another. If you need it (not just want; literally need it for some reason), you'll have a pretty strong motivation to acquire it. (Or give up. But that's where parental guidance comes in.)

My kids reading has really accelerated from playing Roblox. I mean they did read before but they’ve really taken off since. They use Siri to dictate and I surmise they read what she prints. It’s amazing.

Europe is quite diverse, where I'm from, kids are expected to be able to read at least a bit when starting the first grade of school at 7. Of course they practice and improve reading in first grade, and not every child can read on day 1, but the expectation is that for almost everyone the basics of reading should be taught already in preschool or at home before that.

I think you are right on one level, reading and reading comprehension is absolutely required for self driven learning (at least before youtube, and yeah, even with youtube.)

For what it's worth I didnt learn to read until I was 9 and by 11 had a college age reading level.

I think some of the later learners in reading (who were not disabled, or at least not traditionally disabled) might also have some other correlations.

  > All of the people I know who did better on their own
  > than in a classroom were able to do so because they
  > could gobble up half a library in a weekend.

Can confirm. Small rural school (primary and middle), half of the teachers were not specialists on the subjects they taught. We were supposed to be learning English from the grade 4, but we had a "proper" English teacher for a year and then were taught by people who knew no English themselves. But I read a lot and it helped. I managed to be among the best students onward: be it the secondary school or the university. My take is: good teachers can motivate and inspire you a lot, but bad teachers can be ignored and should not hinder your education. I agree with Mark Twain here: "I have never let my schooling interfere with my education".

having met a ton of fully grown adults who have offspring, near as I can tell, most people are functionally illiterate. While they probably can read, most choose not to read anything longer than a tweet. I coach in a local sports league. I send an email at the beginning of each season with nice bulleted sections about schedules, uniforms, etc. After I send that email, I spend the next week answering questions to responses to replies from that email. All answers are in that email they are responding to.

TLDR - just because someone can read, doesn't mean they will, and my experience is that they won't.

> All answers are in that email they are responding to.

My gf works in inside technical sales for an industrial instruments rep/distributor, and therefore a large part of her job is passing information between customers and manufacturers while trying to keep both happy and process orders. On a good day, she probably is forced to send the same requests for information at least two or three times on average before finally getting an answer. People just refuse to read even extremely short emails asking for straightforward information like shipping addresses which simply must be provided to proceed with the order. I wouldn't last a month doing her job without losing my damn mind.

Your GF is a saint. This is a good place for AI to read the original email, and reply with snippets. If the AI isn't very good, it doesn't really matter because they probably aren't reading it anyways. :|

I'm sure some of the parents are just refusing to read your email carefully, but I think people also overestimate how clear their writing is. I do read written policies very carefully, but I often misinterpret things because I read more literally than the author expected. if it's something important (eg, specifications at work), I will rewrite the ambiguous passage in my own words and ask the author / person in charge if it's a correct interpretation. this annoys people sometimes, but it makes it not my fault if I misunderstand :)

I'm certain they are refusing to read it. I try to be sensitive to thinking I'm being clear when in reality I'm not.

Here is a screen grab of a typical email. https://imgur.com/5d36jpq

The first questions I get are "when is first practice".

this is actually a good example to demonstrate my point. you don't explicitly say when the first practice is, only that they recur every tuesday and friday. the "see you next tuesday!" strongly implies that the first practice is the tuesday that immediately follows, but the reader doesn't get this needed context until the very end of the email. I bet if you put something like "starting next tuesday (dd/mm/yyyy)" in the Practices section, you would get fewer of those questions.

all the information is there for an active reader to figure out what they need to do, but I can see how a linear reader (who isn't holding all the information in their head to begin with) could miss it. I had to reread the email to know exactly when the first practice would be. an extremely pedantic reader might be unsure whether "see you next tuesday!" refers to a second informational meeting or the first actual practice.

This is a great point. If I may, I get 2 types of questions on this specific point. "When is first practice?" which is a good question as you point out. I also get " when are practices" which is pretty clear unless they have poorly phrased "when is first practice" with this question and now we've both committed the same error.

Good point either way.

A hurried parent not bothering to read a syllabus is not equivalent to a curious kid blitzing through every single Wikipedia article about dinosaurs.

Both require literacy, but one of these things is fun, while the other is a chore.

the OP inferred that not reading until 10 was suboptimal. I argue that effectively, most people don't read in adulthood. So, if he's frightened by a 10yo not reading, he's in for a rude awakening when he gets to interface with adults.

Perhaps they are unrelated. perhaps I drew a wrong conclusion. But perhaps they aren't hurried, they are just lazy.

Are you really trying to draw an equivalence between laziness and illiteracy?

It's okay for an adult to be lazy. It's okay for a kid to be lazy. It's probably not great for a homeschooled kid to be lazy, but you can invent games and rewards and other incentives and make this work.

But it's irresponsible parenting to allow your homeschooled kid to be illiterate at 10. You're not going to convince me otherwise with comparisons to lazy parents not wanting to read your boring emails. It is so obviously not the same thing.

The whole concept behind unschooling is that you allow a child to find the things that they find interesting, and then allow them to voraciously teach themselves as much as they can, as fast as they can. This doesn't work at all if your kid can't read.

I've often found that laziness in reading is correlated with difficulties reading.

For example, I know a lot of people who say they are too lazy to watch a movie with subtitles. When you dig deeper, they then tell you that it's hard to follow the movie because they have to concentrate on the subtitles or that the subtitles go too fast. That shows that they are actually not very good readers and.

For the specific example of the OP. You might be right, it might just be laziness but those parents do take the time to reply to the email to ask for clarifications. So, either the email was ambiguous or a lot of people just have a hard time reading a block of text. In my experience, the later is often true.

That said I fully agree with you that allowing a home schooled kid to be illiterate at 10 is criminally irresponsible. Reading is the key to knowledge and any parent homeschooling their kids should make damn sure that their kid will learn to read and see the value in it.

> For example, I know a lot of people who say they are too lazy to watch a movie with subtitles. When you dig deeper, they then tell you that it's hard to follow the movie because they have to concentrate on the subtitles or that the subtitles go too fast. That shows that they are actually not very good readers and.

I have a minor quibble with this. I consider myself a "good" reader, at least as far as literal comprehension goes (I was never much good at literary analysis). I can understand pretty much any entry on cppreference. on the rare occasion I lost points on vocab/grammar quizzes in grade school, I was almost always able to persuade the teacher that they themselves were mistaken. FWIW (not a whole lot imo), I got an 800 on the critical reading section of the SAT.

I am however a very slow reader. I absolutely cannot keep up with the subtitles on a foreign film while also taking in the action of the scene. most of my friends in college could probably do a reading assignment in half the time it took me or less. perhaps this is just to protect my delicate ego, but I consider speed at reading words to be one of the least important parts of being a "good reader".

why can "a kid" be lazy, but not a "homeschooled kid?

What's the role of literacy if you don't use it? What's the use of literacy without engagement?

There are lots of ways to learn things without reading. While I personally taught my kids reading at an earlier age than 10 (they are also not home-schooled), I've also seen kids learn "late" but still learn as needed. I also see a ton of kids who can't read even though they were "taught it" early.

On a side note, Montessori methods for teaching are quite interesting in how they use materials to teach concepts most traditional schools rely on abstract ideas and worksheets. They don't need to read to do the Montessori materials, but worksheets certainly require some level of reading to understand what's to be done.

Did you read the article?

If an adult doesn't want to use their literacy, that's their choice, but the unschooling method requires that a kid be able to use their literacy to learn things that interest them at their own pace. A lazy child is going to need additional motivation for unschooling to be effective. An illiterate child is going to have an "at their own pace" that's close to zero.

If you're a parent, and you think you're homeschooling your kid with this "unschooling" method, and they still can't read at ten, then you, as a parent, need to drop the charade that unschooling is working for your kid and teach them how to fucking read, stat.

Your emails are too long. It’s extremely difficult to read multiple paragraphs in an email. Same with a HN comment.

I'm pretty sure that if local officials were aware of this, they'd straight up take the child out of the home in most US states.

Note that missing from your assessment here is an honest analysis of the alternative. I.e. where would you and your brother have ended up if you had stayed in school and gone the traditional college path? You say you're making $150k now as a software engineer, but there's a damn good chance if you had stayed in school and gotten a CS degree in college you would be making a lot more than that now (and earlier in your career as well).

As others have mentioned, you also have to consider how few career paths offer the kind of "no formal training" entry bar that programming does. What if your brother had hated computers and realized at age 22 that he wanted to be a doctor? He'd be years behind his peers.

> honest analysis

An honest comparison can't be made unless he gives up some details of what he's made throughout his life, and his geographic location for fair salary comparisons.

But... from a glance his outcome blows most college grads out of the water. Even compared to comp sci grads with good outcomes.

He was earning income at age 13 and full time income at age 16. The traditional school/college route will have you start work at maybe age 23. With debt.

For most geographic areas in the US, 150k is a serious salary, the apex. It would be hard to increase with paper/certs/degrees. Geography change may be the only reliable way to bump it, but then you'd have to subtract the increased housing costs (million dollar shacks) to compare.

The counterfactual is still useful to think about, because what works for the poster may not work for the modal person. There is a big self-selection problem—if the poster wasn't a successful software engineer, we wouldn't be hearing about their life on an HN post. We are also engaging with their comment, because they are exceptionl and have an interesting life story—who read this article but didn't comment? And whose comments were ignored because their story was less interesting?

This person is clearly successful, but the question is whether their unique schooling experience was causal to their success, and we honestly have no idea. This person may have been equally, or maybe even more successful had they did typical schooling and college. Or maybe not. We also don't know if this person's experience translates to other children—does everyone benefit? Or are there hundreds of less successful unschooled children for every one success?

The median salary for a SW developer is a lot lower than $150K. It's about $108K. If you earn $165K or more, you are in the top 10% of SW developers.

keep in mind $150k is a lot for an IC in most parts of the US.

I've noticed this with my son who has an ADHD diagnosis. Pre-covid I constantly heard from school, that he was not paying attention, getting distracted. But since Covid, his output has been phenomenal - his reading/math has improved, he does really well one on one, we have a nanny working with him,. And I've never seen him happier. I know homeschool would benefit him immensely in the long run from an intellectual standpoint, but am afraid that he will miss out on all the social aspects.

> am afraid that he will miss out on all the social aspects.

Consider carefully and closely what those social aspects are. Check that your perception matches reality. For example, in the classroom, 90+% of the time students are supposed to be quiet, or to interact with the teacher (usually answering a question—in front of, but not with, the other students). Most of the social part of school is interacting with friends at recess and lunch, and sports and non-class activities.

Furthermore, the parts of school that are social are not necessarily good: for some people, they consist of being rejected or even bullied, and making them suffer that for years may lead to socially avoidant habits, anxiety, or other long-term issues.

As eloff suggests, sports and other activities are a good way to get good socialization. Since the activity is voluntary, all the kids can be expected to share at least one interest with your kid. Also, if your kid meets some people he likes, then what are called "play dates" (at young ages) or "hanging out" (at older ages) can lead to deep, long-term friendships.

I left high school at the end of tenth grade, but continued going to the math club and attending an after-school math contest class, and hanging around in the math department's common room with others who had a free period before that class. The school was happy to allow it because I was good at the contests, and it made the school look better to let me participate. I got about as much socialization from that as I did when actually attending school, and I was happy with that.

Can confirm, my social life improved when my parents started homeschooling me... mostly due to us finding a group of other homeschooling families whose children provided much higher quality socialization.

> the parts of school that are social are not necessarily good

Most definitely - however it's also worth bearing in mind that if you happen to fall into a more traditional life path afterwards, those social elements will rear their heads again.

The sink or swim mentality of school social interactions sadly mimics quite a lot of interactions post school as well. In an ideal world my shitty experience at school wouldn't have been relevant as an adult, but it has actually helped navigate quite a number of toxic situations.

As sad a world as it is, I'm (somewhat perversely) glad I was able to learn how to cope with those as a teen.

It's a good thing you responded well to that situation. But can you imagine others in your situation not learning the lessons you did, or learning to emulate the toxic behavior, or becoming withdrawn or callous or misanthropic, or otherwise developing bad coping methods?

It's very common for people who admit that school sucked, to then defend it by saying "it taught me to deal with it". I say, if you really wanted to teach that thing, you could probably come up with something way more safe, time-efficient, and pleasant. I mean, how many weeks would it take for someone to teach a course on "Common personality problems and sources of conflict in the workplace", or something, that would cover 80% of what you learned plus some things you didn't experience? Most of the time, when people claim school is good for a particular thing, you can quickly see that it's nowhere near optimized for that thing.

Oh most definitely - it's neither an efficient or ideal way to learn those things. Unless there's dedicated thought to teaching them though, it could be an issue as well.

I'm certainly not defending the way it worked out, but we focus on an idealised education from the perspective of the learner (i.e. curiosity, passion, zest for self improvement), it might not prepare them if they end up in more traditional scenarios. Fully support the notion of it being taught like a traditional subject, just that it's important those lessons don't get lost (which I can foresee happening).

If the light behind your eyes hasn't been diminished by the experiences at school, it's likely it'll be extinguished in less than ideal real-world scenarios. I'd hate to see the joy of someone who genuinely has a zest of learning and curiosity to be crushed the minute they come across the things a lot of us deal with on a daily basis.

Get him into sports or other after school group activities. Much healthier social environment than school anyway.

Lookup two sigma problem. Kids with a 1 on 1 tutor do two standard deviations better than school. That's an insane advantage if you can find a way to make it work.

He's doing soccer and parkour lessons. On top of that, we end up going to the park pretty much every day and play tennis/soccer. He loves his sports, and is very athletic in general.

I was homeschooled k-10th grade, after which I entered community college.

Certainly social contact and learning is something you want to encourage, but I would not let that hold you back from homeschooling your son if you feel it's working very well. It's complicated to do in the current situation, but playdates, sports, field trips with other homeschool kids, etc. go a long way. There are likely also co-op classes where your kid can meet other kids.

I'm still friends with dozens of kids I was homeschooled with. Most have had very good outcomes. I don't feel that the few who haven't would have done much, if any, better in a traditional school environment, but that's an educated guess.

Good to hear, we are definitely looking at this approach, given the success we've seen so far.

> but am afraid that he will miss out on all the social aspects

Biggest boogeyman ever.

Just make sure he has a few kids he can maitain contact with an be sociable in clubs or in the neighborhood

All the "social aspects" you get from school is basically a bunch of kids you have no controll over, having a disproportionate effect on the moral and emotional growth, or stunting, of your child. And then add all the trauma burntout teachers can generate...

It sounds like you and your brother are highly intelligent and maybe didn't really need school to absorb the stuff you needed. I wonder how that approach would work with a more average child.

I was home schooled in grade school (1-6th) and went in Junior High. There was kind of like a large group of home schoolers, all of them tested very high. My test scores for a private Catholic School at the end 6th grade, they wanted to put me into Sophomore in High School. Thank god my parents understood socially it would have been hard.

There were 80 kids in my home school group that were in my grade, maybe half skipped a year when they went to school. That's a small sample size, but not that surprising as most home school parents highly value education.

Intelligence is not hereditary for the most part, and there's a huge environmental component to it. Clearly this household had the right mix of freedom and strictness to encourage development of creative intelligent thinking. Probably rubs off of adults with same attitudes. Of course it's not 100% I'm pretty sure if OP had more siblings one of them would be bound to be dumb as a rock.

Your comment seems at odds with the current research:

“the most recent studies showing heritability for IQ as high as 80%.”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ

But is IQ (beyond a minimum level) really correlated with the type of success being discussed here?

Both brothers are software engineers, so I'd say IQ is relevant for this particular discussion thread.

Whether it's relevant for the main topic... that's an interesting question. Very much so. But I don't dare speculate, and I don't have data.

He might be of the opinion that IQ != intelligence, or that IQ is a bad measurement of intelligence.

It doesn’t really matter what he calls intelligence - it’s still mostly heritable:

https://areomagazine.com/2020/09/02/the-nature-behind-human-...

Skills, accurate self-image, and cultural competence. etc, are of course a different matter.

Maybe he’s talking about these things, but they aren’t the same as intelligence.

"It's still mostly heritable" -- this statement is confusing to me. If we aren't sure what we're talking about in the first place, how are we sure "it" is heritable?

If you've heard 5-10 plausible meanings for "intelligence", and every one of them is heritable, then you can be pretty sure that "intelligence" is heritable even if you're not sure which particular meaning someone is using.

And the article says: "on average, psychological traits are extremely heritable, at around 50 per cent." It's hard to argue for a definition of "intelligence" that wouldn't be a psychological trait.

> If you've heard 5-10 plausible meanings for "intelligence", and every one of them is heritable, then you can be pretty sure that "intelligence" is heritable even if you're not sure which particular meaning someone is using.

What if you’ve heard definitions for intelligence that aren’t measured by IQ test scores and then someone uses IQ test scores to argue for the heritability of intelligence?

> And the article says: "on average, psychological traits are extremely heritable, at around 50 per cent." It's hard to argue for a definition of "intelligence" that wouldn't be a psychological trait.

Its equally hard to argue for an average of things which are not faithfully represented by numbers.

I'd be skeptical of a definition of intelligence that had no correlation with IQ scores. If you managed to put forth and defend such a definition, then that could turn into a valid objection; but that would then run into the "psychological trait heritability" prior.

> Its equally hard to argue for an average of things which are not faithfully represented by numbers.

How do you represent, say, extroversion with numbers? It's messy and any particular measure is probably not a good one, but what people do is come up with a list of questions like "Statement: I am excited when I go to a social event full of strangers; rate your agreement from 0 (Strongly Disagree) to 4 (Strongly Agree)", and add up the numbers to create a score. It's kind of arbitrary and has a lot of "noise" in it, but on the other hand there is enough signal that it is measuring something real. If you need to turn it into a binary classification, you choose a cutoff number, which will again be semi-arbitrary and make errors, but again can be good enough to draw useful conclusions. You can then apply that measure to, say, biological siblings who were both adopted, or (best) to identical twins separated at birth vs fraternal twins separated at birth, and see if genetic similarity correlates with similarity of your measure. From that kind of data, you can get a vague idea of heritability.

If the thing you're discussing isn't measured by existing tests, fine. If the thing you're discussing has a logical definition and is important, but you think there can be no tests to produce even a vague measure, then I would guess you just haven't tried very hard.

> I'd be skeptical of a definition of intelligence that had no correlation with IQ scores. If you managed to put forth and defend such a definition, then that could turn into a valid objection; but that would then run into the "psychological trait heritability" prior.

Its hard to measure a correlation between a set of numbers and a set of NaN’s. However the prior here is that 50% of psychological traits are not heritable, so our prior is that we have approximately equal chances of a trait being heritable or not. What is likely is that some aspects of intelligence are heritable and some are not, and if the statistics that indicate heritability are measuring anything, they are measuring that part of intelligence that is measured by tests AND is heritable. Which is obviously poor evidence for those being the only relevant aspects of intelligence.

> It's kind of arbitrary and has a lot of "noise" in it, but on the other hand there is enough signal that it is measuring something real.

The “something real” is “how people respond to tests”, the assertion that “how people respond to tests” is positively correlated with “extraversion” is a claim that needs evidence. Mere assertion is not sufficient.

> If you need to turn it into a binary classification, you choose a cutoff number, which will again be semi-arbitrary and make errors, but again can be good enough to draw useful conclusions.

The results of a research program are more often useful to the person who is credited with conducting the research than they are useful to the person who is concerned with making accurate predictions of the real world phenomena allegedly represented by tests.

> You can then apply that measure to, say, biological siblings who were both adopted, or (best) to identical twins separated at birth vs fraternal twins separated at birth, and see if genetic similarity correlates with similarity of your measure. From that kind of data, you can get a vague idea of heritability.

Yes, you can get a good idea of the heritability of how a person responds to tests. However the program you described does nothing to validate the responses on tests to any real-world phenomena.

> If the thing you're discussing isn't measured by existing tests, fine. If the thing you're discussing has a logical definition and is important, but you think there can be no tests to produce even a vague measure, then I would guess you just haven't tried very hard.

Perhaps one has tried hard enough to realize that the problem is less tractable than you suppose. One could also observe that “intelligence” is socially constructed and does not in fact have a logical definition that is based solely on objective factors.

> Intelligence is not hereditary for the most part, and there's a huge environmental component to it.

This isn’t true. Every psychological trait has a large heritable component. The lowest value I’ve ever seen for heritability of intelligence is on the order of 0.6 and 0.8 is just as common.

> Genetic Influence on Human Psychological Traits

> There is now a large body of evidence that supports the conclusion that individual differences in most, if not all, reliably measured psychological traits, normal and abnormal, are substantively influenced by genetic factors. This fact has important implications for research and theory building in psychology, as evidence of genetic influence unleashes a cascade of questions regarding the sources of variance in such traits. A brief list of those questions is provided, and representative findings regarding genetic and environmental influences are presented for the domains of personality, intelligence, psycho- logical interests, psychiatric illnesses, and social attitudes. These findings are consistent with those reported for the traits of other species and for many human physical traits, suggesting that they may represent a general biological phenomenon.

...

> own positive correlation between tests of mental ability, the evidentiary base for the general intelligence factor. This value is typically about .30. The genetic correlation be- tween such tests is, however, much higher, typically closer to .80.

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.397...

Source? I'm pretty sure intelligence is well over half hereditary. AFAIK, most of what we can do to increase people's intelligence is make sure they get proper nutrition as kids. Over that, we can at most spend lots of money on educational programs for really small increases in IQ (though of course education is not just about IQ).

"Heritability" is a funny concept which is easy to misunderstand. http://bactra.org/weblog/520.html

> Heritability is a technical measure of how much of the variance in a quantitative trait (such as IQ) is associated with genetic differences, in a population with a certain distribution of genotypes and environments. Under some very strong simplifying assumptions, quantitative geneticists use it to calculate the changes to be expected from artificial or natural selection in a statistically steady environment. It says nothing about how much the over-all level of the trait is under genetic control, and it says nothing about how much the trait can change under environmental interventions.

In addition, heritability, what claims can be inferred from its measures, and the meaning of those claims in discussions like in this thread are also a tricky concept when investigated from a philosophical standpoint[0][1], and some measures (and of course proposed solutions) have been controversial among sociobiologists, evolutionary biologists, and philosophers alike.

[0] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/heredity/#PhilIssuArisTwi...

[1] https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/beyond-versus

If I had a lot more time I'd like to take a longer look at that link and make a list of all the fallacies and dark patterns it uses. As it I just managed to glance that it first sets up a narrow, technical definition of heritability which then proceeds to criticise. That's a pretty standard dark pattern.

Whatever his definition is, what we mean in this conversation is that smart parents tend to have smart children, and dumb parents tend to have dumb children, and that there's little one can do with the environment (besides minimum nutrition) to change that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBc7qBS1Ujo

I'm sorry, but I meant a source other than a 2 hour video criticising a book. And before you say it's a good video, I actually tried watching it once. I think I got through about 30 minutes of saying nothing of substance when I gave up. I actually recommend the exercise - try rewatching and make a note when he actually makes an argument or references a source.

Right above my comment is another linking the wikipedia page on IQ heritability. That would be a good example of a source. Meta-studies are a good option. Longitudinal studies are a decent one. Single studies are usually useless, but they're at least a good starting point for a productive conversations.

Well, environmental components (such as the style of upbringing e.g. 'mix of freedom and strictness', and simply socioeconomic status, which affects quite a lot) are also quite heritable and shared between siblings, so we'd expect their intelligence to be even more correlated. However, intelligence is hereditary for the most part compared to that shared environment - for example, adoption studies show that the IQ scores of adopted children show higher correlations with the IQ scores of their biological parents than with those of their adopted parents.

Everyone seems to be quoting a lot but in the end it seems to converge to a handful (at least, I hope) studies with adopted children. I'll try to find the references before making judgements.

Until then, whether this is really useful or not, I want to mention that time and again my experience in academia is that topics like these where we really depend on the judgement of the investigators a lot need to be carefully evaluated. Academics have a tendency to over exaggerate significant beliefs from highly questionable data points from very few studies. I'll revert back after going through the literature best I can.

In addition to adoption studies, a lot of analysis of heredity can be (and has been) done in twin studies, comparing and contrasting the variation between twins and "ordinary" siblings; and fraternal vs identical twins.

You're right in that there is a limited number of studies, in part because you're looking at small populations and you don't get that many new adoption or twin cases each year. However, in that regard it's worth looking at equivalent studies worldwide who each have tested their local adopted or twin children; as far as I understand, these studies in different countries generally confirm the same or similar results, but I have not personally gone in detail to verify that.

What about careers other than software development though? I'm definitely not criticizing your choices at all, but its interesting to me that both your brother and yourself ended up doing software development.

Do you feel you would have a different option of "unschooling" if you had tried to be successful in a different career path?

Or even software in the next few years/decades when regulations catch up and having a 16 year old do contract work becomes too large a liability.

I was home schooled 1-6th grade, then went to Junior High. I was WAYYYYYY ahead. I think most home school kids are at least a grade ahead.

I'd say for most students, the vast majority of time they spend in school, they're not learning anything. The content of curriculums are usually quite short and can be crammed in a few weeks by a dedicated and intelligent enough student. For students that need more time, they often disengage anyway and all the time in the world won't help them learn using the same techniques.

I used to be a math teacher, and when a student failed the final exam, I'd spend a few hours one on one, then they could take another exam. The students that pissed around all term and bombed the first attempt often quickly picked up most of it in the 1-1 sessions and passed the 2nd attempt. I jokingly suggested to my boss that maybe we should scrap classes and just divide up my hours on 1-1 sessions with every student for greater efficiency.

> scrap classes and just divide up my hours on 1-1 sessions with every student for greater efficiency.

If done right, that could be one of the best and biggest revolutions in education. It would be amazing if there was a whole school/system doing it.

I think we know how to solve all education problems technically. It's just that the solutions are impractical. Sometimes personalized (expensive management) or require a smart and quick thinking teacher which doesn't scale well, or require hard work doing preparation which teachers don't have the time, motivation, or skill to do, or they are simply effective and leave the kids with nowhere to go while their parents are at work.

This sounds almost identical to how I was raised, even down to the age of transitioning between the two styles, and I was doing contract web development work by 13, too, before cramming for the GED and ranking 99th percentile in science. I'm now working in AI with a startup of my own.

I honestly can't say I've ever met (or even heard about) anyone with such a similar story -- care to chat sometime?

I went to public school and was fixing computers for $$ at age 12, doing web dev at 16 and running a company installing Ethernet cards in college students computers at 18. That was all outside of school.

That's impressive, and sounds like what I was thinking for my future children. I just have no idea where to start. Got any resources for me to learn how to do these things for my children?

My story is similar to that of the parent comment and I would say the most important thing is to be supportive of the activities and interests that your future children are driven towards. If they're into computers, let them tinker with computers. If they like to take things apart, give them your old electrical components and teach them about electrical safety and soldering. If they like making things, show them some cool DIY videos on YouTube. Whatever it is, if they're into it and you support them, then all that time spent is practice doing something they love, regardless of whether or not it ends up being a career.

It's not that simple for the parent-teacher. For 90% of kids, their "interests" are video games, playing with toys, and TikTok if they're older. The hard part is getting your kids interested in things that can lead to an actual education. If you are waiting for your kids to become interested in History in order to teach it to them, most of them would never learn it. You have to do the hard work of making it interesting in the first place.

You're right that it's not that simple, but to be clear, my parents did teach me stuff like history and they did their best to make it interesting. It just so happened that I enjoyed some topics and activities more than others, and homeschooling can allow for more freedom to adjust to that than would be the case with a strict curriculum.

Thanks. May I ask what its like for job interviews?

What do you mean?

If you mean for entry level service level stuff, like high schoolers would take, I can't speak to it (I couldn't really find anything when I looked, but I think that was attributable to the general difficulty of finding a first job. No one asked me what high school I was attending/had attended), but for post-college, no one ever asked me about high school.

As to getting into college, I had to take the SATs, same as everyone. I did better than most. I started at community college (which I believe everyone should do, both because financially it makes sense, and because it helps acclimate you to the realities involved. For home/unschoolers, having deadlines and having to learn to 'work the system' are both necessary), then went to university. Graduated highest honors.

Ok, I was assuming the entire education was self-taught/unschooled. But in this case it was unschooled until the person chose to go to traditional college and get a certifiable degree. I was wondering about someone who went the whole way without traditional schooling.

Ah, can't speak to that. Certainly, there are fields you can not work in without a degree, certification, or licensing, even if self-taught. But there are also plenty you can enter with only the knowledge you've learned on your own. Software is a good one; there are plenty of places that will hire a developer even without a degree.

Nerve-wracking because homeschooling teaches you nothing about career readiness without experience, but that's basically true whether or not you got to spend most of your childhood experimenting with things you actually end up enjoying. For me part of it was luck (lucky that someone took a chance on me and I grew into it from there), but looking back I think putting yourself into a position where you get to practice doing something you're actually passionate about will end up bleeding through into a natural progression/networking. For example, if programming is your hobby before it's your job, by the time you're wanting to interview for a job you will probably already be in some kind of club/group, local makerspace, have friends online who are into game mods, etc. to help get your foot in the door and that's all before you're even college-aged.

"...homeschooling teaches you nothing about career readiness without experience..."

But homeschooling gives you the flexibility to pursue experiences that would be hard to manage if on a traditional school schedule.

Did you ever think about where you could be today if you would have had 'normal' education?

I read your text and i would think you made it despite being home schooled and not because of it.

I assuming this because i was going to school but lazy and if i could go back, i would do things differently.

You don't even know what you missed and you don't even know where you could be today;

And while it did work for you well, it does sound that your brother struggled more .

Assuming you a male, along with your brother, looking at IQ graphs there would be equivalent males on the dumb side, who arguably would be in prison right now if they did what you did.

Also without you at a normal school some students might be worse off. Not your problem of course, but it is at a societal level.

I'm not sure what you're describing by "a base of traditional education", because my definition would include learning to read pretty early. Do you mean taking the GED?

Going to be hard in the current time to get through the gate keepers who are looking for a small number of ivy league universities.

Your going to be screened out by a liberal arts graduate with a 2:2 in HR

In my opinion the conclusion is much different: "Unschooling" works as long as you can find a job in IT.

What is much harder now due to tons of people doing those bootcamps.

Exactly. Careers with a low barrier to entry will eventually settle on low wages. Despite what many believe, programming has a quite low barrier to entry. Supply was artificially suppressed because college was the only place someone would teach you to program, so programmers either had college degrees or were self-starters (comparatively rare).

But the trade schools are finally catching up to demand. The era of 160k dev jobs without very advanced/complementary skills/knowledge are quickly coming to an end.

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