1. Engagement. Learning is hard unless you are engaged.

2. Self-directed. Mastery education--independent mastery of the learning objectives-- was tried in the 1930's (Winnetka System) and it was very successful where it was tried. But it didn't match the goals of the education unions...

3. Montessori. The Montessori program emphasizes "self-directed activity, hands-on learning and collaborative play." This is a popular approach to learning.

4. Vygotsky. Social engagement is important in learning. Homeschooling as described in the article without peers goes against this theory.

5. Scaffolding. A theory of learning by constructing with prior knowledge. The article notes "going down rabbit holes" and that would agree with this theory.

6. Gardner. Theory of using "multiple intelligences" (kinetic, visual, logical, etc.) to learn. The described approach in the article would seem to agree with this theory.

7. Project-based. Using projects as a way to discover and learn. Again, the article seems to agree with this theory/approach

...and more

In short, "unschooling" as described in the article seems to have support in major theories of education. However, the social aspect is not well supported. A curriculum is not a bad thing, it's a set of learning objectives which is necessary.

What is not necessary for learning is the institutional aspect of school--which is what the author is trying to avoid and has discovered is not necessary.

I believe that we are moving as a society to two norms: the "haves" will educate their children using various homeschooling approaches augmented by AI, and the "have nots" will be forced to attend institutions where the emphasis is discipline and not learning.

So many people have no idea about education theory and incorrectly assume public schools are the most efficient because they are taught by trained educators. Unfortunately, trained educators were all taught NOT to teach this way and are prevented from doing what is most effective by the administration and the state.

Our schools are designed to stamp out creativity, critical thinking, strong collective bargaining and solidarity, democracy, and the love of learning.

https://cantrip.org/gatto.html

But i'll still make this point: its an oversimplification to say that education (as defined) is bad.

No matter how much it doesn't align with your passion, you will need to have a basic set of book smarts to hope to thrive in the world. If for no other reason than there will almost certainly be some aspect of that passion that touches on those missing rudimentary skills.

I also personally don't want to live in a world where a significant portion of people don't know basic history or understand eating tide pods is bad.

As quizzes on late night talk shows have shown for the past 20+ years, the current education system doesn't accomplish this. Additionally basic numeracy drops of _severely_ after leaving school, which means a majority of people aren't really absorbing anything beyond arithmetic on the math side.

which is probably happening in spite of school :)

Are you saying that none of these statements are true?

Or are you suggesting that the system claims to be instilling some level of competency in various subjects? Or perhaps you meant that the system is not doing what it _aspires_ to do. Or perhaps what you aspire for it to do.

I am. Otherwise why would there be standardized tests to attempt to measure this?

There's use in the education as a public babysitting service/meal delivery for young children, but that its it's main benefit, we should radically alter the way it's all set up. It could be radically cheaper as well as destroy way fewer children's love of learning.

That bunch in encompassing people with massive learning disabilities including mental retardation, neglected kids and kids from severely disadvantaged situations.

That same exact bunch wont have better results when being homeschooled, with possible exception of some learning disabilities where homeschooling parent still needs a lot of support.

We may expect other kinds of “basic” knowledge not to be much more widely-known than this. It’s easy to turn up similar results on fundamental civics and history. Stuff like “are Puerto Ricans US citizens?” you get a similar 30-35ish% who give the wrong answer and 15ish% “I don’t know”, pretty close to rates on questions about marginal tax rates.

I used to be Ok at math. I would now fail any math test past 10th grade (forget college), and I’m not so confident about 8th or 9th either.

I also used to be pretty good at French. I’ve lost most of it. Rarely having a reason to use a skill means you lose it.

That’s my guess, anyway.

There is also, in my opinion, great benefit to just training your brain. Even if you forget all the details, I think someone who learned calculus and then forgot it is going to generally be in a better place to handle any general mathematics than someone equal who never learned calculus at all.

Sometimes going a few steps deeper helps you retain some useful bit of info. I ended up making useful of various bits of chemistry decades after taking the class, but understanding the basics was still helpful.

Finally basing things on utility is just a prediction. Some things that seemed useful turn out less so as technology filled in a gap.

If I know a couple, there are probably many such folks.

I’ve not seen the same thing happen with any other subject.

The person who would fail that math or French conversation right now, would be able to get up to speed in days, weeks or months depending on what exactly you want if needed. However, learning French from nothing would take years again.

Some televised "quizzes" are picked through for the dumbest possible answers (eg: Australian late night comedy shows doing VoxPop quizzes asking 'random' US citizens to name a country starting with the letter 'U'), other quiz shows audition contestents to select a pool of bright people.

Public schools or home schools should ideally teach about innate bias in sample selections.

    > I also personally don't want to live in a world where a significant portion of people don't ... understand eating tide pods is bad.

As a reminder, in most high-developed, democratic countries, about 1/3 of people have a university degree. That means the majority of your society doesn't have a university degree. To me, the point of public education (through high school) is to prepare people to be good citizens.

Now let's just make up a number, say 240 people. Nah, let's go 2400 people. Let's say that is the number of people who are dumb enough to eat a Tide pod.

Now let's say we grossly overestimate the intelligence of this population so we bump the number of pod-eaters to 24000.

That represents 0.02% of the population between the ages of five and 35. Not 2%. 1/100th of 2%.

If just 1/4 of these people ended up in the ER in a single year, I would still consider that to be a significant portion of people.

If that is the number of people who failed chemistry class, I would not consider it to be a significant portion of people.

The portion of people who don't know history very well is much higher than 1/100th of 2%. The portion of people who would be willing to, oh say, burn downtown to the ground if their favorite candidate trips is incredibly small. But it is significant enough to be scary even at the municipal level.

Are you suggesting the only way to get these skills is through formal schooling? That not going to school means it is impossible to learn what you need to thrive?

If schools started teaching babies to walk, would you assume that people would lose the ability to learn on their own? Keep in mind that our mass education system is only around a century old. People learned the “rudimentary skills” and much more on their own for most of human existence.

And your examples - not knowing history and knowing to not eat tide pods - are heavily associated with people who attend traditional schools!

I think you've already been living in that world for a while now. I'm having trouble finding it right now, but has anyone seen those lists of what books students were reading in the late 19th, early 20th century? Not that long ago students were reading classics like Dickens or Tolkien. These days that's well beyond the literacy of the average US middle/high school student.

I feel like it has eradicated much of the family time for bonding. The only reason we hesitate to take them out of school is the socialization aspect.

You really hit the nail on the head for me here. I see that kids need to work with large, consistent, groups of their peers for years to learn all of the skills needed to be socially competent (work and play). Many don’t get this and it can really show when they move into adulthood.

Typically it is the option within reach.

We've eradicated free ranging & natural adult-free peer time. What's left are adult-built programs. They're artificial constructs and they take real time and money to be reliably available.

I had 5 kids. I spent 10x time (per child) parenting, compared to my parents. My kids had a busier life than I did but they were still shortchanged.

They've also almost universally been incredibly smug, self-righteous people who talked to everyone around them like we were unwashed, unenlightened souls who were to be pitied for having gone through a public school education.

All the research I've seen in this area indicates it would be far better for kids to be in mixed age classrooms that are democratic with several adults, but that costs more and no one wants taxes to go up.

I know many homeschoolers, they had a smidge of difficulty adjusting in college, and then they learned to socialize in that environment which is much more effective for learning how to socialize.

This is not true, at least in our school. They interacted quite a lot. It is not like they would had 7 hours straight of learning and nothing else, there was quite a lot of literally dedicated playtime where teachers done only general supervision.

Which is kind of my point, one could homeschool for academics and then supplement with after school sports for socialization.

It's true that the schooling system has failed in many parts of the world to the point that it might harm kids in many ways, even stunting them academically. And it's great that the author's kid likes to program games and is great at Photoshop and 3D. But the usual curriculum at schools provides a breadth of general knowledge that I don't think parents or online tutorials would ever substitute for.

While this kid may be the next John Carmack, are they now robbed of the opportunity to gain enough knowledge in other disciplines to ever succeed in being a doctor, a lawyer, a mathematician or a historian? I believe so. Kids are really good at learning from anything they have access to, but online content is heavily skewed to entertainment (such as video games), and almost totally non-existent in other areas.

Before I ended up in games, I tried a few different disciplines. I went to med-school and learned things I would have never learned on YouTube because they would have simply been demonetized. Simple biology is often a controversial topic on ad-supported platforms, let alone any kind of injury or most illnesses. Health topics are very muddied by grifters to the point that patients self-diagnosing by YouTube are often very confused. So this kid would have a serious disadvantage if they ever wanted to be a doctor if this is where they learned about it. And this is assuming they would be capable of reconciling the misleading knowledge with real knowledge to be good enough at the discipline, anyways.

So all in all, I can see the benefits, but it is also very concerning to me that a kid is seriously using online content for unsupervised learning. We have all recently got a taste of how unsupervised learning on online content goes. And it's not just detrimental in learning, the world view itself online is very skewed. I am not necessarily very good at education though, so take this with a pinch of salt. It is not impossible that someone's parents, with the help of the internet, could indeed provide better education than traditional schools. I think there are such parents, although probably few and far in between.

Unsupervised youtube sounds pretty awful for most kids, but with some guidance, if you have a curious, gifted kid, it could be a dream for them.

Anatomy… I don’t know if you can properly learn anatomy online. Med schools have anatomy institutes with prosecutoriums ran by specialized faculty. Students learn with real cadavers. Then they learn pathological anatomy with real patients. You also learn a lot in a tactile way, for example, how big the organs are exactly and in what shape. It’s very difficult to learn anatomy to a functional degree with just slides.

I think a curious kid would pick up something from an online tutorial, but they would also pick up some misconceptions. And they’d lose out on the anatomy models and practical kits schools have. I would still see YouTube learning for this kind of discipline as a serious disadvantage.

For example, I could not find one lecture (in about 10 I saw just now searching for “anatomy lecture 1”) that recommends Gray’s Anatomy or similar anatomical atlas books. But they are absolutely foundational, it is the bread and butter of anatomy.

1 hour with a lecturer that would show you around such books and give a 45 minute tactile tour of a model of the human body may do much more than 100 hours of YouTube tutorials. The efficiency of learning just does not compare.

If you've ever taken a break from work, you've probably experienced something like it. At first, you drive yourself crazy, because you don't know what to do with yourself now that you're outside the routine you've "always" had and "everybody" else seems to have.

Then there's a period of mental stagnation. To me, it feels kind of like defragging my brain. It needs not to be doing much else as it processes all the stuff it's just knuckled down and gotten through over the years, trying to craft some sort of self narrative about it that integrates it and makes it into a (semi-)coherent set of desires and character traits.

Eventually you come out of it and start wanting to do stuff again. It might be the same kinds of projects. It might not. It might change pretty frequently, because you're still testing your new ideas against this new self narrative, and iterating on both.

I think not doing this periodically ruins people's lives. That's how you end up with death bed regrets about never becoming the person you wanted to be.

The first few times I did it, I really got worried about the early stages, but now I'm realizing there's a pattern. It comes together in the end, and I'm always better off for having done it!

If you can teach this to your kids early on, their lives will be so much better for it.

Our brain gets mothballed by routine and the years fly by without us doing what matters to us, or why we even got jobs in the first place. We also get convinced, with every passing day, that this is good for us. That routine provides structure, stability, safety. Then at some point, we are so convinced we don't have the capacity to doubt it anymore.

Some of us will get shocked out of it by some kind of a trigger, like a death, financial shock, physical ability changes, etc. But not everyone.

Much more common to unschool for a bit then head back.

Our oldest daughter will be 16 next month. Last year, she decided to take a couple of agriculture-related classes at the local high school so she could be part of FFA and show livestock. This year she spent three hours per day there.

She’s currently spending the next three days at an FFA leadership event at a university about five hours away - despite never having been enrolled as a student in a public school, she will be the only person in her (small) FFA chapter to have ever qualified and attended.

She’s planning on doing “high school” for one more year, then attending our local community college to get an associate’s degree. While she technically “won’t be a high school graduate” when she turns 18, she will have a two-year college degree and about half the transferable credits necessary to graduate from a four-year university if that’s what she wants. For that matter, she could start university this fall if she wanted - but it doesn’t make much logistical sense to send a 16-year-old to live on her own, and that’s not what she wants to do anyhow.

I don’t think there is a true definition for “pure unschooling”. By its very nature, every child ends up valuing different things and making unique choices.

My wife and I are anarchists, and the idea of requiring our kids to attend a government school is kinda anathema to us. We knew about unschooling before our oldest was old enough for her peers to enter kindergarten, so we never really did anything else.

If there’s any one thing we’ve learned it’s that the key is to just let them live life with you. They’ll develop their own interests; support them in that.

If you’re concerned about them learning a specific skill or concept, find a way that it’s required for something they want to do. My oldest learned to read at a conversational pace through Guild Wars 2; my youngest learned basic math through crochet and needlepoint.

Learning is part of human nature. Kids aren’t an exception to that. As long as they have supportive people around them, they’ll learn everything they need to achieve their own goals - and in the process, they’ll learn “how to learn” and build the self-confidence needed to embark on more and more ambitious projects as they get older.

Even as an adult, I sometimes want to enroll in an enrichment program that looks a lot like a school class (was just researching culinary training options yesterday, in fact), but there's a huge difference between how that lands and how it landed when I was "stuck" in school as a kid.

When you choose to be there because you've evaluated its merits and found something you consider worth the costs (whatever annoyances come with it), and you also know you can leave, it loses the "prison" aspect "schooling" has for a lot of kids.

But one thing I've learned is that most homeschool parents are even worse than public school and the risk of permanently harming your child through neglect is dreadfully real.

Most of the flattering literature for unschooling is, as with the link, a case where the parents and child are naturally gifted and curious, and they credit whatever they ended up doing with the kid's relative success.

Even gifted and curious kids run into situations where some structured learning that won't be immediately rewarding needs to happen. There needs to be an adult paying attention and intervening, even in the best cases.

Every parent should have the right to homeschool. But from what I've seen, most parents should go ahead and trust American public schools, which are actually very competitive with the best in the world after adjusting for the familiar, stubborn demographic realities.

Right. Here in the UK it is an unusual thing but I think the majority of homeschoolers who are not doing so for reasons of child ill health or significant neurodiversity are, unfortunately, irresponsible or ignorant.

I am not saying that I believe it is impossible for a child to be homeschooled well, especially by well-to-do parents who can hire tutors, but what I find is that those parents usually believe one or more other extremely outlying thing —- antivax, sovereign citizen, fear of radio frequencies, or extreme religion —- that is a kind of intellectual abuse, and is at odds with the kind of basic pedagogical commitment that is needed to make education work. Kids mostly cannot learn effectively from people who do not spend time thinking about the business of teaching.

Some of the “homeschooling circles” around majority wealthy towns like the one I live in are just unbelievably silly people who are raising admittedly charming, polite, but borderline uneducated children who will have to rely on their parents’ networking skills to get anywhere in life and who are in for a shock at which doors do not open for them.

in the opinion of Brendan W Case, someone deeply embedded within a particular Christian PoV who prolifictly writes about such things . . .

> let’s talk about the toxic individualism and narcissism you learn in secular public schools.

Another of Brendan's opinions, or one of your own then?

He’s talking about the results of a Harvard study. When Harvard studies support a Christian viewpoint, Christians are going to write about the findings. What’s your point?

> Another of Brendan's opinions, or one of your own then?

No, my personal opinion. Compared to Mormons secular Americans are just awful. I don’t even have a dog in that hunt, I’m from a Muslim country. But having seen the school system here I’m not surprised. It’s just “me, me, me, do what you want, be who you want to be.”

Or self reflection either.

Got it.

I have nothing to add as a clearly narcissistic product of a public secular school.

There’s not much toxic individualism and narcissism in British state schools. Our education culture is a bit more inclusive and outward-looking.

Homeschooling is unusual here simply because people don’t feel (with good reason) schools are poisoning their kids or risking getting them shot.

But I would concede that the culture of homeschooling may be more fringe here precisely because of that.

I agree with your generalization about cheerful, conscientious people. I have been mostly pleased with the efforts of people within that faith who have taught my children. Then again, I have been mostly pleased with the efforts of people not within that faith who have taught my children.

But I have been pretty dissatisfied with the efforts of people who were not professional teachers. I have seen a discouraging share of toxic individualism and narcissism among people in all faiths, including my own. Perhaps I fall into the same pit.

I'd like to defend all the good folks in London and New York and caution everyone to not depend on a person's religion as a teaching credential. (Or even a ticket to an after life.)

The minority faiths that engage in homeschooling are more likely to be Christian Scientists and some of the British minority groups such as the Plymouth and Exclusive Brethren. The latter particularly (think Amish, but with very English sensibilities and our commitment to petty bureaucracy, and you are most of the way there; come to think of it, they might be quite successful at some aspects of homeschooling). Even many Seventh Day Adventists send their kids to mainstream schools here.

But I seem to have the same opinion as you do about homeschooling. I am biased by a small sample size of people I know who have homeschooled. Too many of them did so because it was too hard to get their kids up, fed, dressed, and on the bus each morning. Or because one of the public school teachers voted for a particular politician. I have seen very few parents who I felt were competent to teach any subject at a high school level. I have seen a few homeschoolers who wisely depend on co-ops with subject experts. But mostly I have seen what I consider to be failures.

To be fair, the failures I have seen in homeschool are not particularly worse than the failures I have seen in public school. I can't say if the two realities would be different if they swapped. It's just that I have seen great successes in public school and not so much from homeschools.

My own children have been successful in public school. To achieve the same level of success in homeschool would have taken a personal effort from their parents that I am skeptical would have occurred. As it is, they got two bright, well-educated parents to help them understand what the public schools were teaching and to explain dissenting opinions about antivaxing, radio frequencies, extreme religion, etc. :-) In my experience, public school education with active, involved parents is better than active, involved parents alone. At least in the schools my children attended. I admit ignorance to all but a handful of pretty decent public schools. But it is awesome that my children can spend five hours a week learning propaganda about Jefferson and Marx and then I can spend another three hours over dinners to add in John Locke and our local city council. And I lack the structure of the curriculum the school provides. So we can critique and disagree and agree and reinforce and still move through a complete semester of topics because we aren't depending on me to provide the framework and the 95% of things we actually agree on. It's ok if we rabbit hole a bit because the professional teacher will change the subject tomorrow and keep things moving.

Oh, bristle away! I accept I am being contentious. But I grew up with several friends (even at a mainstream school) whose parents were in these categories (not so much fear of RF, that’s newer).

Some of this stuff takes a hell of a lot of unpicking in later life; I know two adults who grew up in a common-enough minority religion who consider what they were taught to think to be profoundly damaging to their long-term intellectual, social and mental wellbeing.

To pick up on one thing to agree with: I think it’s enormously important for children to have exposure to professional teachers. To people who know how teaching works, how to adapt it, how to moderate and meta-moderate learning.

But how do they function as a member of society? Are they hard workers? Polite? Clean up after themselves? Can you trust them not to steal something you left unsecured?

Also considering how much wages have not kept up with inflation, as the rich owners take more and more, perhaps we need workers who are less polite and more confrontational.

Chen hasn't published in four years, and I don't see a single paper title that seems relevant: https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=J_LdHBIAAAAJ

"More likely to attend religious services with their parents" was one of their criteria for well-being. Another was the likelihood of attending religious services in adulthood. That's an absurd yardstick for well-being.

The same two authors produced another opinion piece for the WSJ that basically says "marriage makes women happier": https://www.thecollegefix.com/harvard-scholars-marriage-make...

The center where she works ( https://hfh.fas.harvard.edu ), here are two of their upcoming 'workshops':

> World Congress on Moral Injury, Trauma, Spirituality, and Healing

> Early Christianity and Flourishing Workshops

Here's the staff directory for the "institute" at Harvard where the study was done: https://hfh.fas.harvard.edu/our-people

Notice that a rather large number of people in the department came from a religious university or have degrees that are related to religion?

Chen's bio includes:

> Her other work and interests include a) social disparity in the distribution of well-being; b) the biological and behavioral mechanisms linking childhood familial experiences to health in adulthood; c) the influences of religious participation on individuals’ subsequent health and well-being.

And what’s your point about the researchers having a focus on religion? Religion is a major aspect of human society and a proper subject of academic study.

It's an impenetrable nest of variables, confounds, and actors who are deeply invested in their side of the argument on all sides.

As an American with American attitudes, I believe parents should have that right unless there's real neglect going on.

The studies that claim homeschooling is better are of laughably poor quality in terms of basic research methodology, and make no effort to adjust for factors like socioeconomic conditions in the household or even the education level of the parents.

Guess who funds most of the research into homeschooling? Homeschooling organizations.

It gets worse. A lot of the studies compare tests in school that are standardized or written by professional educators...to tests produced and graded by the parent of the home-schooled kid:

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/parenting-translator...

Even Brian Ray's daughter says homeschooling doesn't work:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2023/12/11/brian-ra...

Things are even worse in religious private/charter schools. The vast majority of Yeshivas are turning out students who fail to meet New York's equivalency standards:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Hasidic_education_con...

That's impressive given religious schools don't have to accommodate special needs students (ranging from physical disabilities to learning disabilities) which are incredibly expensive, can boot out students who are simply difficult to teach, and can boot out students who have disciplinary issues, disrupting their peers.

When religious schools that are allowed to cherrypick the cheapest-to-teach, brightest students end up producing kids who fail the floor (minimum state standards) that is astounding.

That's still pretty useful information if you're in that demographic though, right? Seems like the OP author and their readership might be, so it's reasonable for them to report their experiences for others like them (who might be overrepresented on this forum, for example) to ponder.

This more or less sums of my feelings on the subject as well. A properly home schooled kid is likely to excel to incomparable levels to the same kid in the lowest-common-denominator setting the public schooling system as become. If taught correctly and intensely. Unfortunately home schooling tends to self-select for many parents who have the worst possible intentions.

When I was home schooled my parents were extremely actively in the local home schooling groups. There might have been exactly one other family there that were in it for the actual better/accelerated education vs. indoctrination and shielding kids from reality/greater society. The community is also absolutely rife full of outright child abuse excused and swept under the rug in the name of religiosity and minding your own business.

I have very mixed feelings on the subject. On one hand, my home schooling until 5th grade likely got my all the way through high school in terms of academics. On the other hand, it certainly put me so far behind my peers socially I never really caught up to this day. This wasn't due to lack of trying or effort on my parents - it was due to the socializing being with a very specific segment of the population.

Of course every group and area is wildly different. That's kind of the point of home schooling. If I had another kid I would consider it strongly, but with a whole heck of a lot of professional support. I wouldn't even remotely consider it without having either an unlimited amount of time or a very high budget to augment what I can not realistically teach effectively.

Patent nonsense. Absolute rubbish. There are kids in mud huts in India, right outside the lower middle class home I grew up in, with no proper electricity or water supply, who would outcompete the American public school kid in every STEM metric. Kids over here pass shoddy 5-pointer AP calc exams and don't even know basic trig.They have to take remedial calc as freshmen. I know, I taught them as a TA. Best in the world ?!

The author already pointed out that it worked because they both worked from home. To most this is an unimaginable luxury.

The parents didn't strictly supervise or guide the kid in this case but I strongly assume that they engaged if the kid had questions or just wanted to talk something through. They also apparently had specialized software and a 3d printer at hand or were ready to buy one without long preamble.

The kid's interests were rather easy to handle up until a pretty high level of skill. With writing games and building small stuff you can get very far without a large workshop, risky activity, rare or hard to buy supplies etc.

I'm not at all saying the public education system can hold a candle to the effectiveness of what was told in this article and we could definitely improve a gazillion things about it. I'm just saying that this kid a lot of lucky factors coming together for it to work out THAT well.