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.
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.
Much more common to unschool for a bit then head back.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 ?!
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.
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.
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.
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.
which is probably happening in spite of school :)
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.