> 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.
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.
Remove a screen and a kid can have crazy skills.
Screens are really the opium of the people.
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.
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.
Is there any source for this?
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...
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.
Just providing another perspective.
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.
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.)
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'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.
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 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.
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...
Personally I could have used more socialization, but there is plenty of time after school to learn.
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.
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."
> 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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
TLDR - just because someone can read, doesn't mean they will, and my experience is that they won't.
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.
Here is a screen grab of a typical email. https://imgur.com/5d36jpq
The first questions I get are "when is first practice".
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.
Good point either way.
Both require literacy, but one of these things is fun, while the other is a chore.
Perhaps they are unrelated. perhaps I drew a wrong conclusion. But perhaps they aren't hurried, they are just lazy.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
“the most recent studies showing heritability for IQ as high as 80%.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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...
> 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.
[0] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/heredity/#PhilIssuArisTwi...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Do you feel you would have a different option of "unschooling" if you had tried to be successful in a different career path?
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.
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 honestly can't say I've ever met (or even heard about) anyone with such a similar story -- care to chat sometime?
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.
But homeschooling gives you the flexibility to pursue experiences that would be hard to manage if on a traditional school schedule.
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 .
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.
Your going to be screened out by a liberal arts graduate with a 2:2 in HR
What is much harder now due to tons of people doing those bootcamps.
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.
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.