Just so everyone is clear, she was unschooled, which is pretty different from conventional homeschooling. There's no curriculum at all, kids drive their own learning. If they want to play video games all day they are welcome to. If they want to sleep till noon that is fine.
As unlikely as it seems to someone who has been through conventional schooling, what actually happens in these cases is the child's natural curiosity is not squashed by rote work. As a result they drive their own learning, motivated by the natural curiosity of all humans. It is hypothesized that punishment and boring tasks are needed to squash this natural state, and some like educational reformer John Galt [edit: sorry, I meant John Gatto; freudian slip there] even claim that doing so is the purpose of conventional modern classroom schooling which was established in the late 19th century to create an underclass of unquestioning factory workers who can obey directions from authority figures.
Regardless of how this all happens, unschoolers tend to be the most interesting and well educated people around. This idea is very threatening to most people, so reactions are often hostile when they are encountered and it is frequently claimed that each achieving unschooler is an aberration.
Having thought about (un|home|normal) schooling for my own kids, it seems like unschooling in particular depends very much on who the parents are. Is it underestimating people to say that most kids wouldn't engage in anything like what this girl did? Nor obviously would they have the opportunities to do primary research in biology with a family friend, but even aside from that, doesn't unschooling put a huge emphasis on the parents providing opportunities for the kid to express whatever natural curiosity he has? And this depends on the parents having the education and financial resources to do it.
Not being hostile at all, I'm genuinely interested -- trying to figure out myself what's the right thing to do for two little boys of my own.
I was unschooled. My parents are great, college-educated, knowledgeable people, but they're not preeminent scholars or trained teachers. They pretty much let me do what I wanted, and there were definitely times growing when I slacked off and did nothing remotely of value. However, I was always interested in computer programming, and I devoted a lot of time to learning it. My parents helped me get books and other resources, and I learned a lot from online material as well.
I launched a startup almost three years ago, when I was 18. It's doing very well.
I'm lucky that I happened to get into programming. It's cheap, (relatively) easy to learn on one's own, and it also helped me to learn bits of other fields. I honestly don't know how I would have turned out if I had gotten into something else, so this might be a testament to programming rather than to unschooling.
How well-rounded are you outside of computer programming? Hard sciences, humanities, etc. I ask the question because to me it seems like hyperfocus is a significant danger to the unschooling concept.
In particular, I can see a real possibility that an unschooled child with a heavy computer focus and a lack of parental guidance could very easily lock in on computers and neglect potentially "boring" but incredibly helpful topics. I'm thinking largely of the humanities here; you can get away without understanding, say, chemistry [1], but it seems difficult (in my circles, at least) to be taken seriously without a decent command of English--a skill that I think is refined largely from reading, because I've never met someone who could speak and write well who didn't enjoy reading--and it seems like it'd be difficult to really understand the world around you without a decent grasp of history. In neither case does Wikipedia really cover it; I think that a level of internalization of such things is necessary (it becomes harder to evaluate political statements without at least a high-level understanding of where they come from, which has driven my own recent forays into economics and sociology).
For similar over-focusing reasons, I'm generally but not completely skeptical of the "don't go to college" argument sometimes espoused here on HN; the focus on matters of immediacy--the get-a-job skills--strikes me as a good way of turning out someone with a few strong skills in a few areas and a generally fuzzy understanding of topics unrelated to their focus area. I am, however, even less fond of the idea of "max out your subject matter, take the bare minimum outside your degree area"--I have a hunch that a self-directed person is more likely to stumble into well-roundedness than somebody whose academic drive is constrained to do-your-job topics.
[1] - Not to say chemistry's a useless subject by any means, I actually draw on it sometimes in my day-to-day life. But knowledge of the hard sciences, physics possibly excepted, are a little less impactful overall.
I have had 'normal' schooling for the most part of my life.
Two years back, I got into web dev. Made an app or two.
Now working on others. I learnt everything about it on my own. For the first time in my life, I REALLY understood the meaning of an effective pitch and the value of expression. I taught myself to write well, to be able to communicate with the developer community, do a lot of math and well, coding. I spent time learning how to sketch too. I had so much fun studying the boring subjects - arts, writing etc. In fact, the 'boring' subjects were made boring only for lack of application!
Had I gone the 'normal' way: I don't know whether I'd have been better off but what I do know is that I could never have learnt so much.
It's really circumstantial. What works for someone may not work at all for someone else. So, there cannot be a fair comparison, so to speak.
Well, I wasn't trying to argue against going to college. I went to college for a year, and I would have stayed longer, but it wasn't practical to do that while running my site as it continued to grow. I would definitely like to go back at some point.
I'm not clueless about the world around me, but I'm not as well-rounded as I would like to be. However, I'm not sure I would have fared better if I had gone to an American public high school.
I absolutely agree. I feel that without the proper parental support a student (do you still call a person who is unschooled a student?) would end up not getting very far. As a personal example I know that neither of my parents would have been able to discuss mathematics and biology with me in the same way this girl's parents did with her.
I'm thinking the same. (I'm not married, nor I have children right now). However, it's essential that they get some guidance; like joining private courses for English, Chemistry and other stuff. Outside of school, certainly. So they learn in their own pace, and no stress (or aim) to get high grades (or any grades at all).
It seams to me this strategy will hit high and low. For exceptional people, it will produce the best possible results. For those of us less elite, it would produced worse results than traditional schooling.
Do you mean homeschooling or unschooling or both here? I haven't seen research that specifically targets unschooling (which usually is lumped under homeschooling as it's considered a form of it), but homeschooling studies time and again point to it having superior results in general than public or private schooling, as far as academic testing and low college drop-out rate and high entrepreneurship rate and social skills (like a double-blind study was done years ago and found that homeschoolers exhibited less negative behavior like pushing and name calling and more positive behavior like sharing than age-matched traditionally educated children) and so on. I have yet to see a single study showing homeschooling to produce worse results than traditional schooling, but if you have, please share it.
>For those of us less elite, it would produced worse results than traditional schooling.
Worse by what measure? It depends what you want to do with yourself to some extent I think.
For example, I've a young friend who's a very gifted artist and has a lot of encouragement in that direction (from her graphic designer mother); however, I consider her to be a bit behind in the 'hard' subjects. Her ancient history is pretty good and she knows Greek mythology better than anyone I know.
I'd go for a mixture of home-/un-schooling if it weren't for lack of resources at home. If it were possible I'd also send my lad to school a couple of days a week too - so some school days; some homeschool and some open, student led education.
I disagree that exceptional people will be exceptional people no matter what. I am pretty sure most will agree that if we keep a baby in a dark closet, supplying only enough nutrition to stay alive, that baby will not likely turn into anyone typically considered exceptional. What environment one grows up in does affect the odds of whether a person will someday be considered exceptional or not, and not always in the ways people might think. For example, many would think having living, middle-class parents would be a help on the path to eminence, and yet, not necessarily so...Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in the book "Creativity" notes that about three out of ten men and two out of ten women in his sample of eminently creative Americans (he calls them "exceptional") were orphaned before they reached their teens (and this study was conducted long after it was common for young people to lose their parents). One theory is that this allows the young person to feel a great sense of liberation to be and do anything and at the same time, perhaps feel a tremendous burden to live up to the expectations attributed to a missing parent (having a parent just leave rather than die also seems to help give one an edge here). Now it was also true that there were many example of a warm and stimulating family environment to conclude that hardship or conflict was necessary to give someone a creative urge, but what was noticed was that exceptional individuals either had the warm and stimulating environment or a very deprived and challenging one...what appeared to be missing was the common middle ground.
Social class is a similar scenario. Only about 10% of the eminent people came from a middle-class childhood (which in America, is represented by way more than 10%, often I think more like 50% of the population). About 30% of the eminent people in M.H.'s study had parents who were farmers, poor immigrants, or blue collar workers, but the parents didn't identify with their lower-class position and had high aspirations for their children to move up in the world. Then about 34% had fathers who held an intellectual occupation (professor, writer, orchestra conductor, or research scientist). The remaining quarter were brought up with parents who were lawyers, physicians, or wealthy businessmen (and the general population has way fewer such people, as people here likely realize). A quote on page 172 in the book reads:
"Clearly it helps to be born in a family where intellectual behavior is practiced, or in a family that values education as an avenue of mobility - but not in a family that is comfortably middle-class."
Here is seems the author has concluded that there can be no intellectual behavior practiced or value of education as an avenue of mobility in a family that is comfortably middle-class, for which I would disagree. But I do believe having the contacts that the upper class tend to have and the drive to have more than one has grown up with or to better the world or such are factors that contribute to how exceptional one becomes or is noticed as having become.
Another quote, this time from page 173:
"It is quite strange how little effect school-even high school-seems to have had on the lives of creative people. Often one senses that, if anything, school threatened to extinguish the interest and curiosity that the child had discovered outside its walls."
Choose your walls wisely. Or choose to stay outside of walls.
I wonder about unschooling. I went though a more traditional home school experience 20 years ago that basically consisted of my reading all the traditional textbooks in something like 2-4 hours a day over the first 2-3 months, a few enrichment activity's like field trips and then keeping myself entertained the rest of the time. I learned a lot of things out of curiosity and boredom, but I clearly missed a few basic areas of from the traditional school experience. Primarily grammar, spelling, rote history, and I avoided taking any tests outside of annual state mandated standardized tests.
So, I can see how things might work out with even less direction, but it seems like most people would miss out on some of the basics. I mean is it really an issue to say, here is the 5th grade history textbook you should probably read at some time in the next 6 months? Or even go to enough Shakespeare's plays that the language stops seeming strange and you can fall down laughing watching ask you like it?
I unschooled (was unschooled?) from my sophomore year of high school through college. That's, without a doubt, hugely different from doing it through elementary school I think, but I'm happy to answer any questions.
How much if any direction where you given? How where the required standardized tests dealt with? How does unschooling fit in with collage / graduate school / scholarships? Also, why did you go with unschooling over the other options?
O, and thanks for taking the time to answer a few questions.
I took a calculus course at a local community college, and my dad recommended a bunch of economics resources to me, but for programming (which was really the brunt of what I taught myself) I basically went it alone. I also spent considerable time volunteering with one of the presidential campaign's IT departments.
By the time I left high school I didn't (as far as I know) have any required testing. I took the SATs/ACTs/SAT IIs the same as any other student.
Wherever possible I applied using a college's home school form, and I wrote supplemental essays wherever possible explaining why I left my high school (especially important since I had awful grades at the time I left). I received an academic scholarship from the school I ultimately chose to attend, I assume because of my SAT/ACT scores.
I left my high school because I was extremely unhappy with it during my sophomore year. No option besides teaching myself things ever occurred to me.
You seem to effectively communicate, so I am assuming it wasn't a struggle to patch those holes?
We home education, but it isn't full on unschool here either. There will be definite gaps, but the general assumption that I have made is filling those gaps won't be a terrific struggle. It is always interesting to us to hear first hand accounts.
I guess the definition of "unschooling" can be a fuzzy one. Wikipedia gives the following definition:
"Unschooling is a range of educational philosophies and practices centered on allowing children to learn through their natural life experiences, including play, game play, household responsibilities, work experience, and social interaction, rather than through a more traditional school curriculum."
I consider our son to have been homeschooled for K-4th grade as we were using a private school's curriculum at home and he was having tests graded by a teacher hired by the private school and paid by us. He went on field trips and did a bunch of other things (played with Legos, studied electricity and geography, etc.) with other homeschoolers and played with both homeschooled and traditionally schooled children. One day when he was 6 and in 4th grade, he was reading a college engineering book (friends of the family had given him when he was five, why I am not sure) when I came to him and said it was "time for school" and to come to the kitchen (where we typically "did school"). He looked up at me and responded, "Why should I stop doing what I am doing here, which is actually helping me to learn something new, to go in the kitchen a fill out a bunch of worksheets on things I've long since known?" Foolishly, I answered, "Because we paid good money for this program. But if you want to go it on your own once you finish the fourth grade curriculum, we can give that a try." I should have just ended homeschooling with a private school curriculum right then and there, but I am not as quick a learner as our son.
Anyway, after 4th grade, he learned using all sorts of activities and books, and unschooling was the most delightful part of my career as a homeschool teacher/parent (as really my son was more the teacher than I; he had started correcting my spelling and offering me more precise words for my business letters when he was only two). He went to Shakespearean plays since he was three or four, I think (we had a very smart entrepreneurial friend who owned a tech company by day and ran a Shakespearean group by night and weekend, and he still doing both today). And while I admit I feel history was his worst subject, he was still far better at it than most American adults, as supported by his score on the Culturescope test (where he scored higher at age 7 than most high school seniors) and his being a top student at age 11 and 12 in his university's Honors College upper level history and culture courses.
I don't see unschooling as meaning the parents can't provide any direction to the child's education, or use any textbooks, though I also don't think textbooks are necessary for learning in general (the only exception perhaps - and this is only a perhaps - being upper level math).
Thanks very much for all your posts here, I read them all.
There are so very few profoundly gifted kids and hearing all these anecdotes from a parent is a rare treat.
Clearly for highly intelligent children, unschooling - going their own way academically, is something that works very well. There's also the traditional child prodigy approach of pushing them even harder, and it seems in those cases the kids are never heard from again, perhaps they crack.
Some people ask if unschooling can work well with students that are just normal and aren't highly intelligent. I've seen where it works well in that case as well (or at least as well as traditional schooling). But, obviously for a special needs child with disabilities such as Downs Syndrome, it would not work as they need much more intense interaction just to learn how to live on their own in society. Or say for Helen Keller, what saved her from madness was intense personal tutoring and not just being left to her self. Presumably there is a dividing line in their between disabled and normal where unschooling becomes more suitable. Since unschooling is not a big thing in the modern era, there's few if any studies on results looking into these issues, only anecdotal data and what we know from meeting unschooling students.
I think you have a misperception of unschooling as being left on one's own. That's not what unschooling is, at least not typically. It is more just along the lines of learning through ways that aren't a traditional "school" approach to learning. I have to meet some friends for dinner, so can't elaborate more on what you shared above, but will try to do so soon (if not tonight, tomorrow). Thanks for taking the time to read what I shared (I had doubted anyone would see them as nobody had posted in days), and you are most welcome for the sharing - glad at least one person found them a treat! :)
Thanks for the response and the offer of more details. To clarify, I am fairly familiar with varieties of unschooling and unschoolers and terms such as facilitated learning and strewing.
I didn't mean to suggest going one's own way is the same as being left alone, though it can be if the child is ready for that. I hadn't attempted to respond to some of the comments here by others asking how unschooling works since it's not just one single thing or defined approach.
Anyway I wanted to clarify that, so you don't waste time answering the wrong question. I'm certainly interested in your further views on the topic.
How I interpreted your own story was that after 4th grade your son was able to choose his own path and you were available to facilitate and assist in acquiring needed materials and arranging requested meetings with scientists, going on trips, and what not. His choosing his own path and curriculum as it were is what I saw that you were presenting as consistent with an unschooling philosophy.
You just taught me a term, as I had never heard of strewing until now. I suspect that term became popular after 2000 (the year our son began college). We did indeed strew.
I'm not even sure I would call what we did after 4th grade "choosing a curriculum", which would mean to me having things more laid out (a syllabus and such) than I think we had. I just pulled his portfolio down for a period of time when he was 6 to 7, and it has things like this in it:
1) A letter he wrote to Black Dog and Leventhal Publishers, Inc. noting that when he was reading their book "101 More Read Aloud Classics", the book went from page 96 to page 126 (only he described this much more cutely than I am here) and therefore was "missing 16 (or 32, depending on the way you look at it) pages" and he asked if he could have those pages, either in a separate 32-page book or in another complete book (and he received a new hardbound copy, even though his original was paperback, only 10 days later).
2) A list of books read (with start and finish dates)
3) Photos of things like his planning a lemonade stand with a girl, standing next to a Domino creation, riding a bike, using a continuity checker while fixing a hairdryer, taking a tap dance class, playing in a few handchime choir performances, getting an organ lesson (informal at the handchime choir director's home), visiting the Library of Congress and an airport museum, playing racquetball and ping pong, visiting Montpelier and Monticello, painting, working with an adult friend on a circuit for a robot costume, accepting s Multiple Scerlosis Read-a-thon top fundraiser award, singing at a Halloween campfire, attending a physics of flight class at the zoo, studying the steam engine at a railroad museum, visiting the FDR and Jefferson memorials, attending a university physics program, attending a van Gogh exhibit,visiting Savannah, etc.
4. His subtest and composite scores on achievement and aptitude testing at the end of 6th grade (where he hit the ceiling of 9th grade equivalency on reading, vocabulary, math problem solving, spelling, usage, capitalization and punctuation, science, and social students and scored a general aptitude in the 99th percentile (despite being years younger than a typical 6th grade graduate).
5. A list of examples of questions others posed that he knew the answers for, such as: an electrical engineer giving him a truth table to solve and his solving it correctly even though the engineer at first had the wrong answer himself; in a "Physiology of Speed" lecture given at a science museum that was attended almost exclusively by adults, the college professor asked, "What are endorphins?" and our son was the only one in the room to raise a hand (he had read about endorphins on his own somewhere); in a "Physics of Flight" class, where he was the youngest student, he answered "Who are the Mongolfier brothers?" (he said he had learned this from the software program "Museum Madness", a program he used when he was just two or three); when taking a Degas tour at an art museum, he answered so many questions with such clarity and insight that the tour guide and some parents on the tour felt certain he was planning to be an artist; while eating out at a restaurant, I noticed a picture on the wall of a man carving a statue and it coming to life and asked who the sculpture in the picture was and he answered, "Pygmalion"; at Physics is Phun, he helped solve an equation to find the speed of light using metric measurements, and in doing so, used scientific notation and converted nanoseconds to seconds, among other things.
6. Examples of other ways his mind was strong, such as how he continued to play things on the piano that he often had only heard once prior, and could pick up instruments he didn't usually play and start playing real tunes on them instantly (something that came in handy years later at the Media Lab when a graduate student invented an instrument that he thought would only make nonsense but interesting sounds when used to draw, but our son picked it up and showed the fellow student how it could be used to draw/play a real tune), and how when he was told to jump and risk breaking your legs if in a fire while in a second floor bedroom, he noted that this wouldn't be an issue when he was an adult as his home would have ladders that would automatically shoot out from upper floors when the fire alarm was set off.
7. Samples of some calendar (page-a-day) questions he knew right off, like one asked Fermat's theorem and he stated it perfectly (he had read it in one of his father's books).
8. List of classical myths, poems, stories, and speeches read.
9. Topics covered in grammar and literature.
10. Misc. other ways English was "taught" (seeing two Shakespearean plays at the Folger Library, keeping a journal, writing thank you notes, playing games like "The Play's the Thing", attending a writer's workshop, going to performances at theaters in the area, etc.
11. His making three-colored graphs (one made a flower image) on his new graphing calculator (he had to ask politely on and off for two years to get a graphing calculator), and other topics in math such as probability (figuring out median, mode, median, and range), special triangles, etc.
12. Topics discussed in science, such as internal combustion engines, Anton van Loeuwenhoek, Gregor Mendel, curved reflectors, acids/bases/chemical reactions, experiments with different rocks, adolescence and puberty (and it was good we covered this early as he went through it early; he also took the topic in college when he was 11), and a whole lot more.
13. Topics in geography (24 are listed), world civilization (25 items listed), and American civilization (18 items listed)
14. Health education (fire prevention fair at mall, AIDS, newspaper articles on zinc lozenges and cigars, etc.
15. Topics in art (25 listed).
16. Topics in music (things like Scott Joplin, shapes of melodies, how melody works with chords, attending a Peter and the Wolf performance,etc.
17. Spanish class at the elementary school and Italian class at the community college.
18. Good manners worksheet (one I typed up myself where he had to check off if it was a "Do" or a "Don't" (things like asking when a guest at someone else's home if they prefer you to leave your shoes on or take them off, and get this oldie..."rewind videotapes after watching them"!).
19. A letter to a local paper's editor that resulted in his being offered a position as a writer for the paper (not that this was his intent at all when he wrote).
20. The copy of an essay he wrote that won him $300 in U.S. Savings bonds in a national essay contest.
21. Lots of other stuff (I just scratched the surface there).
So it wasn't like we never used any textbooks (we used a few at times where we felt it made sense), but we didn't do much planning in advance, doesn't seem to me, so much as sort of went with the flow of what seemed interesting to delve into at any given time.
I had read about unschooling, but hadn't heard this about the rote work, etc.
I think it's interesting because in school, I absolutely refused to do homework unless it was absolutely necessary to pass the class. Instead of being a straight-A student, I often got B's and C's, and even an F a couple times.
I was also in a special 'gifted' class in elementary school that took me out of regular classes once a week and taught us other things. (One of which was programming, which is where my career went!) We still had to do all our normal class work, and since we missed 20% of the in-class lectures, that meant a lot of catch-up each week, which was a lot more interesting than sitting in class and listening.
I have a feeling, after reading your post, that those things are related to my continued love of learning. I also have a feeling that unschooling would have been even better for me, but at least I didn't get burnt out young.
I think what people are pointing out is the lack of social learning when unschooled. In school you learn how to make friends, how to avoid enemies, how to live with other people, how to interact with different people...
From my experience social knowledge gained at school doesn't map very well to the real world. In every environment I've been in (except for my first part time job) the social interaction was vastly different from what I experienced in school.
Yes, I remember in my first real job, even though it was a crappy job, I was ecstatic about the fact that, with very few exceptions people were basically polite. There was no outright bullying. Is this adult life? I thought. Great!
This is a misconception. None of these social situations are unique to a school environment. It can be argued that you can actually increase the opportunities for social engagement outside of the confines of school.
seems to me like school is the great melting pot of our society,
now that I'm out of school it seems like I live a very Bowling Alone (http://www.amazon.com/Bowling-Alone-Collapse-American-Commun...) existence, I interact with people at work, and family, it seems like that is the exent of my non superficial interactions
maybe I'm paticularly introverted, but I wouldn't home/unschool my daughter simply because I don't want her social universe to be that small
also schooling is one of the few shared experiences in our society
I believe the social universe is often smaller in a traditional school than when homeschooled. Public schools are often made up of those living in the same area, which often means similar social economic status rather than a melting pot. I didn't have anything but fellow whites in my classes in public school till third grade, when we had one student who wasn't white, and in 5th grade, there was a second (though I still only had one in my class that year). This wasn't your experience? Then guess what - so much for the shared experience, no matter that we both went to a traditional school.
Having had chicken pox is an experience most of the population also shares. Now I contracted the virus as a baby when my brother brought it home from kindergarten. Can't say as I remember it at all as I was barely out of the womb, but I apparently got so few pox marks that I got shingles as a 20-year-old college senior, and oh what fun that was. Has our son had Chicken Pox? No, as we opted to get him the vaccine. I hope he doesn't feel we wronged him by depriving him of a typical childhood experience.
When our son was 5 and homeschooled, he was playing in the ocean while his traditionally educated cousins were in school. My brother asked me, "When are you going to let him out into the real world?"
My response was something like this:
"If you think your children are in the real world because they are in a traditional school, I think you are deluding yourself. Do you have to ask permission to urinate? No, and neither do most people in the real world, but your children do. Ditto getting a drink of water. Are your children starving? No? Well, that is the real world for many children (as of 2010, the the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization puts the figure at over 13% of the world population is undernourished, but I didn't have an iPhone to look this up on the beach back in 1996). Have your children been sexually molested? Perhaps you'd like to set them up for that experience as it's one many have had."
I gave some other examples of what "the real world" is for other people in the world and ended with:
"I believe we can make our own worlds to a good degree, and feel it irresponsible not to realize that and choose what world you'd like for yourself and your loved ones and to work toward living in that world."
How does unschooling work? Do you still have to pass standardized tests, do you apply for a GED at some point? How do you clear this with the state? Are this issues with getting into a college?
What if a child is not interested at all in an important skill, at some point wouldn't you have to force them to work on it? E.g., Algebra.
It varies by state as to whether there are standardized tests required. Our state didn't (still doesn't, far as I know) require testing, but required students to either be under an umbrella school (like the private school served for our son for early on) or to come in to meet with teachers I think it was twice a year for a portfolio review. The teachers we had for our reviews were incredibly supportive of our son and our homeschooling him. The meeting place was a huge internal room with no windows, and one time, there was a power outage and we were all in pitch blackness. Our son was 8 at the time and had brought it a Lego Mindstorms creation of his and he felt around on the table for his remote control for it and had the lights on it turned on in no time and was using that light to escort people out. One of the teachers asked for our son's autograph and said, "You'll be on the cover of magazines in no time!"
He never applied for a GED. At age 8, he took the SAT to see if he could qualify for a CTY engineering summer course that could also give Johns Hopkins college credit (for an extra price), and his scores not only qualified him for that course and all the other CTY courses, but had the state U close to us interested in him. They asked to meet with him as soon as they saw his scores, and handed him an application when he met with them, which he filled out and mailed as soon as he got back home, and within a week, his admission was in our mailbox. This was not at all what I expected when we approved of his taking the SAT so young, nor anything I was particularly comfortable with happening (and we did hold him off till he turned 9, at least), but he had been asking to attend college math and engineering courses since he was 6, and had we to do things over again, I actually think we'd have been better off letting him start college at 6, bizarre that I know that sounds.
We never had the issue with our son not being interested in learning an important skill. Instead, we had the issue of his wanting to learn skills before we were feeling it was worth his learning them. For example, he wanted to learn calculus when he was 7. I typically bought him whatever books he wanted, but this was one where I drew the line. But then he became the top fundraiser in the state for a Multiple Sclerosis read-a-thon (his third year in a row doing so) and one of the prizes was a $50 Borders gift certificate and he used that to buy himself a calculus book. When he took calculus at the university at age 9 (as that is the level the college placement test put him at, must to we parents' shock), he was one of the top students in his class of over 160 students, and he had never even taken anything past algebra I formally before taking that calculus class. But his lack of having had geometry/algebraII/trig/precalc prior to college did not cause him problems in math down the road; he earned one of his bachelor's degree in math at age 13, and took a mix of five college upper level and graduate level courses one semester in modern algebra and number theory, math analysis II, and three other math subjects plus an upper level CS while doing a paid internship off campus and still got a 4.0 that semester (he also did fine in graduate-level math courses at MIT and Harvard). And math is probably the area where most think a linear progression is key, but for some, it actually doesn't appear to be.
The main character of 'Atlas Shrugged' by Ayn Rand. A very popular (in the US) book that is somewhat controversial, mainly because a number of admirers take it all too seriously.
"Who is John Galt?" is expression of helplessness and despair in 'Atlas Shrugged' by Ayn Rand. A very popular (in the US) book that is somewhat controversial, mainly because a number of admirers take it too seriously.
As unlikely as it seems to someone who has been through conventional schooling, what actually happens in these cases is the child's natural curiosity is not squashed by rote work. As a result they drive their own learning, motivated by the natural curiosity of all humans. It is hypothesized that punishment and boring tasks are needed to squash this natural state, and some like educational reformer John Galt [edit: sorry, I meant John Gatto; freudian slip there] even claim that doing so is the purpose of conventional modern classroom schooling which was established in the late 19th century to create an underclass of unquestioning factory workers who can obey directions from authority figures.
Regardless of how this all happens, unschoolers tend to be the most interesting and well educated people around. This idea is very threatening to most people, so reactions are often hostile when they are encountered and it is frequently claimed that each achieving unschooler is an aberration.