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I recommend to any parent Peter Gray's column in Psychology Today, Freedom to Learn https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/freedom-learn

and his book Freed to Learn https://www.amazon.com/Free-Learn-Unleashing-Instinct-Self-R....

He writes about how kids learn on their own if we don't straightjacket them too much and how we're straightjacketing them.

Also Lenore Skenazy's Let Grow: https://letgrow.org, a program to help restore childhood. She was called the worst mom in America after she wrote how she let her 9-year-old take the subway home, embraced the title, and started the free range kid movement.

Question:

1. Anyone considering or practicing unschooling/self directed education [0] for your children?

2. Were you home schooled/unschooled/practiced self directed education ?

What’s your story?

I am Considering this approach. Just finished reading free to learn [1] and Peter gray makes a compelling case for this approach. Also the documentary “schooling the world” covers some of the chilling effects of compulsory schooling. [2] it has made me seriously question our current education system.

Thoughts?

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unschooling

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Free-Learn-Unleashing-Instinct-Self-R...

[2] https://schoolingtheworld.org

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XLSIgZWNR9M

⬐ goodoldboys

I'm considering it. I went to public school my entire life but I've spent the better part of the last decade with self-directed learning (programming).

I think it's that combined with my belief that our current educational model is broken and inefficient (as well as articles like these) that makes me want to explore unschooling more. Thanks for sharing these links.

⬐ ismail

thanks. What do you think is broken with the current model?

Added an Ask Hn for the question.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18878153

⬐ mmierz

My parents did something like this. My near-total isolation prior to college resulted in terrible social skills. I hurt a lot of people and experienced crushing loneliness. In my 30s, I'm starting to feel like I can pass as a "normal" person and have human relationships.

On the plus side I do still know a tremendous amount of trivia about topics that I was interested in as a child, I'm not particularly interested in following rules, and I'm not afraid to be alone or to learn things from a book without anyone to help. These qualities have served me in good stead.

On the balance, I'm not sure I would change anything, but you should be aware of what your kids might be in for.

Ok, time to link a book : Free to learn by Peter Gray https://www.amazon.com/Free-Learn-Unleashing-Instinct-Self-R...

Or how and why parents and adults should really stop trying to control their children.

⬐ davidpelayo

Awesome, I'll link the book to the github repo.

It may seem that US educational system favour individualism, but there are no indications that it has any significant consequences. Google failed to find correlations between performance at college and performance at work [1].

Also there are schools where children are free to do anything during school time including entering/leaving any lecture or activity at will at any moment. Yet there are no indications that on average it makes those that attend such schools any worse in a later life [2]

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/business/in-head-hunting-b...

[2] https://www.amazon.com/Free-Learn-Unleashing-Instinct-Self-R...

⬐ 131012

Individualism, as a behaviour and a way to relate with peers, is learned in elementary and high school. Passivity and the wilfullness to perform task for a reward are learned in elementary school. Relations with peers mostly develop in teenage years.

It is very unlikely that this decade of taming has no impact whatsoever on future working behaviours, and not explaining (at least partly) the american individualism you speak of. Competing for grades through individual work, the traditional school model imported from Western Europe, might indeed breed individualism and competition. As could a ruthless school environment of punishing and policing could steer a children toward antisocial behaviours.

Mainstream educational theories suggest project-based education as a way to teach teamwork, but critiques suggest it can be distressing and yield lesser results with students already struggling with learning school knowledge.

TL;DR: The studies cited does do not prove the point: it is very unlikely that schooling has no impact on working behaviours.

⬐ fpoling

The point is not that schooling has no impact on future life. Rather that what is taught in school has no impact. Children learns from behaviour of teachers and each other. This knowledge stays. Particular topics that school system thinks it teaches does not stay. Witness widespread functional illeteracy despite apparent ability to read in school.

⬐ 131012

Children learn from everything, but what will have the most important impact is hard to assess. Most variables that can explain educational achievements and results are highly multicolinear, so saying this has an impact and this has none is really, really hard, maybe impossible. To make an arithmetic metaphor (yes, some school knowledge stick ;) ), I prefer < and > to = and != for social sciences assertions. Even if we like discrete categories because it is makes bold and satisfying statements, using them is always a reduction in precision. Just like in math I guess.

To tackle the question of widespread functional illiteracy, it is necessary to open the Pandora Box of social inequality, as it is generally accepted that the most important variable to predict school performance is the parent's (mother's) level of education.

⬐ ttam

> Google failed to find correlations between performance at college and performance at work [1].

Well, in Google employees. Which belong to that 1% of the 1% ... etc (and not to mention that many Googlers did not go to school in the US)

⬐ emiliobumachar

Good point. How many people with actual bad grades even make it to Google?

Yet, even if they just found that the difference between 99% grade and 100% grade did not translate to the workplace, that's an interesting result. It's not something I would have guessed at with confidence.

⬐ magicalist

>> It is a terrible thing that our educational system favors so much individualism, even when most important work(Nobel prices, great products or services) are done in teams.

> It may seem that US educational system favour individualism, but there are no indications that it has any significant consequences. Google failed to find correlations between performance at college and performance at work

These aren't incompatible ideas.

You can drill into kids the idea of the lone genius fixing the world (Newton, Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, political figures like Thomas Jefferson and FDR) ignoring the history and vast apparatus that supported them, and you can fail to teach them how to effectively work in teams.

As long as you don't grade these things directly (which would be extremely difficult anyways), you wouldn't expect a correlation between a student's opinion on individualism and their grade.

⬐ fpoling

> You can drill into kids

The thing is that one cannot. Or at least there are no idications that those drills have any significant effect on a later life fading away pretty quickly a year or two after school/college. At best during those drills children learn from teacher behaviour, not words. I.e. they learn how to force others to do things they do not understand or need.

⬐ magicalist

Again, how are you measuring this correlation? If it's not something that's measured, you don't have any numbers to correlate with.

You could equivalently say that scores in any particular subject in school don't correlate with success after school, which is usually true. But it doesn't follow that net success wouldn't change if that subject was taught better: not only would you be teaching different techniques than is measured in that correlation, but you also have network effects when more people are trained in something.

An easy example of this is the topic at hand: software development as part of a team, which many schools don't teach (or don't teach well), but is a skill picked up quickly (hopefully) when entering a job with more than a handful of developers. I'm not talking pair programming or anything specific, just generally being able to develop software with other people.

Here you have something that isn't measured at many schools and is important to success at many companies. So you'd find no correlation between the two, but better developed experience would undoubtedly help the worker and the team in that situation (whether or not that's a skill best learned in school vs on the job is a different question).

> At best during those drills children learn from teacher behaviour, not words

Your apparently data-based argument is wandering into gut feelings, but this is what I was talking about. If a teacher lionizes Albert Einstein for single-handedly saving humanity from 19th century luminiferous aethers and inventing the atomic bomb, the idea that progress is only made by hermit inventors is going to continue to propagate. People are born to be math geniuses, they don't have to work at it, etc.

⬐ fpoling

As a part of development team one learns precisely from behaviour of others when one is not a subject of a learning drill. The book in [2] from my comment above was rather convincing that this the most effective way to learn. And such learning does not imply that one learns team work, as one could learn habits of a single most harizmatic person, not from the whole team.

As for teachers lionizing something, then consider that in Soviet Union in school and university one was constantly subject to drills about Communist Party. It did not help the idea to survive at all.

⬐ sfifs

Two words, Selection bias

⬐ 65827

Fortunately there are more metrics to judge the value of an education and a life than "how productive were they at fucking google".

⬐ BrandonMarc

No kidding. I once read an article where a lady at Google was giving resume advice for how to stand out and get hired by an awesome company, like Google. She gives her own resume as an example, and after one glance I'm frankly pissed off.

Why? Her resume shows she graduated college at age 12. Well Hells bells, señorita, if I was a genius like that getting hired at Google would be (more of a) cinch for me, too.

⬐ sdenton4

It's not that academics are not a useful precursor to work, but that the academy and the company are evaluating people on apparently orthogonal metrics. Which in itself is a really interesting result.

Very sad, but typical story.

> “What’s a bad day?” I ask the class, when I’m done reading. “A school day,” Lea... says. Lea has always seemed perky and upbeat. I start to laugh as if Lea’s comment is a joke, but no one else does. Her eyes look watery. The boy beside her nods. I ask Lea why, and she tells me she is stressed out and unhappy, “every single day” during the week.

The principal of the school would like to eliminate homework, but the parents demand that their children are "challenged". There is no evidence that this pressure and forced study actually benefits children.

What about letting kids find out what they want to do for themselves? Try things out, feel free to fail without an adult standing over and judging them.

There is a totally different style of education called "democratic free schools" or "Sudbury schools" where children are free to do as they like (within democratically made rules), no curriculm, no mandatory exams or meetings, no book reports, no required English or math. In follow-up surveys, graduates are happy, well-adjusted, and successful.

Here is a 9 min intro video about the original Sudbury Valley School: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awOAmTaZ4XI

And here is a book "Free to Learn": http://www.amazon.com/Free-Learn-Unleashing-Instinct-Self-Re...

In democratic free schools, like Sudbury Valley School, students are free to follow their interests without any compulsory courses or exams. In follow-up studies, former students are happy and successful even though they were never formally "taught" to read, do math, or write a "book report".

The typical school model was designed to control students, it is unnecessary and even harmful to real education. Non-compulsory education is not just for smart kids, all children have a natural inclination to learn.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awOAmTaZ4XI

http://www.amazon.com/Free-Learn-Unleashing-Instinct-Self-Re...

⬐ agumonkey

The need to trade nature/randomness for predictability, bandwidth and absurd indicators pops in a lot of places, it's somehow scary.

⬐ mercer

I agree insofar that it greatly benefitted me that I was pretty much free to do as I pleased from age 12 to 18, and then semi-free throughout college.

But looking at my siblings and some of my friends, I hesitate to make a blanket statement about this freedom. Perhaps everyone can do well if they're given this freedom from a very young age. I don't know. But I've met plenty of people who, if given this freedom in middle/high school (12+?), would not have been able to handle it. Whether this is because they already were 'corrupted' up to that age, or whether they have different personalities, I don't know. But I've seen it happen.

⬐ 0xdeadbeefbabe

Just because you've seen it happen doesn't mean it always happens, so I'd hesitate to make a "freedom is good for me and not most people" statement. Here's an anecdote with a reference (still not that great I know), a 20 year old is arrested for armed robbery and goes to jail for 3 years, later he discovers heroin, and then much later he kicks the habit and becomes a Saxophone Colossus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonny_Rollins

⬐ mercer

My point was merely that I hesitate to conclude that this kind of freedom works for everyone. Personally I think it works much better for many more people than we often tend to think, so I'm actually in favor of schooling that is more free.

There is a really good book that came out last year called Free to Learn [1]. The Sudbury Valley School model comes up frequently in the book. If it's something you're interested in, definitely check it out.

[1]: http://www.amazon.com/Free-Learn-Unleashing-Instinct-Self-Re...