Unschooling Is the Parenting Trend That's Pissing Everyone Off

I spent a month in a co-living community in some village in Austria. They were a diverse group of professionals from a variety of backgrounds (programmers, architect, doctor). They often ate meals together in the community kitchen and we would work in the garden together. I thought before arriving it was a hippy commune but it definitely wasn't. I had a lovely time.

Anyways one family with three children were doing this unschooling thing and the kids seemed well-socialized and explored their own interests. The oldest daughter went to Vienna a lot to take acting classes or something.

I thought it was a fine idea but that it took a lot of resources - one parent was always home and because of the community it was like the kids were being raised by the whole village. There were other kids to hang out with and plenty of space to do stuff. It seemed like you'd need a certain degree of wealth and structure to make it work.

In suburban America, I think it'd be a lot more challenging. The only American homeschoolers I've met were well-off Christians (again, wealth + community).

I went to public school for high school - sending my kid to public school.

One thing that is interesting to me. If you look at per pupil funding, and the number of kids in a classroom with ONE teacher - where is the money going?

We did preschool with a fraction of the cost and the teacher ratio was between 1:4 and 1:6. The the public school (with more per pupil funding per student by a huge margin) is 1:25-1:35!

Quick math:

An SFUSD fifth grade class might have 32 students. SFUSD does $24K per student lets say. Let's say indirect county / state / federal costs are another 15% so total system spend is $27K. That get's us to $860,000 in funding per year per class. Let's say a teacher is 123K per year. That would be 7 teachers. The question then is how much overhead is reasonable?

I was homeschooled from K-6th, and unschooled from 7th-12th, circa 90s-2000s. I have thoughts.

I wound up fine, by which I mean I managed to get a B.S. and M.S, and have a good-paying job. IME, this is in no way the norm for either group. To be fair, my upbringing was also conservative Christian (but in a weird way, like my mom encouraged me to do a comparative religion study in high school), so many of my peers were on the "college is useless and indoctrinates you" track.

I was able to do a lot of self-directed learning, which in retrospect was useful. For example, I showed a strong interest in computers since I was about six years old. As such, I was encouraged to explore them, had books purchased for me on the subject, etc. As a counterpoint, before unschooling, I was forced to learn Latin and Greek roots. I hated it at the time, but these have proven to be remarkably useful in life – turns out a stunning amount of English words have Latin or Greek roots, so you can figure out much of a word's meaning from them. I think there are some things that kids are unlikely to be interested in, but just like being forced to eat a balanced diet, are still the right choice.

My wife is a Montessori teacher, and I think it's the best middle ground. Kids are encouraged to learn what they're interested in at a time that they're interested in it, and a love for learning for the sake of learning is encouraged. At the same time, if a kid stubbornly refuses to learn anything, eventually they will be forced to go through lessons, because at some point, you have to have a baseline level of education.

I think it's notable that when people talk about how "broken" the public school system is, they are almost inevitably talking about America.

I was effectively hard-unschooled during my teenage years. I can't really complain about the experience. Most of my time was spent playing video games, reading, or debating people online in forums. I got my GED when I was seventeen and went to college. I had strange ideas about what college was (namely, I thought the PR copy universities provided was the "real thing" and was sorely disappointed to discover what amounted to an adult half-way house for professional employment rather than an actual place of learning).

In retrospect and purely on educational and financial grounds, I regret attending college, as I could've obtained the same information by paying for a community borrower's pass from the library to the same effect but without the pedigree.

My parents didn't do it for any ideological purpose; we simply lived in a bad area and they couldn't afford the tuition the Catholic schools were charging. My other siblings were sent to the local public high school, which was (and sadly remains) the worst in the state. Their life outcomes were much worse than my own.

The germ of truth in the wacky conspiracy theory is that public school teachers have had to stop using a lot of these bottom-up, self-directed techniques, which let the children control how fast the material is presented, and the order in which the material is learned.

Even though these kinds of techniques have been shown to be highly effective, it's just too risky for public school teachers to use them anymore. The teacher is so encumbered by top-down standards that they simply cannot let the students pick the pace or order, bottom up. The pace must be set by the teacher top-down, it must be the same pace for every student--and it has to be a pretty fast pace to fulfill all the top-down standards requirements.

Public school kids would benefit from more bottom-up, rather than top-down learning experiences. But public school teachers are evaluated on how well their students fill in those bubbles on standard exams. Home schooling parents just don't have this kind of accountability.

The desire to have quantitative, objective measurements to "hold teachers accountable" or "get rid of the lazy teachers who have tenure" has had a very unexpected side effect: Every public-school kid has to learn exactly the same things, in the same timeframe, in the same order, at the same pace.

I think that too many parents think there’s something wildly wrong with the public school system for a few reasons that include:

- Political fear-mongering set up by pro-privatization groups that want to profit off of

- The fact that schooling is difficult. Middle school and high school are challenging ages and no school can make the experience go perfectly.

- Anti-institution ideology spread through social media. I think a lot of groups online feel empowered to find alternatives and spread the word even if they are not statistically better outcomes.

Obviously the public school system isn’t perfect. It’s very inequitable based on your zip code. Not all districts are doing so well. But for the most part, engaged and supportive parents of kids in an average school system results in good outcomes.

Un-schooling isn’t the answer. It’s the Un-answer.