The World of the Un-Schooled

One question I often ask home-schooled students is what prevented them from simply turning on the television and watching I Love Lucy reruns all day long. To my amazement, some reply that they did just that, got bored, and consequently picked up books and taught themselves--at least how to read and some history and English literature. In other words, their homeschooling was self-directed and somewhat unstructured.

One of the many problems with formal schooling is that it's a one-size-fits-all model to meet the needs of a diverse and disparate population. For those it doesn't fit, they find themselves struggling and left out. Another problem is that there is little experimentation and little incentive to eradicate what turns out to be bad experiments (see also here). (Out of 67 students in two sections of Principles of Microeconomics, eight turned in their first test with the word "incentive" spelled "insentive.")

Very little information is known about un-schooling, but it's an experiment that caters to the (at least short-term) abilities and needs of the individual student.

As the number of children who are home-schooled grows — an estimated 1.1 million nationwide — some parents like Ms. Walter are opting for what is perhaps the most extreme application of the movement’s ideas. They are “unschooling” their children, a philosophy that is broadly defined by its rejection of the basic foundations of conventional education, including not only the schoolhouse but also classes, curriculums and textbooks.

Here is one person who appears successfully un-schooled.

Peter Kowalke, 27, was unschooled as a child and went on to earn a degree in journalism with a concentration in math three years ago from the Scripps School of Journalism at Ohio University.

“You don’t know everything, and there are definite gaps in most unschoolers’ backgrounds, but you cover most of what you need,” he said. “And if you find out that you need something that you haven’t studied, you’ll have much more drive to actually learn it.”

“But it can be tough,” said Mr. Kowalke, a magazine writer who is married to a woman who was also unschooled. They met while he was filming a documentary about his educational experiences. “It’s always harder to forge your own path without someone telling you what to do.”

What a great last sentence.