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Comment by beer_cub | Hacker News Reader

Never heard of this Unschool term, but I was certainly Unschooled for my entire life until 18 when I went to community college and spent 4 years learning how to be a person around other people. I ended up getting a MA in the humanities, but my education led me to believe that my Unschooling as we're calling it now, was neglect. I suffered a great deal, and have tried to discourage homeschooling to any of my friends now that I'm in my 30s.

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The article addresses this; if your parents had kept you out of school with the explicit goal of guiding you through self-directed study, and actually followed through with that the entire time, you likely would have had a better experience.

Neglect is just, unfortunately, neglect, and I'm sorry you had to go through that.

I really hope you won't continue discouraging homeschooling for your friends' kids. It can clearly be a great experience for a child, if the parents are dedicated to putting in the work to make it so.

Unschooling is a relatively uncommon form of homeschooling. They are definitely not synonyms. Unschooling can be defined differently by different people, but it tends to emphasize the Romantic philosophical notion of people being naturally hungry to learn what they need to learn when they need to learn it.

Most homeschoolers consider unschooling no better than letting a child choose what to eat for dinner. Candy instead of veggies? Sure, if that's what you want, your body knows best! Most homeschoolers (parents) are far more deliberate in their choice of curriculum and the need for children to get used to spending some of their time doing what they need to do, not just always doing what they feel like doing. It's just that, if done right, the "doing what you have to do" time is actually useful work, not just "draw a picture of each science word and be creative!" tedious, time-wasting busywork. And with this increased efficiency (if it works), kids can end up with more time to do what they feel like than kids in regular school. That doesn't make it "unschooling", though, because that's the dessert, not the whole meal.

Unschooling doesn't imply a lack of involvement but rather a lack of structured teaching.

Unschooled adults I've met all had very busy social lives as children.

Your comment seems like a variation of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman. The parent commenter says "I personally experienced X and it was not great for me" and then you say "what you experienced could not have been X, because X is always great for people."

I don't think this holds true here. If parents neglect a child, they're not going to do well, full stop. "Neglect" is what the parent specifically called his experience. Unschooling cannot be successful in an environment where the parent is neglecting the child; the article even addresses this with three examples from their study where the parents quickly failed in their task to guide their child's education, self-directed or not.

> The parent commenter says "I personally experienced X and it was not great for me"

No. The parent commenter clearly mentioned “Never heard of this Unschool term”.

The parent commenter then went on to talk about their experience with a different topic - essentially lack of schooling.

Just because the names sound related doesn’t mean they are the same thing.

I don't think nostrebored said beer_cub's experience could not have been unschooling. nostrebored instead said that some unschooling is different than beer_cub's experience, and gave the anecdote that everyone nostrebored met had a different experience than beer_cub.

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