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Comment by chrisBob | Hacker News Reader

I am sure unschooling works out well for some people. I appreciate giving students some flexibility, but I think there really is a standard core that most people should learn.

I went to a good engineering school for college, but they also require everyone to take 3 years of history, 3 years of english, 2 semesters of a foreign language, a psychology course, ...

If it was left up to me I would not have taken most of those classes, and I suffered through many of them, but I think they were an important part of my education, and I am glad I came out of school knowing more than the engineering that I would have picked for myself.

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A lot of unschooling is predicated on the idea that if you're not forced to learn things, you will be more open to wanting to learn them.

Certainly, in my own life that has held true. I learned to read when I was a kid because I saw my parents doing it, and engaging in it taught me to love it. A lot of math I learned early on just as I was growing up (I figured out multiplication on my own, for instance). But by the time school started 'teaching' me things, I chafed at it. I hated being told what to learn, hated having to follow the classroom's pace, etc.

The same has held true in my adult life too; given a problem to solve or an interesting thing to explore I'll learn. Even things I -hated- in high school and college (such as foreign languages), I am engaging in learning on my own as an adult because I -want- to.

Given a better environment, most kids will want to learn. The problem is school forces it on kids, without investing in showing the kid why they would want to learn it in the first place (i.e., the reason "when will we ever use this?!" is so stereotypical)

This is a pretty horrible assumption to make and it's a bad idea to use yourself (or any HN commenter) as a good example of the general public with regard to learning curiosity. If you spend much time outside the tech bubble, I think you'll quickly find that the number of people who go out of their way to learn things in-depth instead of spending all their time on entertainment and social activities is a rather small percentage of the total population.

Of course the plural of anecdote isn't data. Never claimed it was.

"I think you'll quickly find (etc)" - I think you're thinking about this the wrong way. Who, exactly, are you evaluating? The average adult who grew up in the school system, who learned that 'learning' is all about being told stuff, and who now 'knows enough' to hold down their job and pursue whatever hobbies they have in what little spare time they have? Not sure that's representative of children, or how people grow up under a different system. And even there, you'd be surprised how often those adults still end up looking up information -that is of interest- to them.

I mean, heck, I'm one of those adults - outside of work what I learn is very little, because I don't have the energy. And yet, I still am curious, I still ask questions, I still read things. Certainly, I look for opportunities to learn things as -part- of my work. I am the HN crowd, sure, but I'm also a consummate gamer and waster of time. Heck, I'll even waste my time responding to HN comments. :P

Beyond that, for children, if you're just looking at kids who are already in school...yeah. No kidding. After 5-8 hours in school being 'taught' things, why they heck would someone spend their free time learning things outside of it? It's just like a job. But what about a kid who has hours of free time, and who sees, constantly, that there are people around them who 'know things', and they don't? They'll ask questions. Lots of questions. Encourage that, and you have learning.

I mean, I can't speak to you, the HN crowd at large, or people at large (nor can you), but I can say that given just the spare time the quarantine has given me, my unproductive pursuits very quickly ran dry (not for lack of them), and I've picked up learning a number of new things to fill the time. I don't think that's nearly as uncommon as you might think.

I've seen a bit of observational data that points at the hypothesis that one of the things that manifests as IQ is an increased need for intellectual stimulation. Googling for ""need for intellectual stimulation" iq" shows some authoritative people saying that they tend to coincide; I don't immediately see studies about it.

Now, I agree that school tends to squelch natural curiosity and such. I really can't say enough bad things about school.

Still, I can't shake the hypothesis that a decent amount of observational data connected to schooling and unschooling is done by smart people, looking at their social group (likely to also be smart) and at the kids of those in their social group (likely to have inherited smartness). John Holt formed some of his hypotheses teaching at a school with a minimum IQ cutoff (IIRC around 110-120) (researching, I think it was the Shady Hill school, the second one he taught at).

But at the very least, it seems to me that unschooling will work well with smart kids—the smarter, the better—and, furthermore, the smarter the kid is, the worse school will be adapted to them, so it seems pretty clear that, above some intelligence level, unschooling should be placed above school in the list of default recommendations (the specifics of the individual kid and the available schools would, of course, be used to tailor the default into the correct, but I am talking about the default). I don't know what level that should be, but I suspect it's something like 120-130 IQ.

Why is forcing people who don’t care about learning to do so any more moral than forcing nerds who don’t care about sports to do physical exercise? Most people have no intellectual interests, just as watching sports bores me. Exercise and learning both have pay offs in terms of physical and mental health and earning power respectively, for those who enjoy them and those who don’t.

Why is forcing people to read books they don’t care about good enough to warrant the intrusion on their autonomy necessary to get them to do so?

In my experience you have to forced to learn most things until they 'click'.

Some things click instantly and others take longer. While I was good at highschool math, matrices never clicked for me until almost 3rd year of university, when a good prof took the efforts to make it 'click'. I never felt like cooking until I began staying alone, gave it an honest (an necessary) try due to monetary requirements, and now it is my main hobby that I can't live without.

I understand that this argument can be use like the great filter, where if you don't like something it hasn't clicked yet, so keep going and it will click. But, for most things, we know 'click' checkpoints. For musical instruments, it tends to be the first song. For programming, it is your first repository. For math, it tends to be your first moment when a group of seemingly unrelated things fall into place to give you a neat derivation or when you find a visualization that works as an analogy 100% of the time.

The first few weeks of a lot of things are straight up miserable. (new Musical instruments and new languages being major examples of it). It is only after you have understood the basics can you start enjoying them.

> The problem is school forces it on kids, without investing in showing the kid why they would want to learn it in the first place

Absolutely. That investment is key to making forced learning work. Much like training wheels, once they can balance the topic on their own, you can stop trying to make it click, and the student will sustain their interest on their own.

> having to follow the classroom's pace

This is incredibly annoying. I remember binging the whole English textbook in the summer before the year started, then impatiently fidgeting or reading fantasy fiction novels under the table because the class felt that it went too slowly.

The “well rounded” education stops at college for me. It’s too expensive. If you want to take those courses, you go ahead and take them. But they aren’t necessary and shouldn’t be required.

> I went to a good engineering school for college, but they also require everyone to take 3 years of history, 3 years of english, 2 semesters of a foreign language, a psychology course, ...

I've always found that a fascinating difference between University in the USA and Australia.

In Australia I studied Software Engineering (Accredited by the Australian Institute of Engineers). From day one, every single course was strictly "on topic". Maths, Electronics, Programming, Computer theory, compilers, real time programming, Java, C++, Real Time Programming, Digital Electric Design, Data Comms, more Maths, Digital Signal and Image processing, Game Design, Personal Software Process, etc. etc.

In the four years I studied (plus another for a placement in the workforce) I never studied a single moment that wasn't directly Software Engineering. Not a single English or history or anything course.

My knowledge is very deep, but not nearly as broad as someone that took all those other courses.

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