In unschooling circles, that "detox" period is called "deschooling," and is estimated to take about a month per year of formal schooling.

If you've ever taken a break from work, you've probably experienced something like it. At first, you drive yourself crazy, because you don't know what to do with yourself now that you're outside the routine you've "always" had and "everybody" else seems to have.

Then there's a period of mental stagnation. To me, it feels kind of like defragging my brain. It needs not to be doing much else as it processes all the stuff it's just knuckled down and gotten through over the years, trying to craft some sort of self narrative about it that integrates it and makes it into a (semi-)coherent set of desires and character traits.

Eventually you come out of it and start wanting to do stuff again. It might be the same kinds of projects. It might not. It might change pretty frequently, because you're still testing your new ideas against this new self narrative, and iterating on both.

I think not doing this periodically ruins people's lives. That's how you end up with death bed regrets about never becoming the person you wanted to be.

The first few times I did it, I really got worried about the early stages, but now I'm realizing there's a pattern. It comes together in the end, and I'm always better off for having done it!

If you can teach this to your kids early on, their lives will be so much better for it.

I'm a homeschool parent, and we wouldn't have it any other way for our family.

But one thing I've learned is that most homeschool parents are even worse than public school and the risk of permanently harming your child through neglect is dreadfully real.

Most of the flattering literature for unschooling is, as with the link, a case where the parents and child are naturally gifted and curious, and they credit whatever they ended up doing with the kid's relative success.

Even gifted and curious kids run into situations where some structured learning that won't be immediately rewarding needs to happen. There needs to be an adult paying attention and intervening, even in the best cases.

Every parent should have the right to homeschool. But from what I've seen, most parents should go ahead and trust American public schools, which are actually very competitive with the best in the world after adjusting for the familiar, stubborn demographic realities.

This is somewhat concerning to me, a software engineer in the games industry.

It's true that the schooling system has failed in many parts of the world to the point that it might harm kids in many ways, even stunting them academically. And it's great that the author's kid likes to program games and is great at Photoshop and 3D. But the usual curriculum at schools provides a breadth of general knowledge that I don't think parents or online tutorials would ever substitute for.

While this kid may be the next John Carmack, are they now robbed of the opportunity to gain enough knowledge in other disciplines to ever succeed in being a doctor, a lawyer, a mathematician or a historian? I believe so. Kids are really good at learning from anything they have access to, but online content is heavily skewed to entertainment (such as video games), and almost totally non-existent in other areas.

Before I ended up in games, I tried a few different disciplines. I went to med-school and learned things I would have never learned on YouTube because they would have simply been demonetized. Simple biology is often a controversial topic on ad-supported platforms, let alone any kind of injury or most illnesses. Health topics are very muddied by grifters to the point that patients self-diagnosing by YouTube are often very confused. So this kid would have a serious disadvantage if they ever wanted to be a doctor if this is where they learned about it. And this is assuming they would be capable of reconciling the misleading knowledge with real knowledge to be good enough at the discipline, anyways.

So all in all, I can see the benefits, but it is also very concerning to me that a kid is seriously using online content for unsupervised learning. We have all recently got a taste of how unsupervised learning on online content goes. And it's not just detrimental in learning, the world view itself online is very skewed. I am not necessarily very good at education though, so take this with a pinch of salt. It is not impossible that someone's parents, with the help of the internet, could indeed provide better education than traditional schools. I think there are such parents, although probably few and far in between.

I agree that classical schooling has fallen far away from learning (as the author defines it). That has even crept more and more into "higher education". This is a travesty and produces worse people, citizens, what have you.

But i'll still make this point: its an oversimplification to say that education (as defined) is bad.

No matter how much it doesn't align with your passion, you will need to have a basic set of book smarts to hope to thrive in the world. If for no other reason than there will almost certainly be some aspect of that passion that touches on those missing rudimentary skills.

I also personally don't want to live in a world where a significant portion of people don't know basic history or understand eating tide pods is bad.

I like the entire structure that they put up for their kids to learn and I think it would work for many children. However, I doubt it would work for many parents.

The author already pointed out that it worked because they both worked from home. To most this is an unimaginable luxury.

The parents didn't strictly supervise or guide the kid in this case but I strongly assume that they engaged if the kid had questions or just wanted to talk something through. They also apparently had specialized software and a 3d printer at hand or were ready to buy one without long preamble.

The kid's interests were rather easy to handle up until a pretty high level of skill. With writing games and building small stuff you can get very far without a large workshop, risky activity, rare or hard to buy supplies etc.

I'm not at all saying the public education system can hold a candle to the effectiveness of what was told in this article and we could definitely improve a gazillion things about it. I'm just saying that this kid a lot of lucky factors coming together for it to work out THAT well.

I've been struggling with this as well. I feel like my kids go into elementary school and spend ~7 hours (most of the day) not really learning anything. They come home and do "home work" only for myself and my spouse to teach them only for them to eat, sleep and do it again the next day.

I feel like it has eradicated much of the family time for bonding. The only reason we hesitate to take them out of school is the socialization aspect.

This is an interesting article and there are some interesting connections with education theory (not practice) based on my masters program.

1. Engagement. Learning is hard unless you are engaged.

2. Self-directed. Mastery education--independent mastery of the learning objectives-- was tried in the 1930's (Winnetka System) and it was very successful where it was tried. But it didn't match the goals of the education unions...

3. Montessori. The Montessori program emphasizes "self-directed activity, hands-on learning and collaborative play." This is a popular approach to learning.

4. Vygotsky. Social engagement is important in learning. Homeschooling as described in the article without peers goes against this theory.

5. Scaffolding. A theory of learning by constructing with prior knowledge. The article notes "going down rabbit holes" and that would agree with this theory.

6. Gardner. Theory of using "multiple intelligences" (kinetic, visual, logical, etc.) to learn. The described approach in the article would seem to agree with this theory.

7. Project-based. Using projects as a way to discover and learn. Again, the article seems to agree with this theory/approach

...and more

In short, "unschooling" as described in the article seems to have support in major theories of education. However, the social aspect is not well supported. A curriculum is not a bad thing, it's a set of learning objectives which is necessary.

What is not necessary for learning is the institutional aspect of school--which is what the author is trying to avoid and has discovered is not necessary.

I believe that we are moving as a society to two norms: the "haves" will educate their children using various homeschooling approaches augmented by AI, and the "have nots" will be forced to attend institutions where the emphasis is discipline and not learning.

I was homeschooled from 3rd through 8th grade And then attended public high school. I think home school can be great. however, I've never met anyone who is obviously advantaged because of home school, but I've met a few that were obviously disadvantaged.