So as Emma points out, I grew up unschooled. I'm going to paint you a rosy picture, then fill in some of the less glamorous details. My life seems wild sometimes, sometimes utterly banal, and I'll let you sort that out. https://twitter.com/triagegirl/status/1246187406979555328

So for context, homeschooling is legal in all 50 states. What that means in each state varies, sometimes quite a bit. I'm not currently versed in this generation's laws. I grew up in the 90s, and I was, officially, home-schooled.

In Colorado in 1995, this means two things:

- a teacher evaluates a portfolio of work, or you pass the Iowa Test of Basic Skills with a >13% score.
- you do 163 hours/mo of "instruction".

Now, if you get <13% score on the ITBS, you were considered special education eligible, and one of the concessions is home-schooling, so. Score? unimportant. It's not like any employer has _ever_ asked for ITBS scores.

Let's talk about instruction.

The model the laws are written for is "parent teaches child, 163 hours per month." This is the same kind of measurement schools have for "how much" schooling is done. It is a patently absurd system because hours are not equivalent to education nor learning.

It turns out there's also no way to verify this except with self-certification and standardized testing. Which we've discussed. If you say you instructed the kid, you instructed the kid.

There's other models — in California, you registered your home as a private school. Correspondence schools like @ClonlaraSchool were popular with some of my peers. There's all kinds of ways to meet state mandates for education. Not universally accessible, but more later.

The laws assume "bring school home", and this is what most home-schoolers do. There's curriculum, teaching, and in the most evangelical contexts, some very Jesus-laden textbooks. But let's talk unschooling.

Unschooling is the opposite of taking school home. The core premise is ... "what if we just ... didn't?"

Kids are curious. They'll learn. Good luck stopping them.

If I had to design a system for suppressing curiosity and self-driven learning, I'd make it start too early in the morning, follow a set schedule, expect discipline and obedience, and expect everyone to move at the same pace. I'd scold questions weren't on the lesson plan.

Oddly enough, school is right on the nose for this. I'm not conspiracy-minded enough to believe this is on purpose but it sure works out that way.

So what if we didn't? What does life look like?

Now for context, I grew up in a working-class family. My dad had a union job at a grocery store, we made ends meet on one income. I don't think I ever knew how barely we scraped by sometimes, but my parents are thrifty and clever people. Mom stayed home with us.

Now, mom didn't teach us. I mean, officially, she made it look right if anyone asked in an official capacity. But the teachers were us kids.

We had an encyclopedia, library cards and bicycles. That's all a kid needs to give themselves a world-class education.

The theory is that they will, too. I think the reality's a bit more complicated, but I'll come back to that. I was a voracious reader as a kid. My sister too. My brother not at all as much, but he did fine too.

I collected seeds. I built with lego. I made stuff out of cardboard

I played video games, I drew, I made games, I wrote. I got bored once. It was terrible. I vowed never to do that again and filled my life up. It was pretty grand.

Dad got an old projecting microscope and we looked at slides projected onto the wall. We had computers.

I saved my allowance, I spent it on RAM for a computer. I was the nerdy kid. It was 1993. It was a good time for it. Now things are different and easier in some ways. Less enticing to toy with deeply though.

I did physics lessons from a grad student who taught a group of us homeschooled kids. We built pinewood derby cars and launched balloon rockets. I still remember what the coefficient of friction is and what it means.

We moved to a tiny town in the mountains. I started doing theater at the community theater. My sister worked on a ranch. She helped a local veterinarian as an unofficial vet tech. She got into dog-sledding and skijoring. My brother made costumes and swords and played all parts

And through all of this my sister and I _lived_ at libraries.

I had 8 barcodes on my card when we moved. The main one alone had a circulation count of 2500. I probably read 9/10 of everything I checked out.

When the library in our new town opened my sister got card #1. I was mad I waited until later in the day and got card #106.

At 13, I went to get internet service at the local ISP. I ended up with a job instead. I did tech support. (took a couple more weeks to actually get service.)

A year later my boss slapped an O'Reilly book about HTML and CGI programming on my desk and asked if I could learn it.

I'm still a web programmer. I'm 38 and I'm now 25 years into my career. Do with that information what you will. I have a fourth grade education as far as paper can really track me. I write that in on job applications when they ask about education. It gets me calls back.

So my brother is an interesting case. My parents read to my sister and I religiously. We grew up reading early. My brother not so much. A bit of a gap in our ages, my parents were busier, maybe his brain is different. He could read a bit, but nothing more than a cereal box really

He read his first book at age 13, bless my mother's trust in letting the process work. It was 160 pages. His first book was at-level when he finally did.

Now you can see a thread through all of this: my parents trusted us. Trusted we could learn, trusted we could grow, trusted we'd make do with where we ended up. They trusted that we could go do things on our own — we biked to the library alone a lot!

We had access to a lot. Mom was home, there was no latchkey kid stuff going on here. My dad was that kind of kid, and he's self-sufficient and does great, but it wasn't actually good for him. It doesn't have to be a parent, but stable people to come home to help a ton.

My parents let us sign up for any class we wanted through the local rec center, sometimes through the school if they could talk the school into it. Music. Theater. Ceramics. Swimming. We didn't want for access. I'm glad my parents made it work.

When I was 17, I biked the west coast. (Vancouver, BC to Petaluma, CA) — three of us for the first bit, as many as ten unschooled kids by the end of it. It was all planned by us, the kids.

One of them rode to the start of the ride from his house. In Wisconsin.

I went to an unschooler summer camp for a week (or two) each year as a teen. ( @NBTSC is an amazing place. My social network is still full of people I met there. I still dream of being staff. I need to arrange my life to center unschooling more again.)

The thing I remember most about my growing up is that we _all_ learned. At the dinner table, we'd grab a dictionary or encyclopedia most nights. We'd often still be there at 10 or 11, talking and learning. My parents have hobbies too. We all do.

It's not that mom was around to answer questions all the time (though I'm sure we asked them all the time) or dad was in charge of math and science (though he is the one in the family who loved that stuff most) — we all followed our passions, and we talked about them!

My sister is now a paramedic (and firefighter, meatcutter, dogsled guide, scuba diver, and hot air balloon ground crew)

I'm a programmer. My brother's been middle management at a pet food company doing mergers and acquisitions. My adopted brother—another story—is a carpenter.

So there's a standard set of questions everyone always asks about homeschooling. I'll answer 'em.

"What about socialization?"

We did so much stuff with people of all ages. I was the shy and withdrawn one. We turned out fine, and we can relate to _anyone_. My mother's sunny personality made a great template to learn from though.

"What about college?"

My brother went to community college at 16. He could have transferred somewhere else if he wanted. He didn't. I might go see if I can get a masters and skip undergrad. That'd be fun. Bet I can. Also Goddard, Hampshire, Marlboro colleges & more get it.

"What if you need credentials?"

So go get them? See above about sister who is a paramedic.

"Weren't you lonely?"

I had books and a theater. Next question.

"I could never teach math and science."

That wasn't a question. But did you see where nobody taught? Learning is independent of teaching. The best learning is learning together. If you don't know math and science, a kid who wants to learn will get you to learn. I promise.

So now I want to talk about the downsides. A lot of homeschoolers get so used to those standard questions that we're a bit defensive.

But real talk: dysfunctional parents do a lot of damage. Schools are our primary social services in the US.

Alcoholism, mental health problems, addiction, health neglect, emotional neglect, anger management problems, abuse. All of these things will wreck a kid's ability to learn — probably more if the parents are untreated than the kid, to be honest.

Class is a huge issue. I say my family is working class, and they are, but we thought of ourselves as "middle class" as kids. Certainly not the always-strapped-for-resources working poor. We had time, we had some money, we had enough food on the table.

My entire childhood avoided trying to fit in. It was easy to be the exception because we're all friendly, and we're all white. People give you so much slack when that's true. When the world wants to hammer you back down for sticking out, this is a LOT HARDER. Racism is awful.

Some of my unschooled peers were isolated — living rural, not able to have many friends. Hostile school districts that keep homeschooled kids walled off from the system. A few regret being unschooled because of this.

The socialization fear isn't unfounded. Unschooling without access to society is pretty dangerous. All the success stories I know were kids given immense access to the world. Not a sanitized kids world, not kicked into the adult world without support, but the world we share.

That's really it. Deprivation from public life yields dysfunctional people. Early access to public life accelerates us. Not unsupported, but not fettered and filtered.