Unschooling children

I attended only public school throughout my childhood, but I had two good friends who did not. Both of them were home-schooled for large portions of their upbringing and both of them are exceptionally bright. Because of our friendship I was spurred to learn more about alternative methods of education. In the past year, I have been reading about a really interesting version of home-schooling called ?unschooling.?

Unschooling is so named because the way in which a child learns is not determined by a teacher or even a set of curricula but rather by the child. My two friends who grew up home-schooled were essentially doing the same schoolwork I was doing, just at home (and in other countries, I should add). They were using the same science texts and doing the same reading exercises as everyone else.

Parents who unschool their children do none of this. There is no structure whatsoever in unschooling. This is not to say that parents do not try to influence their children. Parents teach their children literacy by reading to them, and they teach them math by counting coins at the store. Ultimately, however, the children are the ones who choose which books they want to read and at what pace they read them. If the children want to play videogames all day, they are free to do that, too.

This probably sounds like a terrible way of raising a child. Why would children learn anything if they didn?t have to? How could children become prepared for jobs that demand the skills they would learn in school?

I had many of these doubts myself and so was interested to hear how unschoolers solved these problems. David D. Friedman (a favorite writer of mine and the son of economist Milton Friedman) and his wife unschooled two children. I recently watched an interview Friedman gave about the experience and I was surprised at how his children acquired useful and often technical knowledge by playing games.

Friedman said that his son was very interested in a role-playing board game called Dungeons and Dragons. I will not get into the game other than to mention that it involves a great deal of dice-rolling, including dice with four, six, eight, 10, 12 and 20 sides. In order to be successful at the game, it is useful to know the probability of certain numbers being rolled. At the age of 13, Friedman?s son became interested in learning about probability theory and read a few books on the subject. I do not recall any 13-year-olds in my school who read math books for fun.

Friedman?s daughter was particularly fond of a videogame called World of Warcraft. It is played over the Internet and the players are able to communicate with one another by sending instant messages during the game. While playing the game, his daughter met people from around the world who wrote to her in English, their non-native language. She felt bad about never being able to speak in their native language and thus endeavored to learn one of them, deciding on Italian.

When she began taking college classes in Italian, she was irritated that the papers she wrote for class were read only by the professor and then thrown away. She wanted to do something productive with her skills and set her sights on translating a 15th-century Italian cookbook into English, which she finished last year and uploaded to the Internet.

You may be wondering how an unschooled child could be admitted to college. Both of Friedman?s children took the SAT, but most colleges require more than that. His daughter did something rather unconventional and listed on her college application the 400 or so books she had read in her life. Friedman said the list blew the admissions staff away.