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Grown Unschoolers Evaluations of Their Unschooling Experiences: Report I on a Survey of 75 Unschooled Adults
Abstract and Figures
Seventy-five adults, who had been unschooled for at least the years that would have been their last two years of high school, responded to a survey about their experiences. Their responses indicated that their parents generally played supportive, not directive roles in their education and played bigger supportive roles for those who started their unschooling early than for those who started later. The great majority of respondents reported that they were very happy with their unschooling. Nearly all of them valued the freedom it gave them to pursue their own interests in their own ways, and many reported that unschooling promoted their capacities for self-motivation, self-direction, personal responsibility and continued learning. A minority said they experienced a learning deficit as a result of unschooling, and most of those said they easily made up that deficit when they needed to. Most said they had satisfying social lives as unschoolers, and many commented on the special value of having friends of a wide range of ages. Only three respondents said they were unhappy with their unschooling, and those three all said that they were socially isolated, in dysfunctional families with mothers who were psychologically depressed and fathers who were uninvolved.
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... Put another way, reference is made to a non-intrusive learning process for children. Similarly, Gray and Riley (2015) concluded that the participants referred to homeschooling as oopposed to non-schooling. As implied in the results of this study, homeschooling is referred to as a process in which children learn by living, not a home education process followed by parents. ...
... They also think that homeschool will help children become critical, free, and self-aware people, embracing their individual differences. Likewise, the previous studies associate homeschooling with gains such as self-motivation, self-guidance, personal responsibility, and unlimited learning capacity (Gray & Riley, 2013;Gray & Riley, 2015). Similarly, Anthony and Burroughs (2012) noted the main goal of such parents was to educate adults who are able to think and learn on their own, are well-trained and educated freely. ...
... Similarly, Anthony and Burroughs (2012) noted the main goal of such parents was to educate adults who are able to think and learn on their own, are well-trained and educated freely. It seems noteworthy that homeschoolers find themselves more sociable compared to regular schoolers, and they value having a wide age range among their friends (Basham et al., 2007;Gray & Riley, 2013;Gray & Riley, 2015). ...
This study aims to find out the reasons for preference of homeschooling by Turkish parents who are reluctant to send their children to school, the reasons for their choice of homeschooling, and their opinions regarding homeschooling. The study was carried out in phenomenological design among qualitative research patterns. Semi-structured interviews were conducted face-to-face with nine mothers who were contacted through social networking sites. The results indicated that the participants do not want to send their children to school mainly because they think existing public schools do not provide well-equipped teachers or learning environments. Also, they revealed that they favour homeschooling as it maintains a learning continuum compliant with human nature, in a learning environment that takes individual characteristics into consideration, so that children can grow up as free-thinking, self-confident individuals with higher self-esteem and awareness of democracy, without losing their intrinsic motivation for learning. Finally, the study disclosed the parents’ need for an alternative education environment for their children.
... Home education has been shown to result in equal or greater academic success to schooling (Cheng et al., 2016;Gloeckner & Jones, 2013), with particular benefits in learning skills such as self-direction and intrinsic motivation (Gray & Riley, 2015). Higher education has shown increasing provision of alternative pathway entry without ever having attended school (Jackson et al., 2023). ...
... There is alignment between the recognised skills in home-educated students and the skills to be developed in ITE. Adults who have been home-educated have been found to be successful, well socialised, self-confident, self-directed and motivated, independent, politically and socially engaged, and greater readers than the average (Gray & Riley, 2015;Knowles et al., 1992;Neuman, 2020;Ray, 2004;Sheffer, 1995). It is possible that home-educated PSTs miss an apprenticeship of observation and engage in progressive practices for teaching and learning, which combine to benefit their learning to teach. ...
Lortie’s original conception of the apprenticeship of observation was one of conservative schooling practice and negative impact on teacher learning for school change. Schooling practices have changed in the 60 years since the original research that established the apprenticeship of observation as launch pad to teaching, changing prospective teachers’ experience of schooling. This article shares the experience of one pre-service teacher who never attended school, having been home educated. The absence of an apprenticeship of observation in schools highlights the need to better understand the growing diversity of experience pre-service teachers bring to initial teacher education. This one pre-service teacher’s experience raises the need to explore Lortie’s conception in the context of contemporary school experience and the impact on learning to teach. Challenging the acceptance of Lortie’s view to pre-service teachers’ prior experience and the impact on learning to teach has significance for all teacher education programs.
... Some of the results of this research are similar to those of previous work on unschooling: an educational experience driven by the satisfaction of immediate needs or desires; the advantages and limits of autodidacticism; the free use of information technology and its reappraisal; a socialization marked by a feeling of belonging to a support group (Bertozzi, 2006;Curtice, 2014;English, 2014;Gray & Riley, 2013, 2015a, 2015bGrunzke, 2010;Kirschner, 2008;Siconolfi, 2010) -but also by solitude and marginalization. As in the study by Gray and Riley (2015b), most participants note a strong connection between centres of interest developed during unschooling and their jobs or current fields of education. ...
... Furthermore, the gradual slide of homeschooling to unschooling, and the association of unschooling with a "counter-cultural" lifestyle are consistent with the results of Kirschner (2008), Grunzke (2010) and O'Hare and Coyne (2020). An appreciation of time spent with the family, and the value of freedom are apparent, as in the studies of Gray and Riley (2013;2015a) -but also testimonies of parental negligence and enforced isolation. ...
To better understand the experience of unschooling, non-directive in-depth interviews with five Quebec adults who had experienced it were conducted according to a phenomenological approach, revealing their perceptions of their educational experiences and their families, as well as their views of the world. Certain aspects of the testimonies corroborate the results of previous studies concerning self-directed learning, use of information technology, development of interests, and participation in a support group; others reveal limits when it comes to learning perseverance, pursuit of complex learning goals, school integration, and evaluation. The participants also spoke of family conflicts, parental control, negligence, and the influence of this experience on their views of society, work, the school system, and the role of government in education.
... an educational experience driven by the satisfaction of immediate needs or desires; the advantages and limits of autodidacticism; the free use of information technology and its reappraisal; a socialization marked by a feeling of belonging to a support group (Bertozzi, 2006;Curtice, 2014;English, 2014;Gray and Riley, 2013, 2015a, 2015bGrunzke, 2010;Kirschner, 2008;Siconolfi, 2010)but also by solitude and marginalization. As in the study by Gray and Riley (2015b), most participants note a strong connection between centres of interest developed during unschooling ...
... Furthermore, the gradual slide of homeschooling to unschooling, and the association of unschooling with a "counter-cultural" lifestyle are consistent with the results of de Kirschner (2008) and Grunzke (2010). An appreciation of time spent with the family, and the value of freedom are apparent, as in the studies of Gray and Riley (2013;2015a) but also testimonies of parental negligence and enforced isolation. ...
Français
Pour mieux comprendre l’expérience de l’unschooling, des entretiens en profondeur non directifs avec cinq adultes québécois l’ayant vécue ont été menés selon une approche phénoménologique, révélant les perceptions de leur vécu éducatif et de leur famille, ainsi que leur vision du monde. Certains aspects des témoignages corroborent les résultats d’études antérieures concernant l’autodidaxie, l’usage des technologies de l’information, le développement des intérêts et la participation au groupe de soutien; d’autres relèvent des limites quant à l’apprentissage de la persévérance, la poursuite d’objectifs d’apprentissage complexes, l’intégration scolaire et l’évaluation. Les participants parlent aussi de conflits familiaux, d’emprise parentale, de négligence et de l’influence de cette expérience sur leur vision de la société, du travail, du système scolaire et du rôle de l’État en éducation.
English
To better understand the experience of unschooling, non-directive in-depth interviews with five Quebec adults who had experienced it were conducted according to a phenomenological approach, revealing their perceptions of their educational experiences and their families, as well as their views of the world. Certain aspects of the testimonies corroborate the results of previous studies concerning self-directed learning, use of information technology, development of interests, and participation in a support group; others reveal limits when it comes to learning perseverance, pursuit of complex learning goals, school integration, and evaluation. The participants also spoke of family conflicts, parental control, negligence, and the influence of this experience on their views of society, work, the school system, and the role of government in education.
... Moreover, proponents argue that unschooling promotes lifelong learning (Sanchez Tyson, 2019). This theoretical assertion is substantiated by the findings of Gray and Riley (2015) who found that unschoolers believed their unschooling led to them to become lifelong learners. ...
... In fact, with time, some students and their families found the home environment to be more conducive to their learning, especially for mental health reasons, even if the parents did not have any pedagogical skills or training [64]. As most schools were not designed for a shift in terms of the home-school continuum, for many families, the only alternative to getting back to how things were, became homeschooling [65,66]. Even though most parents are not trained teachers, homeschooling is generally associated with positive learner outcomes in terms of academic achievement, social, emotional, and psychological development, and success into adulthood, including higher education [67]. ...
The existing evidence shows that parental engagement is one of the most effective educational interventions. Most parents, carers, and teachers are aware of that and wish to engage with their children’s education. However, most parents are still only peripherally involved through parent–teacher evenings, school activities, or by helping their children keep up with their homework. In this review paper, we summarize the evidence about the impact of parental engagement, as opposed to involvement, on the learning of children. Via that, we critically look at the design choice of most western mainstream public education systems to distance parents from their children’s education, which, as the review results indicate, can be detrimental to children’s learning. Based on these results, we reframe parental engagement in the light of two global shifts: (1) the implications of the school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic for the role of parents in their children’s learning; and (2) the increased use of educational technologies for learning, and specifically, the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. We conclude by calling for a renewed conversation about parents’ and families’ roles in their children’s learning and their interface with schools and teachers.
... According to Gray & Riley (2015) the great majority of adults who had been unschooled, are very happy with their unschooling. Nearly all of them valued the freedom it gave them to pursue their own interests in their own ways, and many of them reported that unschooling promoted their capacities for self-motivation, self-direction, personal responsibility and continued learning. ...
... An additional consideration is whether SDL, developed initially for adult learners, is relevant to children's learning. Extensive, longitudinal research has been conducted to confirm both the appropriateness of SDL for young people (referred to as unschoolers) and its ability to support mental health and career aspirations [215,216]. ...
The COVID-19 pandemic has prompted continuing constraints on the ability of students to interact with teachers and peers. Regarding this imposed segregation, what has not been considered is the effect of learners seeing self as other. With respect to augmentations of their body in interpersonal space by, (1) extending the body through witnessing themselves regularly in videoconferencing learning sessions, (2) isolating the body as a result of spending time apart from peers, social distancing at home, and (3) protecting the body through required mask-wearing where learners now consider who they represent in a mask, there are three important ways in which learners have felt unable to recognize themselves as they did pre-COVID-19. This migration from self to other, involving ingroup/outgroup distinctions, will be investigated from a number of perspectives—both sociological and psychological. Why the turning of self into other is problematic to the psyche will be discussed, as will the possible consequences for this ongoing lack of learner recognition long term, including focus on the new norms or embracing self-directed learning. Based on this analysis, the type of mentorship by teachers and parents that may be appropriate for helping learners contend with these changes will be recommended.
The school-to-work transition is widely acknowledged as difficult, requiring meaningful support for young people to navigate successfully. This paper examines the reported experiences of six families navigating 23 home educated young people’s transition from compulsory education to tertiary education and work. Data from semi-structured interviews with the parents were thematically analysed using Bourdieu's habitus , capital , and field . Findings indicate that the parents provided ample opportunity for self-exploration to encourage autonomy coupled with opportunity to explore and participate in the wider community, leading to a successful transition experience. The findings suggest that a contrasting, alternative career preparation method can be successful; one that values autonomy over the traditional approach which involves a scaffolded set of knowledge and skills. This study indicates that the transition can be successfully facilitated by providing young people with opportunity for autonomous self and career exploration in the community, without the standardised assistance provided through schools.
Unschooling families (families that don't send their children to school and don't school them at home) were invited to participate in a survey about their unschooling practices. Two hundred and thirty two self-identified unschooling families, with at least one child over five years old, completed and returned the questionnaire. Qualitative analyses revealed considerable variability in the routes to unschooling and in the ways in which the parents saw themselves as involved in their children's education. The biggest challenge expressed was that of overcoming feelings of criticism, or social pressure, that came from others who disapproved and from their own culturally-ingrained, habitual ways of thinking about education. The reported benefits of unschooling were numerous; they included improved learning, better attitudes about learning, and improved psychological and social wellbeing for the children; and increased closeness, harmony, and freedom for the whole family.
A sample of 75 adults, who had been unschooled for at least the years that would have been their last two years of high school, answered questions about their subsequent pursuits of higher education and careers. Eighty-three percent of them had gone on to some form of formal higher education and 44 percent had either completed or were currently in a bachelor's degree program. Overall, they reported little difficulty getting into colleges and universities of their choice and adapting to the academic requirements there, despite not having the usual admissions credentials. Those who had been unschooled throughout what would have been their K-12 years were more likely to go on to a bachelor's program than were those who had some schooling or curriculum-based homeschooling during those years. Concerning careers, despite their young median age, most were gainfully employed and financially independent. A high proportion of them— especially of those in the always-unschooled group—had chosen careers in the creative arts; a high proportion were self-employed entrepreneurs; and a relatively high proportion, especially of the men, were in STEM careers. Most felt that their unschooling benefited them for higher education and careers by promoting their sense of personal responsibility, self-motivation, and desire to learn.
Although homeschooling is growing in prevalence, its educational outcomes remain unclear. The present study compared the academic achievements of homeschooled children with children attending traditional public school. When the homeschooled group was divided into those who were taught from organized lesson plans (structured homeschoolers) and those who were not (unstructured homeschoolers), the data showed that structured homeschooled children achieved higher standardized scores compared with children attending public school. Exploratory analyses also suggest that the unstructured homeschoolers are achieving the lowest standardized scores across the 3 groups. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
In this study, I explore some of the inherent and lived tensions or paradoxes produced through the principles and practices of the governmental and educational contexts of the neoliberal milieu, through the lens of a contemporary countercultural movement. In the particularities of this movement, a community of practice known to insiders as the “unschooling movement,” families seek to challenge the rationalization and standardization that they perceive as rampant and objectionable in state-overseen education. This is an ethnographic study of the countercultural praxis and identities entailed in cultivating unschooled children through distinctive childhood, familial, and community-based experiences. I consider dimensions of lifestyle that include attachment parenting, the organization of space and time, consumption, community-based education and legitimation (portfolio evaluations) to prove educational equivalence. This study reveals the hidden resources of social capital and educational capital used to sustain a countercultural educational alternative.
This article reviews research on homeschool learner outcomes and evaluates opposition to homeschooling. It synthesizes research on learner outcomes related to homeschooling in areas of students' academic achievement and children's social, emotional, and psychological development and the success of adults who were home educated and finds generally positive outcomes on a variety of variables are associated with homeschooling. The author identifies four classes of negativity expressed toward home-based education by the education profession, such as the claims homeschooling is bad for the collective good and that without much state regulation significant numbers of homeschooling (home schooling) parents will harm their children. The evaluation reveals that proactive opposition to homeschooling and calls for significant state control over homeschooling do not offer any empirical research evidence that homeschooling is bad for individual children, families, neighborhoods, or the collective good. The alleged harms of homeschooling or arguments for more control of it are fundamentally philosophical and push for the state, rather than parents, to be in primary and ultimate control over the education and upbringing of children so they will come to hold worldviews more aligned with the state and opponents of state-free homeschooling than with the children's parents and freely chosen relationships.
This article reviews recent research on homeschooled children's socialization. The research indicates that homeschooling parents expect their children to respect and get along with people of diverse backgrounds, provide their children with a variety of social opportunities outside the family, and believe their children's social skills are at least as good as those of other children. What homeschooled children think about their own social skills is less clear. Compared to children attending conventional schools, however, research suggest that they have higher quality friendships and better relationships with their parents and other adults. They are happy, optimistic, and satisfied with their lives. Their moral reasoning is at least as advanced as that of other children, and they may be more likely to act unselfishly. As adolescents, they have a strong sense of social responsibility and exhibit less emotional turmoil and problem behaviors than their peers. Those who go on to college are socially involved and open to new experiences. Adults who were homeschooled as children are civically engaged and functioning competently in every way measured so far. An alarmist view of homeschooling, therefore, is not supported by empirical research. It is suggested that future studies focus not on outcomes of socialization but on the process itself.
This article reviews selected research on successes of homeschooled students over the past decade. The article raises several methods issues, especially related to sampling issues and recent changes in some state laws. In addition the article reviews research collected from college admission's officers’ on their perceptions and attitudes relate to homeschooled students. The comparative results of the studies reported in this review, combined with the data collected from college admission officers provides evidence that homeschooling is an effective alternative path to college for the children of many families.
The purpose of this study was to examine the correlation between online survey non-response and various demographic factors, including gender. Studies have shown that trends exist with regard to who responds to surveys, at least with regard to traditional modes of survey administration. Reports suggest that many demographic and other correlates with non-response to online surveys may indeed mirror those of more traditional modes of survey administration. However, the influence of such a basic demographic factor as gender on online survey response behavior is unclear. In this study, a record-linking technique was employed to compare the gender of online survey respondents directly to available demographic data of all members of a sampling frame, thus allowing comparison of demographic information of both respondents and non-respondents. The sampling frame, which consisted entirely of university faculty members of a large research university in the southeastern United States with a full-time faculty of approximately 1000, was specifically chosen to minimize the effect of other potential correlates to non-response behavior, such as education level, Internet access, geographic location, occupation, and income. Pearson's chi square analysis showed a significant relationship between gender and survey response rates: female faculty members contributed disproportionately to the respondent data set. One possible explanations for the observations is that the observed differences in female and male faculty response rates is a product of differences in female and male values operating in a gendered online environment. Results of this study suggest that researchers should not assume that response behavior toward online surveys, and therefore data gathered from online surveys, is free of gender bias. (Contains 2 endnotes and 4 tables.)
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