Unschooling: A personal story

On being unschooled, transitioning to school, and reflecting on that experience.

Rachel Ernstoff is a doctoral student at the University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill studying social psychology, specifically political polarization. She was born in Massachusetts but raised in Israel. She is the middle child of five. Her and her four siblings were unschooled, although each were in school for some portion of their childhood. Rachel describes unschooling as a lack of formal education: “You do whatever you want to do. Fill your time however seems right. And everyone kind of gets to do their own thing.” At the time, her family was one of 20 or 30 families in the whole country who did some form of homeschooling. Her mom had a bad experience attending public schools in Massachusetts during the 60s and 70s and thought, “why would I ever want to subject my kids to this?” She was inspired by John Holt to unschool her kids. Her mindset was, “each child is unique and has their own path through life, and schools try to make you all uniform.”

Rachel sat down with me to describe her experience being unschooled, her transition to school, and how she reflects on her unschooling experience. The conversation was lighthearted, with Rachel laughing from time to time when thinking back on her childhood, especially her adolescent years. But she also gave frank responses and provided advice for parents contemplating an unschooling or homeschooling approach to education for their children¹.

To provide context for how she views education, Rachel described her response to the questions: What is education? And what does it means to be an educated person? For her, acquiring broad knowledge is the most important aspect.

I think to be an educated person you need to have two components: You need to have knowledge, and you can't replace that. You just have to have read things, you have to be taught things, however you accumulate that knowledge, you have to have it. Obviously, not about everything but just knowledge about the world. And you have to have the skills of acquiring knowledge and information. I think part of being educated is knowing how to look at research, how to determine what's fake news or not, and how to know which kinds of sources are the appropriate ones for the question you are asking.

[Education is] the process of going through that and becoming educated. I think it usually will involve more than just the learner and I think that's probably necessary. We're social creatures, we learn from each other. We learn from imitation and we look up to people—celebrities, authorities, whatever—because we're trying to learn from their successes and their mistakes. I think education involves some combination of people actively trying to give you the knowledge and the tools and you actively trying to receive them, and both parts need to be there. 

In the life of an unschooled child, there is no such thing as a typical day, which is the point, according to Rachel. But she described a few typical days from her early years of childhood.

When I was ages 5 to 11, I spent most of my time reading books. I'd read a lot of fiction books, mostly. And sometimes I would pick up an encyclopedia. This was before we had internet, and I would read stuff from there. Mostly, I would wake up whenever I wanted, which was usually like 10 or 11. Or past noon on some days, and then make myself food. Everyone was very independent. I knew how to do simple cooking from a very young age, and if I wanted to eat, I would make myself eggs or whatever. And then I would just sit down and read all day. My older brother was very into nature and animals, so we had a donkey and ducks. I would play with my siblings and with the animals. And we would play board games, go to the park, just hang out.

Rachel was raised Orthodox Jewish, but around age 12, she decided that she didn't believe in God and didn't want that life. She started hanging out with peers her age or a little bit older, “staying out all night, getting into trouble.” She tried school in 1st grade, then again in 2nd grade, but she didn’t stay long because she either felt more advanced than her peers or didn’t fit in. Ultimately, she enrolled full-time in 10th grade.

When I was 13, I started dating someone who talked to me a lot about how I was wasting my life by not being in school, and that I was not learning anything, and I was just going nowhere, which was true. So I decided to go to school in 10th grade. I had to sign myself up. There was a municipality office in Jerusalem that I just walked into. I'm a 14-year-old girl, like, “Hi, who do I talk to about signing up for school?” They were kind of taken aback. They had to figure out what to do with me because they didn't have any middle school grades. And they didn't know if I was smart, or dumb, or what level I was at, or if I knew how to read. They gave me some tests, and basically gave me a shortlist of schools that I could go to. And I just chose one randomly, because I really didn't know anything about anything. And through that process, my parents, I think they knew that I was doing that, but weren't getting involved, because it was still the sort of laid-back hands-off approach of: if I want to go to school, then I'm going to do that. And that's my thing.

People who attended school their entire childhood are often curious about how kids learn how to read and write and acquire other skills when they are not taught through direct instruction. Rachel described how she and her siblings “picked up” these skills.

I taught myself to read and write when I was 4-ish. I don't remember how, exactly, it happened. Our parents did read to us a lot when we were young. I think that it just like soaked in, a lot of it. But my older brother was really far behind developmentally, in terms of reading and writing. I say that, my mom says, “everyone has their own path,” so he wasn't behind anything. He's five years older than me, so when I was 5, he was 10, and we were at the same reading level. But that also meant we collaborated on things. We would write a story together and be able to help each other out and stuff. For things like math, a lot of [learning] was from playing games like monopoly, where we had to count out the money, or cooking, and learning fractions from that. And other real money stuff.

When it came time to enroll in high school, Rachel was prepared in some ways but not in others. She described the first semester of high school as “bad,” but from the next semester until the end, she was able to catch up.  

I knew I was going to enroll, so the summer before that, I asked a friend to help me catch up on math. He was very good at math, and so he basically tutored me all summer, and I just spent all summer studying math. By the time I got to school, I was above average because I spent a lot of time learning it. I started with simple things like fractions. I didn't know how to add or multiply fractions. And by the end, I was doing pre-calculus, and geometry, and whatever. So in terms of math, I was fine. Reading and writing in Hebrew, I didn't do that as much because I always read in English, but I caught up pretty quickly. I wasn't as fluent in it, but that wasn't too bad. 

Rachel did, however, struggle with the sciences. Her and her siblings would do science experiments at home, but they didn’t understand why experiments produced reactions, such as mixing baking soda and vinegar. When she got to school and learned that “there’s all this stuff going on inside your body,” it blew her mind. And she described not having the skills necessary for learning.

I had never put any effort into trying to learn something. Anything that I knew, I just picked up. And so when I first had tests, I didn't realize that I was supposed to go over the material and try to memorize things and really know the people we were learning. That was quite a shock to me. But I was able to pick that up pretty quickly.

By the end of her high school career, she had the top grades and received an award: “It was nice, something that I was proud of myself for.” When asked whether being unschooled helped her in school, Rachel responded, “it's really hard to know.”

And I think that's where proponents of homeschooling and unschooling need to be a little bit more humble or cautious about their takeaway. Because everything I do that's good, my mom will say, “Well, you see, it's because you were unschooled.” And then I'll say, “Well, I think it's actually despite being unschooled.” I don't think either of those are true. I think being unschooled did give me a lot of tools in terms of being more independent. But I don't know if that was unschooling or just the independence in our family. And I wasn't exposed to any stereotypes. It didn't occur to me that I was a woman, therefore, shouldn't be doing certain types of classes or whatever. Maybe some of that was good, but it's really hard to tell. Unless you're going to do a randomized controlled experiment, which you can't do, I think you shouldn't jump to conclusions about what exactly the cause of any of this was. 

And I don't know if the expected value of unschooling is positive. There's a lot of risk involved. When I think about when I was ages 12 to 15, hanging out with rough crowds, I was not in a good place. I could have easily stayed in that place, or it could have gotten worse if my luck had been just a little bit different. I think not being in school and not having that structure could have been really harmful.

Rachel was reading the Coddling of the American Mind at the time of our interview, and she noted that the book brought up some good points about the importance of independence in childhood. But for her, not attending school meant that she missed out on “having a peer group and an active social life.” Suddenly, at age 15, she had to navigate being around a bunch of kids her own age who she described as “normal kids.”

I didn't know how to make friends. I think those skills are really important to learn. I think you can get that through homeschooling or unschooling, but I didn't. It's important to make sure that all of that infrastructure is in place. 

Rachel also felt like she missed out on learning opportunities that other kids had, which deterred her from trying those subjects.

There were some classes in computers and in languages, where I knew that everyone else already had a few years of classes. And I was like, “I'm just not going to take those classes because there's no way that I'll ever catch up.” I think that's too bad because I could have been really good at whatever, you know. I think it can be very limiting if you [aren't] exposed to all the different experiences that kids at school get.

Rachel’s takeaway is that being unschooled gave her a unique life experience but not a sense of normalcy.

I think the main thing is, for my whole life I've been different, because I'm the girl who didn't go to school. When I was really young, we'd go on TV every once in a while because people wanted to interview my mom because she was so different. It's not like I was famous or anything, but I knew that I was not normal, and I think in a lot of ways that's a good thing. I have a unique life story, and when it comes down to writing applications or writing personal statements, I have great material. But when it comes down to feeling like you belong in the world, just having a sense of being normal is important. You want to be special in ways that are normal to be special in, but once you deviate too far from that you're just weird. I think that's something that parents need to think about in terms of the communities that they're going to be raising their children in and how accepting they are, or whatever, and I think it's something that we don't place enough value on. I would say that is something that I hope that people think about.

This is one story in a series, “What does it mean to be an educated human?”

1. Rachel’s responses have been edited and condensed for clarity.