Comment by graemep
> Homeschooling often gets confused with self-directed education, aka “unschooling”. These are not the same.
There are also a lot of other approaches. Home education is a blanket term for every approach to education other than schools with class rooms.
I think my own approach was a hybrid. I expected academic progress (especially in English and maths, which are enablers for studying other things), but let the kids follow their interests too.
That’s right. And at the other end of that spectrum, there is what some refer to as “radical unschooling” which gives total agency to the child over the material they’ll learn. I know some radical unschoolers who’ve even ended-up in conventional schools because it was their decision. It may sound like a paradox but it happens, usually not more than a few years though, but again, depends on what’s available to them wherever they live, and also the friends/peers and what they are doing too. I think these choices come down to the child, parenting style and the environment in which the child evolves. There is no right or wrong in my opinion.
In his 2017 paper[1], Peter Gray goes in depth on all the different self-directed education approaches including some of the well-known self-directed “schools”, from Summerhill in the UK to Sudbury Valley in the U.S.
[1] https://cdn2.psychologytoday.com/assets/self-directed_ed.-pu...