That’s an interesting point. Where we’re at at the moment, with a child who’s only ten, I’m actually keeping tabs on his performance against the conventional metrics that are used for UK children his age, and he’s a long way ahead on those.

I think unschooling’s easier as a US citizen, because there’s a SAT score that counts for a lot, and you don’t really need a school, or school-type education to deliver on multiple choice tests — whereas for something like the international baccalaureate, where there’s a lot of learning involved, you might require a more school-y approach.

My impression from Americans who unschool is that unschooled children regularly get into college and universities, because often the projects and folios they show are *far* more sophisticated and in-depth than what kids would do in high school – plus they can deliver high SAT scores, which counts for a lot.

Though it doesn’t seem beyond the bounds of possibilities that an unschooled child could deliver far more sophisticated projects than your average A-Level coursework, to put it very mildly.

I, personally, don’t think we’ll unschool all the way through — I envisage him having more time in a traditional school environment as he gets older (so he has his own space, not least) and I’d like him to get IB (international baccalaureate) probably, as that’s an internationally valid 18yo qualification. I’d see him doing iGCSE. And probably being in school to do that. But he’ll have his own views on what he wants to do, too.

But colleges and universities accept people from a range of educational backgrounds. And he’s currently achieving way ahead of his age group on all the key metrics, so for the moment I’m happy with where we’re at…

I wonder if you’d need to be a bit more formal about educating if you had several children? I think we (my siblings and I) would have distracted each other and not asked such probing questions. (That said I often overheard my brother asking Dad such questions as “what’s the theory of relativity” or asking about light and waves vs particles when he was about 8 years old, just randomly at home. Weird kid.) Plus you’d have to make sure you were dedicating enough ‘education’ to each child at their different levels. Interesting. It certainly seems to be working with just the one kid though.

It´s been great for me to find more and more unschoolers around the web with so much information on how they deal with it.

Why, thank you!

We started with regular school once a week. FAR too much like hard work. It’s amazing how fast they learn when it’s self-directed, isn’t it?

Our teaching of history and culture remains very Eurocentric, I think. To be honest, one of the slightly unnerving aspects of unschooling or homeschooling (neither things I would have contemplated in the early years) is realising how very little our primary system actually delivers.