‘Unschooling’ parents put their kids in charge of their own educations. Are they actually learning?

This summer, a TikTok video of a mother showing off her son’s literacy skills went viral. “Not comparing myself to other moms,” said the social media influencer Onami, producing a notebook belonging to her six year-old son, Rainer, filled with crudely scrawled words in crayon. “Look at this: Lamp. Egg. Jar. Lion. This is him, doing this, by himself!”

The clip made the rounds online, eliciting outrage and indignation for reasons the 36-year-old swears she was not anticipating.

Onami, who goes by a single name, is one of many parents – increasingly visible on social media, more unassuming offline – practicing a radical form of home teaching dubbed “unschooling”. Also known as “free schooling” or “self-directed learning”, it is an informal educational approach in which the direction is dictated by a child’s interests. It eschews curricula, testing (standardized or otherwise), homework, recess, other pupils and all the other hallmarks of conventional education. True believers regard it as a corrective to a flagging public school system, which leaves so many children behind. Critics, meanwhile, say that it’s little more than a form of educational neglect and abuse.

As Onami soon learned, not everyone values such an outside-the-box approach to education. Her feed was deluged with withering comments: “This is how my son wrote at 3”; “this is quite behind for a six yr old”; “all the letters were backwards and upside down”; “you’re crippling your children”; “this isn’t ‘free’ learning or ‘unschooling’. It’s just neglect.” Others chimed in to make fun of her tattoos, which include the word “gentleness” inked in cursive on the upper perimeter of her forehead, just below the hairline.

“What’s so interesting about all of these commenters,” Onami says from her home in New York’s Hudson valley, “is that nobody looked up what the average reading age is. The average age for reading in America is six and seven. People really wanted to throw my child – or really me – under the bus, but never even Googled the facts that they’re spitting out.”

Onami is partially correct. The age six to seven benchmark is for something closer to literacy – with children being able to compose full sentences, even paragraphs – whereas those same standards state that children typically start writing letters by age four or five. She tells me that her three-year-old daughter, meanwhile, is progressing along with reading and writing closer to this pace. This is not a problem for an unschooling parent. Different children, the philosophy goes, demand different things.

As an unschooling parent, Onami centers observation in her approach. She notes that while her son is more interested in hands-on learning, in the form of building and construction, her daughter showed an interest in reading and writing by age three. When her son showed an interest in cooking, she began asking questions of him, and herself: “What is it about the process they love? Is it the problem-solving? Is it messing things up? From this I’ve noticed his love of measuring, from which has come a love of math.” She describes this approach, which values play and self-discovery, as “very Montessori”.

Unlike a traditional Montessori school, however, Onami removes anything resembling a traditional classroom. Her children’s education is demonstrably more robust and outdoorsy. When young Rainer is not appearing in her TikTok videos, Onami estimates that he spends up to 10 hours a day playing outside: damming creeks, constructing ad hoc aquariums, grafting plants in the family garden and availing himself of other earthly delights. Towards the end of an hour-long call, Onami’s son knocks on her door and asks if they can go outside to pick black raspberries. She immediately obliges.

Unschooling believers claim the approach boasts benefits beyond education (or lack thereof). For Onami – who works mostly from home, as an entrepreneurial adviser, life coach and autoerotic sex magic guru – unschooling permits her more quality time with her children.

Back to the old school

It’s estimated that some 3.1 million American children are home schooled. Some research suggests that 12% of those are “unschooled”. (For reasons explored a little later, those numbers can be very tricky to precisely verify.) Prominent unschoolers have drawn more attention to the movement. Unschoolers claim the pop singer Billie Eilish, and her producer-slash-brother Finneas, as prominent success stories. (“I learned how to do math by cooking with my mom,” the singer has said.) Another multiple-Grammy winner, Alanis Morissette, has likewise spoken out as an unschooling parent. The Food Network star Ree Drummond, the Pioneer Woman herself, does not use the word “unschooling” but has spoken openly about her role as a “relaxed home schooler”, whose at-home education approach amounts to an “a la carte hodgepodge”. Elon Musk has also spoken in support of education models that reject traditional grading and standards in favor of a more unfettered approach to creativity.

Unschooling has a long, somewhat fuzzy history. Because it possesses no real doctrine or dogma, it can be tricky to connect it to pre-existing modes of alternative education. However, some clear precedents and points of contact exist. There was the “open classroom” movement of the 1960s and 70s; the rise of “minimally invasive education” in the late 1990s; and the much older, and more explicitly politicized, idea of “voluntarism”, promoted by the 19th-century British individualist philosopher Auberon Herbert, which held that all state activities, including the education of children, should be non-mandatory and non-coercive.

In the more modern context, this non-coercive approach was reconceived by John Holt, a non-accredited American educator whose newsletter, Growing Without Schooling (GWS), catalyzed the contemporary unschooling movement in the mid-70s. In essence, Holt believed that children would learn to read, write, do basic math and cultivate a range of other interests (academic and otherwise) of their own accord, and without explicit instruction.

Peter Gray, a psychologist at Boston College, has emerged as another key figure, having written the book (or at least several widely read pamphlets) on unschooling. “I prefer to use the term ‘self-directed education’,” Gray says. “I’m talking about children taking charge of their education, which also involves determining what they’re learning.”

The question that follows is how exactly does a child determine, or even know, what they’re interested in, absent any kind of initial instruction? For Gray, the answer is exposure. Presented with a range of stimuli (books, films, television programs and “free play”, of which Gray is a particularly strong proponent), the child’s interests will naturally present themselves, in time. Gray notes that the pace of learning also differs among children. Some self-directed students may not learn to read until their teenage years. “But they learn very quickly,” he notes. “They can become big readers, after that.”

The fluidity of these timelines can raise some alarms. More conventional, school-bound literary milestones suggest that children should be reading independently by the second or third grade. A 2003 report from the US Department of Education stresses that, when it comes to reading, the sooner the better. “It is no exaggeration to say that how well children learn to read affects directly not only how successful they are in school but also how well they do throughout their lives,” it states. “When children learn to read, they have the key that opens the door to all the knowledge of the world.” For many unschoolers, traditional education (namely US public education) is simply not the best system for reaching those sorts of ideals.

School’s out for ever

Gregory Horlacher, 46, started thinking about alternative education while employed as a teacher. He was living and working in Baltimore, teaching high school to what he calls “quote-unquote at-risk kids”. He loved his students but struggled to apply that devotion within the structure of the school system. He researched alternative education methods. He made every effort to reach out to the students who needed it. But nothing seemed to take. “I came to think of myself as a prison guard,” he recalls. “I didn’t want my kid to go through what I see so many kids going through in the school system.”

In time, Horlacher and his wife had a son of their own and began mulling alternative education options. They were in a unique position. His wife made enough money to support the family, meaning Horlacher was able to devote himself to being a stay-at-home-dad. “I was able to do that,” he says. “So we were able to try unschooling.”

At home, Horlacher employs a technique called strewing, in which potential interests are presented to a child, in order to determine the direction of their learning. “We’re not just throwing our kids out in the wild and saying ‘good luck’,” he says. “When you see what your kid’s interests are, you leave stuff out for them, whether it’s a toy or a YouTube video, so you can see if their interest is piqued. So you’re sort of leading them on their own journey … well, not leading. Supporting that journey.”

Another popular influencer in the #unschooling scene is Skyler DuPont, a 29-year-old “lifelong unschooler” with two degrees. “A mistake a lot of people make about unschooling is assuming that unschooling means absolutely never using metrics of formal education,” Dupont explains from their home in Anchorage, Alaska. “Unschooling is really all about using whatever a person wants to use, as long as they’re the one determining that that’s how they want to learn.”

In their videos, DuPont habitually identifies as “a grown radical lifelong unschooler”. They answer questions from viewers, post “unschooling hot takes”, expound on their own experiences – being “unschooled” by two mothers who encouraged them to follow their “own educational interests” – and generally offer a highly informed, intelligent and overwhelmingly positive take on the philosophy, from the perspective of someone who actually experienced it.

“I don’t like to think of myself as a success story,” they say. “There’s an idea in the unschooling world that there’s success, and not-success. That’s often measured from outside perspectives. Typically that means: ‘Did you go to college?’ Obviously I went to both undergrad and grad school. So that presents really well.”

DuPont parlayed a decade-plus of unstructured, self-directed learning into the pursuit of an undergraduate degree at Hampshire College, a private liberal arts institution in western Massachusetts, and a master’s in social work from Columbia University. They recently accepted a job as the executive director of a non-profit in rural Alaska countering domestic violence.

A peer-reviewed 2015 study co-authored by Gray of Boston College found that only 4% of unschoolers reported being unhappy with the experience. (Gray notes that the survey, of only 75 people, is somewhat self-selecting: that is, the people surveyed agreed to take part, and were inclined to report positively. It also didn’t account for unschoolers who drifted into conventional education between kindergarten and 12th grade.)

However marginal, such negative experiences do undoubtedly exist. “My experience with unschooling can be boiled down to extreme inconsistency and moderate neglect,” says Tyler*, who agreed to share his experience on the condition of anonymity. “It places the responsibility of education on children, who don’t have the same psychological needs as adults. But the whole philosophy of unschooling is to ignore this fact and say that children should direct their own learning.”

Unlike DuPont, Tyler had great difficulty adjusting to formal education. When he entered community college at age 16, his math and reading skills were only at a second grade-level, he said. It took him 12 years to complete a bachelor’s degree, which he attributes to all the remedial courses he had to enroll in merely to catch up to his peers. He also suffered significant neglect, educational and otherwise. For Tyler, and a number of others schooled (or unschooled) at home, unschooling can feel like little more than a fancy term for straight up not schooling. “It keeps children uneducated, and easily controlled,” he says. “They won’t speak out, or even have enough understanding to know they are being abused or neglected.”

School of hard knocks

Caitlin Davis, 36, was pulled out of school in southern Ontario, Canada, when she was in first grade. Her parents were evangelical Christians, who took their children out of school after their eldest daughter passed away from leukaemia. Initially, Caitlin’s mother made a run at something like conventional home schooling: setting up lesson plans, assigning schoolwork, even having an ad hoc classroom in the family basement. Before long, any semblance of normal schooling fell apart.

When her mother returned to work, Caitlin and her younger sister were left more or less to their own devices, mostly spending time fiddling around on the family computer. In 1999, when she would have been in the sixth grade, Caitlin heard the news of the massacre at Columbine high school in Colorado. It stirred in her a strange feeling: not sadness, or horror, but something closer to longing. “I would have rather gone to school with the threat of a school shooter,” she recalls, bitterly. “I would have rather been shot in the face. That’s how bad it was … I think home schooling, unschooling, whatever you want to call it, is absolute child abuse.”

Related: ‘Children are being failed’: why more English parents are home educating

Beyond the total dearth of formal education, which put Davis well behind her peers, she says she suffered most acutely from not really having any peers. Friendships were hard to come by. When she did connect with other children, and then teenagers, she found herself woefully out of step. She watched lots of movies and spent her days and nights surfing the internet, largely unsupervised. Her understanding of the high school experience was shaped entirely by pop culture. “To this day, I’ll ask people if stuff like school pictures, or school dances, really happen,” she recalls. “Like: ‘Is that actually a thing?’ It’s crazy.”

In her adult life, Davis has settled into something like normalcy. She sees a therapist. She has a healthy relationship with her husband. She completed a college degree. After some work as an education assistant, she now works with children at a therapy center. But the feelings of alienation and abuse she suffered in a free-form, unsupervised educational environment are never far from her mind.

Davis is not alone in her suffering, or her desire to process that childhood trauma. As information – and mere “content” – advocating for unschooling, free schooling and other self-directed educational philosophies spreads online, a countervailing movement has emerged, warning against the potential dangers of these movements. Beyond haranguing pop-ups in comment sections of videos by influencers like Onami or Skyler DuPont, communities have formed giving a voice to those who see themselves as “survivors” of unconventional education.

Deep in such forums, a profound incredulity prevails. There is a sense that all forms of home schooling or self-directed education are de facto neglectful and abusive. Deeper still, there looms a form of vigilant paranoia, which rejects the idea that anyone could even conceivably emerge from such a setting physically and psychologically unscathed. When I tell one survivor that I’ve spoken with some grown, well-adjusted-seeming unschoolers, they insist that those people’s trauma has merely not yet manifested.

“Responsible home-schooling families do exist,” says Angela Grimberg, executive director of the Coalition for Responsible Home Education. “But you have another group of people who take advantage of lax home-schooling policies across the country to isolate and abuse their children.”

The coalition focuses on “empower[ing] children by educating the public and advocating for child-centered, evidence-based policy and practices for families and professionals”. A recent report by the group noted nearly 500 cases of abuse among home-schooled students in the US, with nearly 200 fatalities since the year 2000. A 2014 study found that nearly half of child torture victims in the US were home schooled. Grimberg notes that 11 states do not even require that parents notify school districts of intent to home school, which can lead to a total lack of accountability at the state level. Only one state, New York, mandates that children educated outside of traditional schools regularly come into contact with an adult outside the home, for the purposes of assessment. This is what makes it so difficult to even estimate the number of American home schoolers, let alone unschoolers. For many parents pursuing alternative, in-home educational philosophies, this lack of oversight is just fine. For others, it may be the point.

A key value among many parents who pursue in-home, alternative modes of education is “parents’ rights”. These rights enshrine a parent’s ability to make decisions on behalf of their child, especially in regards to education. Such parents have their own non-profit groups that lobby (sometimes quite relentlessly) on their behalf.

The Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA), for example, provides resources to home-schooling parents, ranging from tips for developing an at-home curriculum to an emergency number for parents confronted with pesky state social workers rapping at their doors. Michael Farris, a co-founder of the HSLDA, has even authored a kind of novel/manual called Anonymous Tip, telling the story of a home-schooling mother squaring off against an eager investigator dispatched by Child Protective Services. “The most shocking part of it all,” the back cover text claims, “it could really happen to anyone!”

“They have a lot more money than us,” Grimberg says of the HSLDA. “Every time positive legislation that would protect children comes up in a state, the HSLDA gets their constituent to go and attack the capitol and make sure that bill doesn’t get passed. We’re constantly at odds with them. They’re working to deregulate states further.” Grimberg notes that the HSLDA has been particularly effective in normalizing the rhetoric of “parents’ rights”.

Yet the focus on these particular rights marks a sharp distinction between more traditional forms of home schooling, and those fuzzier, more newfangled modes of self-directed learning. Historically, home schoolers across the country fit a fairly reliable profile: fundamentalist Christians whose politics tilt rather far to the right. They are typically distrustful of state and private institutions educating and rearing their children.

One home-schooling survivor, 35-year-old Sarah*, was instructed in the tradition of Christian Reconstructionism, a Calvinist movement that holds that God’s law transcends that of the state. She says that she and her siblings suffered extreme physical and emotional abuse, resulting in lifelong struggles with PTSD. “I grew up being taught that my parents had the authority from God to maim or kill me if I wasn’t obedient enough,” Sarah says. “A lot of parents are using the guise of home schooling to exercise complete domination and totalitarian rule over their children’s lives. They scream freedom, but not freedom for children.”

The more modern unschooling set rejects – or at least claims to reject – this domineering tendency. Gray describes many unschooling parents as “politically left-of-center, more than libertarian”. Onami describes many in the community as “crunchy, granola, hippie”. Gregory Horlacher, meanwhile, actually finds himself “wary” of other unschoolers. “I don’t like ‘granola’,” he says. “Sometimes it signals, you know, anti-vaxxers. I don’t want to be around that.”

A school of thought

What is shared among this diverse swath of practitioners is a genuine-seeming value of children’s autonomy. The idea (on paper, anyway) is to nurture and encourage a child’s emerging interest and preoccupations, not just to build more curious students but more well-rounded people. “You have a massive amount of self-determination, from a very young age,” says Skyler DuPont. “When you grow up with that kind of self-reflection and self-evaluation, it creates people who can do that as adults. It builds resilience. It builds self-confidence.”

Related: I loved being home schooled (apart from the sex ed lessons). But are new methods too radical? | Elle Hunt

DuPont has watched the scene expand from the frontlines, as one of the lead organizers of the Northeast Unschooling Conference, an annual meeting of self-directed learners. This year’s conference featured a tie-dye workshop, an ice cream social, an online video creation seminar and a keynote address by Sawyer Fredericks, a songwriter and grown unschooler and winner of the NBC singing competition series The Voice. For DuPont, the explosion of unschooling content spreading on social media helps draw attention to the movement, further diversifying it. “There’s a much greater variety of voices in the unschooling world than there was even 10 years ago,” they note, “who are adapting the philosophy to work for their families, in all sorts of different ways.”

For advocates like Angela Grimberg, the swelling social media ecosystem can seem like a bit of a distraction from more pressing issues facing the many children who are isolated, abused and otherwise unaccounted for. “We have so much work to do defending the basic rights of children,” she says. “We’re not on TikTok, looking at these influencers.”

For the critics flooding the comment sections to cry foul about shoddy parenting, social media may well provide something that more conservative, orthodox, housebound home schoolers lack: not just an outlet for their outrage, but a form of shared, highly public, livestreamed oversight. Still, many survivors of unschooling, and home schooling, aren’t buying it. The projection of normalcy, and even success, has long been part of the home-schooling toolkit.

“This is exactly how my mother was back in the 90s,” says Tyler. “For her, it was touring support groups and conferences and whatnot, to brag about how happy, well-adjusted and educated her children were, while neglecting to mention the suicide attempts, running away, screaming and tears that permeated daily life.”

*This article uses pseudonyms to protect the identities of home-schooled sources who requested anonymity.