Record: Peter Gray and Gina Riley, “The Challenges and Benefits of Unschooling, According to 232 Families Who Have Chosen that Route” in Journal of Unschooling and Alternative Learning 7, no. 14 (2013): 1-27. [Article]
Summary: Gray is a professor of psychology at Boston College, and Riley is an educational psychologist who teaches courses at Hunter College and Mercy College. Here they discuss the results from a survey they conducted with 232 unschooling families.
Unschooling is the refusal to send children to school and the refusal to homeschool them through traditional means. While related to homeschooling, unschoolers do not follow a set curriculum. They learn through everyday experiences that match their abilities, interests, and learning styles. Gray and Riley estimate that 10% of the approximately 2 million homeschooling families in America would identify themselves as unschoolers, but there are no official numbers.
It is difficult to define unschooling since it is informal by nature. John Holt, who coined the term and popularized unschooling, believed that children have an intrinsic motivation to learn about the world and that they can do it without much coercion or interference from adults. The parents’ role in this type of education is to foster an environment where natural learning can flourish by promoting self-regulation, self-understanding, and intrinsic motivation in their children.
There has not been much academic research on unschoolers, possibly because of their self-contained structure and their philosophical hesitancy towards research. Donna Kirschner’s [abstract] doctoral research is one of the few studies focused on the unschooling movement. She spent significant time with 22 unschooling families to study their behavior. She noted that they faced many pressures to conform, but mostly the families felt positively about their decision to unschool.
In their survey, Gray and Riley asked eight questions to determine how unschooling families define unschooling, why they chose it, and the perceived benefits/challenges. They posted their questionnaire on three unschooling websites [Psychology Today, Learning without Schooling, and The Natural Child Project], and people were free to respond. While they received 255 surveys back, they excluded 23 of the families because their oldest child had not yet reached five years old.
The first two questions established the demographics of their sample. 80.1% of the families resided in the United States. 95.2% of the individuals completing the survey were the mother. 90.5% were married and/or living with a significant other. 22.6% had one child; 44.8% had 2 children; and 33.6% had 3 or more children. The other questions and a summary of their findings are below.
Question 3 asked about employment. Roughly half of the mothers identified themselves as stay-at-home moms. Almost all of the fathers were employed full-time. The families represented a wide range of socioeconomic strata with many parents describing themselves as professionals while others described themselves as self-employed or blue-collar.
Question 5 asked for the family’s definition of unschooling. They categorized these responses into three groups based on parental involvement. The first group of 43.5% of the responses said that any parental involvement in learning was at the child’s request. These parents did not deliberately try to direct the child’s education in any way. The second group of 41.4% is similar to the first group, but they made some mention of guiding or motivating their children to learn. Finally, the last 15.1% were “relaxed homeschoolers” on the border between unschooling and homeschooling. These parents had some specific educational goals in mind for their children but still valued the freedom of unschooling.
Question 6 inquired about what drew the family to homeschooling. 43.5% indicated that at least one of their children attended school before beginning unschooling and that the child’s experiences led them to remove the child from school. Many cited the authoritarian nature of school, wasted time, declining interest in learning, and/or the child’s unhappiness due to bullying, etc. as reasons for leaving. The transition from traditional schooling to unschooling is often gradual since families usually start with a structured homeschooling curriculum. 47.4% of the respondents reported trying homeschooling before unschooling, but they eventually developed a preference for unschooling. The most influential authors on unschoolers are John Holt, John Taylor Gatto, and Sandra Dodd. The majority of unschoolers reported that an author played a role in their decision to unschool. Other families decided to unschool because of websites, conferences, lectures, or unschooling acquaintances.
37.1% said they unschooled their children from the beginning. This group was mostly attracted to unschooling due to their life philosophies or their experiences parenting their young children. Finally, 31.9% of the families mentioned their own negative school experiences as a reason for choosing unschooling. However, these groups are not mutually exclusive, and most families chose unschooling for a variety of the reasons mentioned above.
Question 7 asked about the challenges of unschooling. The most common difficulty described by 43.5% of the respondents was overcoming negative judgements from friends, family members, and strangers. Coming in second, mentioned by 41.4% of the respondents, was restraining the parent’s culturally-ingrained notions about education and staying true to the unschooling method. Other challenges were the amount of time unschooling took, trouble finding like-minded individuals, and legal issues.
Question 8, the final question of the survey, asked about the benefits of unschooling. Gray and Riley note that the answers to this question were much more detailed and passionate, so to the respondents, the benefits seemed to outweigh the possible challenges. 57.3% of the respondents believe that unschooling benefited their child’s learning. 52.1% mentioned social and emotional advantages. They said their children were happier, less stressed, more self-confident, more agreeable, and/or more outgoing than they would be if they went to a traditional school. 57% said unschooling brought the family closer together, and 36.2% enjoyed the freedom from the typical school schedule.
In their discussion, Gray and Riley point out the variance of unschoolers. This section mostly repeats their main findings, but they do point out that unschoolers are not a uniform group. The authors recognize that their results are flawed for a number of reasons such as the open-ended format, and the fact the the parents were surveyed rather than the children. Another limiting factor was that their sample is not random, and it only includes people who liked unschooling enough to stick with it. With this caveat, they say that their results at least describe the views and experiences of a large number of unschooling families who enjoy the method.
Gray and Riley conclude with a big question to which they cannot really provide an answer: how do unschoolers fare in college/life? However, their point seems to be that looking at the test scores and grades of unschoolers is beside the point because unschooling parents are much more concerned about raising happy, healthy, responsible, and intrinsically motivated children.
Appraisal: There is no doubt that Gray and Riley’s questionnaire has a number of flaws. While they were gracious enough to point out many of them, there are several more concerns that I have. First, given the unschooling community’s historical mistrust of research like this, I worry that the 232 families who participated may not represent the typical unschoolers. Also, if their estimates of approximately 200,000 unschooling families are to be believed, the sample is too small to make any definitive judgements. They reached less than 1% of their target population. As they say in their study, many homeschooling families are doing unschooling without realizing it. They may have gotten a fair sample of adamant unschoolers that frequent 3 websites, but there are probably many more moderate unschoolers who do not realize the terminology that missed out on the opportunity to participate in the questionnaire.
Nevertheless, in spite of the flaws, unschooling is not very well documented, so in that regard, Gray and Riley have laid the foundation for future studies to build on.
Also, some other research is suggesting that the answer to the question Gray and Riley pose about college success might not be a good one. Studies by Green-Hennessey and Martin-Chang have found that less structured homeschooling has worse outcomes (read the reviews for details). Studies outside of the homeschooling literature (Ehri’s synthesis of reading instruction scholarship, for example, finds positive gains with structured interventions, and Patall, Cooper, and Robinson’s synthesis of the literature on parental involvement in homework finds structured parental involvement to be more effective than a hands-off approach) also cast doubt on the efficacy of unschooling as a pedagogical strategy. While academic outcomes might not be the main thing motivating unschoolers as Gray and Riley make clear, it is still worth mentioning that a large body of literature has found that children do not excel when given absolute freedom.
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