Tanzina Vega: Welcome back to The Takeaway, I'm Tanzina Vega. As the school year gets underway, concerns about safety of in-person learning remain. We recently covered on the show that some people are turning to less conventional ideas, including learning pods, where parents or private teachers oversee a small group of students, but for families considering other out of the box approaches to education, one option is something called unschooling. It's a method that lets kids lead the way allowing them to shape their own curriculum and learn at their own pace. Unschooling first emerged in the 1980s when a Canadian filmmaker and writer named Astra Taylor was growing up. She's written about being unschooled by her mother and she told us why being unschooled was a better fit for her.

Astra Taylor: I was very grateful to be unschooled and to be left to my own devices and to not have to experience what I felt were the problems with school, which was that I was in this arbitrary group. We're all eight. I'm in a room full of eight-year-olds and being told to learn according to very formal schedule and someone-- Even at eight years old, I would get really into something, and I would want to do it for more than 45 minutes or maybe even more than the whole day. I'd want to be able to really get invested.

Tanzina: For more on this, I'm joined now by Peter Gray, a research professor at Boston College and author of the book Free to Learn. Peter, welcome to The Takeaway.

Peter Gray: I'm glad to be here.

Tanzina: Peter, what's unschooling, really?

Peter: Legally, to unschool, you have to register as a homeschooler. From a legal perspective, unschooling is a way of doing homeschooling, and what it really means is that if you're the parents, you have decided to trust your child to direct his or her own education, that you are not going to require any particular curriculum, you're not going to worry about testing your child, you're going to really trust your child's instincts and desire to learn and allow your child to take charge of their own education. That's really what unschooling is.

Tanzina: Now, does that include-- Is that additive to things like teaching your child how to read or how to count or doing basic things that we need to survive in the world today, or is that also something that kids can direct on their own?

Peter: Interestingly, that's also something that kids learn on their own. It's very interesting. I've actually done a little study by surveying unschooling families about how children learned how to read, about how they learned to calculate with numbers, and it's very interesting that many families don't even know how their children learned to read. They just picked it up just the way they learn oral language. One interesting thing is that children learn to read if they're unschooled at very different ages. Some children learn very early, some children learn later, but I have yet to find, and I've done quite a number of studies, any child in an unschooling family who did not learn how to read, and most of them we're not taught in any deliberate way.

Tanzina: What's the appeal here for parents? I guess the bigger question for me is, doesn't that require a certain amount of attention from parents, and maybe even this is a word that gets used a lot, privilege, to be able to stay home? I mean, a lot of us are staying home because we have to, but doesn't that require just a level of the ability to school your kids that not everybody has?

Peter: I wouldn't recommend unschooling or any kind of homeschooling for every family. I don't think it's the solution for every family. I don't think it's so much income, it has more to do with, "Is this really what you want to do? Is this your priority?" There's not a whole lot of data on this, but the only two studies that I'm aware of that looked at the income level of people doing unschooling indicated that the median income for people doing unschooling is less than the median income for the nation as a whole. You certainly don't have to be wealthy to do this.

On the other hand, if you're in great poverty, if you're a single parent, having to work, unschooling would be very difficult. There are, however, a growing number of learning centers for people doing homeschooling or unschooling, where your child can be at this learning center during the day if you're working, and if it's an unschooling-oriented center, it follows those principles. There may be courses, but you're free to take them or not take them. There are adults there who are literate and numerate. There are other kids there to play with.

Most of these involve some tuition, but a growing number of them have sliding scales all the way down to no tuition at all if you can't afford it. There's a growing number of means. There's recognition that if we want this to be available to everybody, we have to find ways to make it possible for people with low income and families where there can't be somebody home during the day.

Tanzina: One of the things that interested me about this topic is looking at Instagram and finding out that there are parents, particularly parents of color, Black and brown parents, in particular, who are starting to, at least, from what it appears, to get interested in this as well. Are you noticing that communities of color are starting to embrace unschooling?

Peter: Absolutely, there's a growing number. Many are talking about it as part of a general liberation movement. Many people of color feel that their children are being discriminated against in various ways in public school, they're taking their children out because of that, and within that category, a certain number are choosing unschooling. There's a number of African-American leaders, Black leaders of unschooling movements currently in the United States.

Tanzina: I'm sure there are some parents who are thinking, "What happens to my kid if I let them direct everything at the end of the day? Do they grow up to be okay? Do they grow up to go to college, for example? Are they able to manage in more structured educational environments as they get older?

Peter: Yes. Well, I was curious about that. A few years ago, along with Professor Gina Riley at Hunter College, I did a study of grown unschoolers. We identified 75 grown unschoolers, we looked at their life as adults, and also talked to them about what they had been doing when they were young people being unschooled, and we found that more than half of them had gone on to bachelor's degrees. Some of them had never been to school before they went on to college, yet, they got into college and did well there. They were well-employed.

One of the most interesting findings from that study was that for well more than half of them, you could see a very direct relationship between passionate interest that they had developed as children and their careers. Because they had plenty of time as children to play and explore and discover what they liked and become good at that, they were able to go on to careers that they greatly enjoyed.

Tanzina: Peter Gray is a research professor at Boston College and author of Free to Learn. Peter, thanks so much.

Peter: You're very welcome.

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