The recent piece on Good Morning America featuring a mom and dad who were unschooling their two kids, and the negative, rather than inquiring tone, that it was framed with, made me recall our own decision to let our son Eric unschool, rather than go to high school. I wrote a piece about it in January of 2009, “Unschooling Instead of High Schooling”, and I have reworked that piece below, based on additional thought, more feedback from Eric, and more water under the bridge…

We pulled Eric out of school in February 2000 at age 14 because it had become clear that he hated going to school every morning and had a profound incompatibility with the conventional instructional academic environment. We had been considering doing it for a while, and Eric’s mom had done a fair amount of research on homeschooling on the Internet. After pulling Eric out, which removed the most acute of his issues, Sally and I had tried initially to build a home curriculum that included the four standard academic areas – English, social studies, science and math. Eric, as it turns out, had other ideas. Continue reading →