I think you neglect to realize you don't need traditionally schooling to reap terrific social rewards, and indeed, from the research I read over the years when our son was growing up, social rewards were more likely to be gained by homeschooling than traditional schooling.
Our son also giggled and laughed when interacting with people, young and old, and continued to do so all the way up till he moved away to graduate school at 14. He still laughs plenty, but not as often as he did before he moved away, and I am not sure the reason for that (though I do wonder if he'd be happier had he never gone the formal education route or stayed at home longer), but am happy he at least has plenty of laughter in him.
Do some research, Pay close attention to who the unhappy 5 to 18 year olds are. As far as mental health visits, traditionally schooled people have FAR more than home educated people, and while I grant that homeschooled people might for whatever reasons be less likely to go in for mental health help, I doubt that explains the big picture as many people who become mental health patients didn't choose that path/go voluntarily. There are also far fewer prisoners who were homeschooled than traditionally educated (fewer than the general population of homeschooled people, which I realize is a very small population still itself). And homeschoolers on welfare were unheard of a decade or so ago, when I last read on the topic; not sure if that's still the case. People in the hospital or a clinician's "couch", prison, and welfare lines don't tend to be the jolliest folks around (which isn't to say they never laugh, of course).
You just taught me a term, as I had never heard of strewing until now. I suspect that term became popular after 2000 (the year our son began college). We did indeed strew.
I'm not even sure I would call what we did after 4th grade "choosing a curriculum", which would mean to me having things more laid out (a syllabus and such) than I think we had. I just pulled his portfolio down for a period of time when he was 6 to 7, and it has things like this in it:
1) A letter he wrote to Black Dog and Leventhal Publishers, Inc. noting that when he was reading their book "101 More Read Aloud Classics", the book went from page 96 to page 126 (only he described this much more cutely than I am here) and therefore was "missing 16 (or 32, depending on the way you look at it) pages" and he asked if he could have those pages, either in a separate 32-page book or in another complete book (and he received a new hardbound copy, even though his original was paperback, only 10 days later).
2) A list of books read (with start and finish dates)
3) Photos of things like his planning a lemonade stand with a girl, standing next to a Domino creation, riding a bike, using a continuity checker while fixing a hairdryer, taking a tap dance class, playing in a few handchime choir performances, getting an organ lesson (informal at the handchime choir director's home), visiting the Library of Congress and an airport museum, playing racquetball and ping pong, visiting Montpelier and Monticello, painting, working with an adult friend on a circuit for a robot costume, accepting s Multiple Scerlosis Read-a-thon top fundraiser award, singing at a Halloween campfire, attending a physics of flight class at the zoo, studying the steam engine at a railroad museum, visiting the FDR and Jefferson memorials, attending a university physics program, attending a van Gogh exhibit,visiting Savannah, etc.
4. His subtest and composite scores on achievement and aptitude testing at the end of 6th grade (where he hit the ceiling of 9th grade equivalency on reading, vocabulary, math problem solving, spelling, usage, capitalization and punctuation, science, and social students and scored a general aptitude in the 99th percentile (despite being years younger than a typical 6th grade graduate).
5. A list of examples of questions others posed that he knew the answers for, such as: an electrical engineer giving him a truth table to solve and his solving it correctly even though the engineer at first had the wrong answer himself; in a "Physiology of Speed" lecture given at a science museum that was attended almost exclusively by adults, the college professor asked, "What are endorphins?" and our son was the only one in the room to raise a hand (he had read about endorphins on his own somewhere); in a "Physics of Flight" class, where he was the youngest student, he answered "Who are the Mongolfier brothers?" (he said he had learned this from the software program "Museum Madness", a program he used when he was just two or three); when taking a Degas tour at an art museum, he answered so many questions with such clarity and insight that the tour guide and some parents on the tour felt certain he was planning to be an artist; while eating out at a restaurant, I noticed a picture on the wall of a man carving a statue and it coming to life and asked who the sculpture in the picture was and he answered, "Pygmalion"; at Physics is Phun, he helped solve an equation to find the speed of light using metric measurements, and in doing so, used scientific notation and converted nanoseconds to seconds, among other things.
6. Examples of other ways his mind was strong, such as how he continued to play things on the piano that he often had only heard once prior, and could pick up instruments he didn't usually play and start playing real tunes on them instantly (something that came in handy years later at the Media Lab when a graduate student invented an instrument that he thought would only make nonsense but interesting sounds when used to draw, but our son picked it up and showed the fellow student how it could be used to draw/play a real tune), and how when he was told to jump and risk breaking your legs if in a fire while in a second floor bedroom, he noted that this wouldn't be an issue when he was an adult as his home would have ladders that would automatically shoot out from upper floors when the fire alarm was set off.
7. Samples of some calendar (page-a-day) questions he knew right off, like one asked Fermat's theorem and he stated it perfectly (he had read it in one of his father's books).
8. List of classical myths, poems, stories, and speeches read.
9. Topics covered in grammar and literature.
10. Misc. other ways English was "taught" (seeing two Shakespearean plays at the Folger Library, keeping a journal, writing thank you notes, playing games like "The Play's the Thing", attending a writer's workshop, going to performances at theaters in the area, etc.
11. His making three-colored graphs (one made a flower image) on his new graphing calculator (he had to ask politely on and off for two years to get a graphing calculator), and other topics in math such as probability (figuring out median, mode, median, and range), special triangles, etc.
12. Topics discussed in science, such as internal combustion engines, Anton van Loeuwenhoek, Gregor Mendel, curved reflectors, acids/bases/chemical reactions, experiments with different rocks, adolescence and puberty (and it was good we covered this early as he went through it early; he also took the topic in college when he was 11), and a whole lot more.
13. Topics in geography (24 are listed), world civilization (25 items listed), and American civilization (18 items listed)
14. Health education (fire prevention fair at mall, AIDS, newspaper articles on zinc lozenges and cigars, etc.
15. Topics in art (25 listed).
16. Topics in music (things like Scott Joplin, shapes of melodies, how melody works with chords, attending a Peter and the Wolf performance,etc.
17. Spanish class at the elementary school and Italian class at the community college.
18. Good manners worksheet (one I typed up myself where he had to check off if it was a "Do" or a "Don't" (things like asking when a guest at someone else's home if they prefer you to leave your shoes on or take them off, and get this oldie..."rewind videotapes after watching them"!).
19. A letter to a local paper's editor that resulted in his being offered a position as a writer for the paper (not that this was his intent at all when he wrote).
20. The copy of an essay he wrote that won him $300 in U.S. Savings bonds in a national essay contest.
21. Lots of other stuff (I just scratched the surface there).
So it wasn't like we never used any textbooks (we used a few at times where we felt it made sense), but we didn't do much planning in advance, doesn't seem to me, so much as sort of went with the flow of what seemed interesting to delve into at any given time.
I think you have a misperception of unschooling as being left on one's own. That's not what unschooling is, at least not typically. It is more just along the lines of learning through ways that aren't a traditional "school" approach to learning. I have to meet some friends for dinner, so can't elaborate more on what you shared above, but will try to do so soon (if not tonight, tomorrow). Thanks for taking the time to read what I shared (I had doubted anyone would see them as nobody had posted in days), and you are most welcome for the sharing - glad at least one person found them a treat! :)
One thing I feel the Internet has changed is how much personal connection matter. Prior to the Internet, one needed to be in the local area of a mentor or at least write a handwritten letter to someone a distance away to get help learning for an expert. This is NOT the case anymore and hasn't been for around two decades. When my son was 7 and wanted to see a model for each element on the Periodic Table of Elements, he couldn't find it in any of our books at home or in the local library, but he contacted a "science expert" on the Internet and got a link to such a resource (and later, did find a book on it). The week he turned 8, he read a book that excited his mind and he wrote the author an email with comments and questions; that man emailed him back in about an hour and became a mentor to our son even with the two living in different states (and did a lot to help our son form other connections), and indeed the man became our son's academic advisor for his MIT graduate education down the road. It's pretty easy for anyone to reach out and make connections today. My understanding of the history of the girl whose article started off this thread is that she had an interest in a topic and her father suggested she write someone who was an expert in that field, and that was how she got a mentor in CA; the girl was living in another country when she contacted the CA scientist. Anyone with access to a library with a computer connected to the Internet can get the most important of all resources - people resources. Spread the word if you know people who are still not realizing this.
I can theorize one "sign" of innate smartness. When I was pregnant, my hands at one point in the pregnancy came to rest on my belly, and at some point, I happened to tap on my belly, and back came the same number of kicks or punches. I thought this had to have been coincidence, so tried a different number of taps, only to have that number tapped back, and so I tried a third number, which again came mirrored right back to me. It was at this point that I became freaked out and did my best to keep my hands off my belly for the remainder of the pregnancy. I have only heard of one other woman having this experience, and she told me her child is also one with a rather high IQ.
Rolling over soon after birth might be another such indicator. Our son did this as a newborn and I've heard other mothers of high IQ children (not just one other, but several others) say their children did the same. One would think such a move would have more to do with muscle strength (and our son was born a typical 7 pounds and 6 ounces, so no football player baby) but perhaps it's more how quickly the mind can figure out how to pull off the turn, I don't know.
You sound like a neat person, and congrats on having become such. :)
I am curious about one thing you shared - the choice to get the B.A. rather than the B.S. in CS. Did the B.A. require less coursework in CS, since the choice allowed you more time out of the CS building? Our son's state U didn't even have a B.A. in C.S., only a B.S. option. It was in math that he had a B.A./B.S. option and there, the B.S. required more math courses (and maybe more science courses, too), and his CS advisor urged him to relax and not bother with the B.S. in math since he'd already had a B.S. in C.S. and it would seem more well-rounded to have both a B.A. and a B.S., but our son felt that was B.S. since in fact, he needed no more coursework to get the B.A. and needed two extra math classes for the B.S., so really the B.S. was a "higher level" of education and he didn't care what things looked like to others. He also had finished his first B.S. with a 4.0 GPA in CS and we questioned whether he should really sign up for yet more CS credits when he didn't need them, but he again didn't care about risking the GPA; he only cared about learning, and back then, I don't think auditing much crossed his mind (where in graduate school, he has just sat in some courses because the program wouldn't allow him to load up formally on more credits, where his undergraduate school dean had no issue signing off on a 25-credit semester rather than the typical 12-15 credits).
I feel pretty confident that it's not like all people with a B.S. in C.S. lack a well-rounded education in college. Our son took above and beyond the college's requirements in arts and humanities, social sciences, language/culture (he took German and French courses plus a bunch of culture credits, and had taken some Spanish and Italian before going to college), science (the university only required students take two courses in bio, chem, or physics, and our son took one in bio at 9, two in chem at 9, and also three physics courses), and English (he got freshman English credit from his CLEP score, but since he also was in the Honors College, if he used test credit for freshman English, he had to take an upper level English). In addition to that, he was on a college sports team for a year (won a gold medal in it), was in SGA from sophomore to senior years, and was active in a bunch of other things on campus while also staying active which younger students off campus (was in a handchime choir for those 10 and up, did tap performances with other children, gave magic performances with children ages 5 to 18, etc.) as well as socializing with senior citizens (he volunteered once a week at a local retirement home from ages 7 to 14, when he moved out of state for graduate school, though he did come back at 15 to give a eulogy for one of the residents, as she had requested he do a eulogy for her even since she heard him do one for another resident when he was I think 10). He also spent summers doing 40 hour/week internships at a tech company in another state from ages 9 to 12. Oh, and he did study abroad programs in eleven countries while in college and had been to over 30 countries before he moved away from home at 14, I believe (is up over 40 countries now, I think).
An early start programming no doubt does give one a leg up. Our son began programming at age 5, and by the time he finished college, I think he had dozens of computer languages on his resume, most of which were learned outside of college and not in classes.
As with others in this thread, I'd urge you to research homeschooling more before you make any decisions for your own offspring's education, if you ever go the route of having children (as I realize many smart people opt out of the parenting path, just as I had planned to do before meeting my husband).
It varies by state as to whether there are standardized tests required. Our state didn't (still doesn't, far as I know) require testing, but required students to either be under an umbrella school (like the private school served for our son for early on) or to come in to meet with teachers I think it was twice a year for a portfolio review. The teachers we had for our reviews were incredibly supportive of our son and our homeschooling him. The meeting place was a huge internal room with no windows, and one time, there was a power outage and we were all in pitch blackness. Our son was 8 at the time and had brought it a Lego Mindstorms creation of his and he felt around on the table for his remote control for it and had the lights on it turned on in no time and was using that light to escort people out. One of the teachers asked for our son's autograph and said, "You'll be on the cover of magazines in no time!"
He never applied for a GED. At age 8, he took the SAT to see if he could qualify for a CTY engineering summer course that could also give Johns Hopkins college credit (for an extra price), and his scores not only qualified him for that course and all the other CTY courses, but had the state U close to us interested in him. They asked to meet with him as soon as they saw his scores, and handed him an application when he met with them, which he filled out and mailed as soon as he got back home, and within a week, his admission was in our mailbox. This was not at all what I expected when we approved of his taking the SAT so young, nor anything I was particularly comfortable with happening (and we did hold him off till he turned 9, at least), but he had been asking to attend college math and engineering courses since he was 6, and had we to do things over again, I actually think we'd have been better off letting him start college at 6, bizarre that I know that sounds.
We never had the issue with our son not being interested in learning an important skill. Instead, we had the issue of his wanting to learn skills before we were feeling it was worth his learning them. For example, he wanted to learn calculus when he was 7. I typically bought him whatever books he wanted, but this was one where I drew the line. But then he became the top fundraiser in the state for a Multiple Sclerosis read-a-thon (his third year in a row doing so) and one of the prizes was a $50 Borders gift certificate and he used that to buy himself a calculus book. When he took calculus at the university at age 9 (as that is the level the college placement test put him at, must to we parents' shock), he was one of the top students in his class of over 160 students, and he had never even taken anything past algebra I formally before taking that calculus class. But his lack of having had geometry/algebraII/trig/precalc prior to college did not cause him problems in math down the road; he earned one of his bachelor's degree in math at age 13, and took a mix of five college upper level and graduate level courses one semester in modern algebra and number theory, math analysis II, and three other math subjects plus an upper level CS while doing a paid internship off campus and still got a 4.0 that semester (he also did fine in graduate-level math courses at MIT and Harvard). And math is probably the area where most think a linear progression is key, but for some, it actually doesn't appear to be.
I believe the social universe is often smaller in a traditional school than when homeschooled. Public schools are often made up of those living in the same area, which often means similar social economic status rather than a melting pot. I didn't have anything but fellow whites in my classes in public school till third grade, when we had one student who wasn't white, and in 5th grade, there was a second (though I still only had one in my class that year). This wasn't your experience? Then guess what - so much for the shared experience, no matter that we both went to a traditional school.
Having had chicken pox is an experience most of the population also shares. Now I contracted the virus as a baby when my brother brought it home from kindergarten. Can't say as I remember it at all as I was barely out of the womb, but I apparently got so few pox marks that I got shingles as a 20-year-old college senior, and oh what fun that was. Has our son had Chicken Pox? No, as we opted to get him the vaccine. I hope he doesn't feel we wronged him by depriving him of a typical childhood experience.
When our son was 5 and homeschooled, he was playing in the ocean while his traditionally educated cousins were in school. My brother asked me, "When are you going to let him out into the real world?"
My response was something like this:
"If you think your children are in the real world because they are in a traditional school, I think you are deluding yourself. Do you have to ask permission to urinate? No, and neither do most people in the real world, but your children do. Ditto getting a drink of water. Are your children starving? No? Well, that is the real world for many children (as of 2010, the the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization puts the figure at over 13% of the world population is undernourished, but I didn't have an iPhone to look this up on the beach back in 1996). Have your children been sexually molested? Perhaps you'd like to set them up for that experience as it's one many have had."
I gave some other examples of what "the real world" is for other people in the world and ended with:
"I believe we can make our own worlds to a good degree, and feel it irresponsible not to realize that and choose what world you'd like for yourself and your loved ones and to work toward living in that world."
I guess the definition of "unschooling" can be a fuzzy one. Wikipedia gives the following definition:
"Unschooling is a range of educational philosophies and practices centered on allowing children to learn through their natural life experiences, including play, game play, household responsibilities, work experience, and social interaction, rather than through a more traditional school curriculum."
I consider our son to have been homeschooled for K-4th grade as we were using a private school's curriculum at home and he was having tests graded by a teacher hired by the private school and paid by us. He went on field trips and did a bunch of other things (played with Legos, studied electricity and geography, etc.) with other homeschoolers and played with both homeschooled and traditionally schooled children. One day when he was 6 and in 4th grade, he was reading a college engineering book (friends of the family had given him when he was five, why I am not sure) when I came to him and said it was "time for school" and to come to the kitchen (where we typically "did school"). He looked up at me and responded, "Why should I stop doing what I am doing here, which is actually helping me to learn something new, to go in the kitchen a fill out a bunch of worksheets on things I've long since known?" Foolishly, I answered, "Because we paid good money for this program. But if you want to go it on your own once you finish the fourth grade curriculum, we can give that a try." I should have just ended homeschooling with a private school curriculum right then and there, but I am not as quick a learner as our son.
Anyway, after 4th grade, he learned using all sorts of activities and books, and unschooling was the most delightful part of my career as a homeschool teacher/parent (as really my son was more the teacher than I; he had started correcting my spelling and offering me more precise words for my business letters when he was only two). He went to Shakespearean plays since he was three or four, I think (we had a very smart entrepreneurial friend who owned a tech company by day and ran a Shakespearean group by night and weekend, and he still doing both today). And while I admit I feel history was his worst subject, he was still far better at it than most American adults, as supported by his score on the Culturescope test (where he scored higher at age 7 than most high school seniors) and his being a top student at age 11 and 12 in his university's Honors College upper level history and culture courses.
I don't see unschooling as meaning the parents can't provide any direction to the child's education, or use any textbooks, though I also don't think textbooks are necessary for learning in general (the only exception perhaps - and this is only a perhaps - being upper level math).
I disagree that exceptional people will be exceptional people no matter what. I am pretty sure most will agree that if we keep a baby in a dark closet, supplying only enough nutrition to stay alive, that baby will not likely turn into anyone typically considered exceptional. What environment one grows up in does affect the odds of whether a person will someday be considered exceptional or not, and not always in the ways people might think. For example, many would think having living, middle-class parents would be a help on the path to eminence, and yet, not necessarily so...Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in the book "Creativity" notes that about three out of ten men and two out of ten women in his sample of eminently creative Americans (he calls them "exceptional") were orphaned before they reached their teens (and this study was conducted long after it was common for young people to lose their parents). One theory is that this allows the young person to feel a great sense of liberation to be and do anything and at the same time, perhaps feel a tremendous burden to live up to the expectations attributed to a missing parent (having a parent just leave rather than die also seems to help give one an edge here). Now it was also true that there were many example of a warm and stimulating family environment to conclude that hardship or conflict was necessary to give someone a creative urge, but what was noticed was that exceptional individuals either had the warm and stimulating environment or a very deprived and challenging one...what appeared to be missing was the common middle ground.
Social class is a similar scenario. Only about 10% of the eminent people came from a middle-class childhood (which in America, is represented by way more than 10%, often I think more like 50% of the population). About 30% of the eminent people in M.H.'s study had parents who were farmers, poor immigrants, or blue collar workers, but the parents didn't identify with their lower-class position and had high aspirations for their children to move up in the world. Then about 34% had fathers who held an intellectual occupation (professor, writer, orchestra conductor, or research scientist). The remaining quarter were brought up with parents who were lawyers, physicians, or wealthy businessmen (and the general population has way fewer such people, as people here likely realize). A quote on page 172 in the book reads:
"Clearly it helps to be born in a family where intellectual behavior is practiced, or in a family that values education as an avenue of mobility - but not in a family that is comfortably middle-class."
Here is seems the author has concluded that there can be no intellectual behavior practiced or value of education as an avenue of mobility in a family that is comfortably middle-class, for which I would disagree. But I do believe having the contacts that the upper class tend to have and the drive to have more than one has grown up with or to better the world or such are factors that contribute to how exceptional one becomes or is noticed as having become.
Another quote, this time from page 173:
"It is quite strange how little effect school-even high school-seems to have had on the lives of creative people. Often one senses that, if anything, school threatened to extinguish the interest and curiosity that the child had discovered outside its walls."
Choose your walls wisely. Or choose to stay outside of walls.
Do you mean homeschooling or unschooling or both here? I haven't seen research that specifically targets unschooling (which usually is lumped under homeschooling as it's considered a form of it), but homeschooling studies time and again point to it having superior results in general than public or private schooling, as far as academic testing and low college drop-out rate and high entrepreneurship rate and social skills (like a double-blind study was done years ago and found that homeschoolers exhibited less negative behavior like pushing and name calling and more positive behavior like sharing than age-matched traditionally educated children) and so on. I have yet to see a single study showing homeschooling to produce worse results than traditional schooling, but if you have, please share it.