During my childhood I experienced the full spectrum of American education systems, including /laissez faire/ unschooling, homeschooling with a structured curriculum, a one-room country schoolhouse, urban public schools, and even a Catholic private school. I was fortunate that my parents, particularly my father, were willing to try multiple approaches to learning based on what was and wasn't working.

I hated almost every moment of my public school education, and private school was only slightly better. My urban public school was little better than a gladiator academy, and even in private school the curriculum was not challenging or engaging in any way. I was an awkward child and was frequently bullied (in fairness this did teach me the importance of being willing to meet violence with violence, a lesson which fortunately I've not needed to apply since my school days). I would find every opportunity to get out of school and work on my own self-edification projects; vaguely defined "sick days" were my stock in trade.

My last year of "normal" education was the 6th grade, in a public school in a small midwestern town (population: ~750). Having explored the gamut of educational styles it was clear that I learned best on my own.

I spent a lot of time exploring different subjects based on what caught my interest. By the time I was 13 I had already decided I wanted to go into EE. I saved my meager allowance and over time managed to procure the entire library of Forrest M. Mims' "Engineer's mini notebooks", and could reproduce the schematics in each one practically from memory. I was already looking at how I could get into the field without waiting until I was 18 and could go to college, but then I discovered digital circuits...

After extensive lobbying on my part my parents finally bought a computer in 1994 (a Gateway 2000 486 DX2 66Mhz). From then on I've been immersed in computing, at times to an obsessive degree. If you'd asked my father in 1995 if unschooling me had been a mistake, he might have shared his concerns that my humanity was slipping away as I spent every waking moment on that "damn machine". He couldn't have known at the time that I was laying the foundation for an incredibly satisfying career as a software engineer.

I always assumed I'd get around to a GED and then a college degree, because it was taken as an article of faith in my family that one must, if nothing else, graduate with at lease a bachelor's degree in something. But it never happened. I started community college like many unschoolers do as a way to get around age and testing requirements in four year schools, but by then I was already working as a software engineer and I didn't see the point in taking on debt and spending a few years in a CS curriculum, so I dropped out and never looked back.

I've seen some other comments here talk about the "socialization" question. My mother was very worried about this also. As others have mentioned, in the end I was better socialized than my age peers, because I had more meaningful interactions with people outside my age cohort. My coworkers, boss, in some cases even their children were all older than me, and that taught me how to act both professionally and in informal settings like happy hours and parties.

On the topic of privilege, I certainly count myself privileged to have been raised by two involved parents who had the insight to let me develop outside the accepted bounds of our society. However my family were very poor for the first ten years of my life, and barely middle class during my teens. One of my parents had a serious substance abuse problem which contributed to our poverty. Whatever aspect of my background and upbringing gave me an advantage in life, it was definitely not socio-economic.

Who knows if my experience reflects the superiority of one system over another, or if I would have turned out this way anyway, or some complex non-linear space in between. The key takeaway I think is that education is in no way a solved problem, and the system we have now (particularly in the US) is in no way the apotheosis of pedagogy. Just like we vigorously debate the merits of programming languages, tech stacks, type sytems, methodologies, business models, etc here on HN, how we educate ourselves and our children is at least as much of an unsolved problem.

Whether or not unschooling is a good fit for a particular child or their particular parents, the movement has nonetheless done us all a great service by proving convincingly that it's OK to question the education orthodoxy, that there are is no priestly caste of teachers who possess the wisdom of the pedagogical gods. In the early 80s this was by no means apparent, and my parents took a lot of shit from a lot of people for their approach. Now my sister is free to unschool her four kids with little to no hassle from the state.