Experts And Former Students Confess Their Honest Thoughts About Unschooling

Scroll through TikTok or Instagram and you’ll likely come across families documenting their “unschooling” lives — children learning through nature walks instead of textbooks, kitchen experiments instead of science labs, and daily life instead of daily lessons.

The posts are idyllic: kids painting in sunlight, teens coding in cafés, parents narrating how freedom fuels creativity. “Life is learning,” many captions read — the unofficial mantra of the unschooling movement.

Lisa5201 via Getty Images On paper, the philosophy of unschooling is meant to prioritize true learning over testing and grades — but unschooled alumnus have mixed feelings.

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Unschooling, a form of homeschooling that removes formal curriculum entirely and emphasizes child-led, self-directed learning based on a child’s own interests, is gaining renewed attention as parents increasingly question traditional education systems. Some see it as the purest form of child-led learning. Others worry it’s just educational neglect in disguise.

So what’s it really like to grow up unschooled — and what happens when those kids grow up?

‘We hid from the school bus every morning.’

For Calvin Bagley, unschooling wasn’t a choice.

“I grew up in the Utah desert, where my parents pretended to educate us, but in reality, they were just isolating us from the world under the guise of religious protection,” he said. “By the time I was 10, even the pretense of learning had disappeared. There were no books, no lessons, no real education, just work and fear.”

He said a typical day meant chores, farm labor, and pretending to study whenever his father came inside.

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“We hid from the school bus every morning because we were to