While there have been many stories about gifted homeschoolers achieving academic success over the 40+ years I’ve been writing about homeschooling, two things leaped out to me from Ms. Tillman’s story: her desire to share her love of science and art with other young people, and her desire to “focus on who I am" as her next step.

Lidya Foxglove writes: “I was unschooled through most of my childhood and never went to college. I’ve gotten questions and sometimes pushback about it all my life but I think it helped me to my writing career as well as living intentionally.”

John Holt: “I have always said, but never with an example as eloquent and persuasive as this, that though the child may not know what he may need to know in ten years, he knows, and much better than anyone else, what he wants and needs to know next, in short, what his mind is ready and hungry for.”

Just as school is not really an effective preparation for life, neither should life be considered a preparation for school.

There are methods and curricula that don’t follow the authoritarian model of schooling, but they are dismissed as not being academically rigorous or too coddling for serious educators. Despite this dubious claim, alternative schools, homeschooling, private and charter schools continue to grow because the conventional system is not adapting to change—and there are cracks appearing in the authoritarian model that are worth noting.