Research Specifically About Unschooled Children
Hello, World!
Pattison, Harriet. Rethinking Learning to Read (Education Heretics Press, 2016) is the latest book to explore how homeschoolers learn to read using different schedules and techniques (leaving children alone to read is one!) than school permits.
• The Journal of Unschooling and Alternative Learning published by the Schulich School of Education, Graduate Studies, Nipissing University, Ontario, Canada.
• Thomas, Alan and Harriet Pattison. How Children Learn at Home. (Continuum Books, 2007) . Covers informal education, autonomous, natural learning, and unschooling. In particular, How Children Learn at Home studies how being a child who learns to read at an older age than in school is not a problem, and confirms other research and observations about children who learn on different schedules than in school(see for instance, Raymond and Dorothy Moore, Better Late Than Early ).
• Another book by Dr. Alan Thomas, Educating Children at Home (Continuum, 2005) , explores research on older readers and homeschooling and finds no special learning issues among children who learn to read at older ages than they learn to read in school.
• Unschooling Media: Participatory Practices among Progressive Homeschoolers by Vanessa Bertozzi.
• Though not specifically about unschooling, Sugata Mitra's "Hole in the Wall" experiments (the second and third video links that follow) have shown that, in the absence of supervision or formal teaching, children can teach themselves and each other anything if they have access to each other and a computer connected to the Internet. Mitra recently won the first TED prize—a million dollars—for his work (Feb. 2013), and he is encouraging people to join in his new project, Self-Organized Learning Environments (SOLE), which he will fund with the prize money. You can learn about his prize and join his new project here:
