Just so everyone is clear, she was unschooled, which is pretty different from conventional homeschooling. There's no curriculum at all, kids drive their own learning. If they want to play video games all day they are welcome to. If they want to sleep till noon that is fine.
As unlikely as it seems to someone who has been through conventional schooling, what actually happens in these cases is the child's natural curiosity is not squashed by rote work. As a result they drive their own learning, motivated by the natural curiosity of all humans. It is hypothesized that punishment and boring tasks are needed to squash this natural state, and some like educational reformer John Galt [edit: sorry, I meant John Gatto; freudian slip there] even claim that doing so is the purpose of conventional modern classroom schooling which was established in the late 19th century to create an underclass of unquestioning factory workers who can obey directions from authority figures.
Regardless of how this all happens, unschoolers tend to be the most interesting and well educated people around. This idea is very threatening to most people, so reactions are often hostile when they are encountered and it is frequently claimed that each achieving unschooler is an aberration.
Having thought about (un|home|normal) schooling for my own kids, it seems like unschooling in particular depends very much on who the parents are. Is it underestimating people to say that most kids wouldn't engage in anything like what this girl did? Nor obviously would they have the opportunities to do primary research in biology with a family friend, but even aside from that, doesn't unschooling put a huge emphasis on the parents providing opportunities for the kid to express whatever natural curiosity he has? And this depends on the parents having the education and financial resources to do it.
Not being hostile at all, I'm genuinely interested -- trying to figure out myself what's the right thing to do for two little boys of my own.
I was unschooled. My parents are great, college-educated, knowledgeable people, but they're not preeminent scholars or trained teachers. They pretty much let me do what I wanted, and there were definitely times growing when I slacked off and did nothing remotely of value. However, I was always interested in computer programming, and I devoted a lot of time to learning it. My parents helped me get books and other resources, and I learned a lot from online material as well.
I launched a startup almost three years ago, when I was 18. It's doing very well.
I'm lucky that I happened to get into programming. It's cheap, (relatively) easy to learn on one's own, and it also helped me to learn bits of other fields. I honestly don't know how I would have turned out if I had gotten into something else, so this might be a testament to programming rather than to unschooling.
How well-rounded are you outside of computer programming? Hard sciences, humanities, etc. I ask the question because to me it seems like hyperfocus is a significant danger to the unschooling concept.
In particular, I can see a real possibility that an unschooled child with a heavy computer focus and a lack of parental guidance could very easily lock in on computers and neglect potentially "boring" but incredibly helpful topics. I'm thinking largely of the humanities here; you can get away without understanding, say, chemistry [1], but it seems difficult (in my circles, at least) to be taken seriously without a decent command of English--a skill that I think is refined largely from reading, because I've never met someone who could speak and write well who didn't enjoy reading--and it seems like it'd be difficult to really understand the world around you without a decent grasp of history. In neither case does Wikipedia really cover it; I think that a level of internalization of such things is necessary (it becomes harder to evaluate political statements without at least a high-level understanding of where they come from, which has driven my own recent forays into economics and sociology).
For similar over-focusing reasons, I'm generally but not completely skeptical of the "don't go to college" argument sometimes espoused here on HN; the focus on matters of immediacy--the get-a-job skills--strikes me as a good way of turning out someone with a few strong skills in a few areas and a generally fuzzy understanding of topics unrelated to their focus area. I am, however, even less fond of the idea of "max out your subject matter, take the bare minimum outside your degree area"--I have a hunch that a self-directed person is more likely to stumble into well-roundedness than somebody whose academic drive is constrained to do-your-job topics.
[1] - Not to say chemistry's a useless subject by any means, I actually draw on it sometimes in my day-to-day life. But knowledge of the hard sciences, physics possibly excepted, are a little less impactful overall.
I have had 'normal' schooling for the most part of my life.
Two years back, I got into web dev. Made an app or two.
Now working on others. I learnt everything about it on my own. For the first time in my life, I REALLY understood the meaning of an effective pitch and the value of expression. I taught myself to write well, to be able to communicate with the developer community, do a lot of math and well, coding. I spent time learning how to sketch too. I had so much fun studying the boring subjects - arts, writing etc. In fact, the 'boring' subjects were made boring only for lack of application!
Had I gone the 'normal' way: I don't know whether I'd have been better off but what I do know is that I could never have learnt so much.
It's really circumstantial. What works for someone may not work at all for someone else. So, there cannot be a fair comparison, so to speak.
Well, I wasn't trying to argue against going to college. I went to college for a year, and I would have stayed longer, but it wasn't practical to do that while running my site as it continued to grow. I would definitely like to go back at some point.
I'm not clueless about the world around me, but I'm not as well-rounded as I would like to be. However, I'm not sure I would have fared better if I had gone to an American public high school.
I absolutely agree. I feel that without the proper parental support a student (do you still call a person who is unschooled a student?) would end up not getting very far. As a personal example I know that neither of my parents would have been able to discuss mathematics and biology with me in the same way this girl's parents did with her.
I'm thinking the same. (I'm not married, nor I have children right now). However, it's essential that they get some guidance; like joining private courses for English, Chemistry and other stuff. Outside of school, certainly. So they learn in their own pace, and no stress (or aim) to get high grades (or any grades at all).
It seams to me this strategy will hit high and low. For exceptional people, it will produce the best possible results. For those of us less elite, it would produced worse results than traditional schooling.
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.
>For those of us less elite, it would produced worse results than traditional schooling.
Worse by what measure? It depends what you want to do with yourself to some extent I think.
For example, I've a young friend who's a very gifted artist and has a lot of encouragement in that direction (from her graphic designer mother); however, I consider her to be a bit behind in the 'hard' subjects. Her ancient history is pretty good and she knows Greek mythology better than anyone I know.
I'd go for a mixture of home-/un-schooling if it weren't for lack of resources at home. If it were possible I'd also send my lad to school a couple of days a week too - so some school days; some homeschool and some open, student led education.
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.
I wonder about unschooling. I went though a more traditional home school experience 20 years ago that basically consisted of my reading all the traditional textbooks in something like 2-4 hours a day over the first 2-3 months, a few enrichment activity's like field trips and then keeping myself entertained the rest of the time. I learned a lot of things out of curiosity and boredom, but I clearly missed a few basic areas of from the traditional school experience. Primarily grammar, spelling, rote history, and I avoided taking any tests outside of annual state mandated standardized tests.
So, I can see how things might work out with even less direction, but it seems like most people would miss out on some of the basics. I mean is it really an issue to say, here is the 5th grade history textbook you should probably read at some time in the next 6 months? Or even go to enough Shakespeare's plays that the language stops seeming strange and you can fall down laughing watching ask you like it?
I unschooled (was unschooled?) from my sophomore year of high school through college. That's, without a doubt, hugely different from doing it through elementary school I think, but I'm happy to answer any questions.
How much if any direction where you given? How where the required standardized tests dealt with? How does unschooling fit in with collage / graduate school / scholarships? Also, why did you go with unschooling over the other options?
O, and thanks for taking the time to answer a few questions.
I took a calculus course at a local community college, and my dad recommended a bunch of economics resources to me, but for programming (which was really the brunt of what I taught myself) I basically went it alone. I also spent considerable time volunteering with one of the presidential campaign's IT departments.
By the time I left high school I didn't (as far as I know) have any required testing. I took the SATs/ACTs/SAT IIs the same as any other student.
Wherever possible I applied using a college's home school form, and I wrote supplemental essays wherever possible explaining why I left my high school (especially important since I had awful grades at the time I left). I received an academic scholarship from the school I ultimately chose to attend, I assume because of my SAT/ACT scores.
I left my high school because I was extremely unhappy with it during my sophomore year. No option besides teaching myself things ever occurred to me.
You seem to effectively communicate, so I am assuming it wasn't a struggle to patch those holes?
We home education, but it isn't full on unschool here either. There will be definite gaps, but the general assumption that I have made is filling those gaps won't be a terrific struggle. It is always interesting to us to hear first hand accounts.
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).
Thanks very much for all your posts here, I read them all.
There are so very few profoundly gifted kids and hearing all these anecdotes from a parent is a rare treat.
Clearly for highly intelligent children, unschooling - going their own way academically, is something that works very well. There's also the traditional child prodigy approach of pushing them even harder, and it seems in those cases the kids are never heard from again, perhaps they crack.
Some people ask if unschooling can work well with students that are just normal and aren't highly intelligent. I've seen where it works well in that case as well (or at least as well as traditional schooling). But, obviously for a special needs child with disabilities such as Downs Syndrome, it would not work as they need much more intense interaction just to learn how to live on their own in society. Or say for Helen Keller, what saved her from madness was intense personal tutoring and not just being left to her self. Presumably there is a dividing line in their between disabled and normal where unschooling becomes more suitable. Since unschooling is not a big thing in the modern era, there's few if any studies on results looking into these issues, only anecdotal data and what we know from meeting unschooling students.
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! :)
Thanks for the response and the offer of more details. To clarify, I am fairly familiar with varieties of unschooling and unschoolers and terms such as facilitated learning and strewing.
I didn't mean to suggest going one's own way is the same as being left alone, though it can be if the child is ready for that. I hadn't attempted to respond to some of the comments here by others asking how unschooling works since it's not just one single thing or defined approach.
Anyway I wanted to clarify that, so you don't waste time answering the wrong question. I'm certainly interested in your further views on the topic.
How I interpreted your own story was that after 4th grade your son was able to choose his own path and you were available to facilitate and assist in acquiring needed materials and arranging requested meetings with scientists, going on trips, and what not. His choosing his own path and curriculum as it were is what I saw that you were presenting as consistent with an unschooling philosophy.
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 had read about unschooling, but hadn't heard this about the rote work, etc.
I think it's interesting because in school, I absolutely refused to do homework unless it was absolutely necessary to pass the class. Instead of being a straight-A student, I often got B's and C's, and even an F a couple times.
I was also in a special 'gifted' class in elementary school that took me out of regular classes once a week and taught us other things. (One of which was programming, which is where my career went!) We still had to do all our normal class work, and since we missed 20% of the in-class lectures, that meant a lot of catch-up each week, which was a lot more interesting than sitting in class and listening.
I have a feeling, after reading your post, that those things are related to my continued love of learning. I also have a feeling that unschooling would have been even better for me, but at least I didn't get burnt out young.
I think what people are pointing out is the lack of social learning when unschooled. In school you learn how to make friends, how to avoid enemies, how to live with other people, how to interact with different people...
From my experience social knowledge gained at school doesn't map very well to the real world. In every environment I've been in (except for my first part time job) the social interaction was vastly different from what I experienced in school.
Yes, I remember in my first real job, even though it was a crappy job, I was ecstatic about the fact that, with very few exceptions people were basically polite. There was no outright bullying. Is this adult life? I thought. Great!
This is a misconception. None of these social situations are unique to a school environment. It can be argued that you can actually increase the opportunities for social engagement outside of the confines of school.
seems to me like school is the great melting pot of our society,
now that I'm out of school it seems like I live a very Bowling Alone (http://www.amazon.com/Bowling-Alone-Collapse-American-Commun...) existence, I interact with people at work, and family, it seems like that is the exent of my non superficial interactions
maybe I'm paticularly introverted, but I wouldn't home/unschool my daughter simply because I don't want her social universe to be that small
also schooling is one of the few shared experiences in our society
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."
How does unschooling work? Do you still have to pass standardized tests, do you apply for a GED at some point? How do you clear this with the state? Are this issues with getting into a college?
What if a child is not interested at all in an important skill, at some point wouldn't you have to force them to work on it? E.g., Algebra.
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.
The main character of 'Atlas Shrugged' by Ayn Rand. A very popular (in the US) book that is somewhat controversial, mainly because a number of admirers take it all too seriously.
"Who is John Galt?" is expression of helplessness and despair in 'Atlas Shrugged' by Ayn Rand. A very popular (in the US) book that is somewhat controversial, mainly because a number of admirers take it too seriously.
The aging-focused futurist biotech / longevity science ecosystem in the Bay Area is well worth getting to know better - or being more aware of. It is the root system of a revolution in applied biotechnology that is gearing up for launch, and will be talked about 30 years from now in much the same way that Steve Blank talks about the connections of the opening years of Silicon Valley today. This ecosystem stretches from the transhumanist salons (the diaspora of the old Extropy Institute) at one edge through to the researchers in the Kenyon lab at UCSF and the Buck Institute at the other. On the winding road of connections that link those two communities stand such figures as Peter Thiel, the Laura linked in this submission, Aubrey de Grey and the SENS Foundation research center staff, Christine Peterson and the other folk at the Foresight Institute, various volunteers associated with the Methuselah Foundation, a range of gung-ho immunotherapy startup efforts focused on GIFT cancer research, a bunch of strong AI researchers and advocates, Paul Glenn and his Foundation that funds aging labs in a range of universities, Halcyon Molecular down in Redwood City, Larry Ellison and his Foundation that acts more or less as an arm of the NIA, Patri Freidman and the seasteading crowd, and so forth.
It is a web, and to better understand the prospects for ventures like SENS, or immunotherapy startups, one has to have at least some grasp of how all these people are connected and how the money likes to flow through this web - it is a whole parallel world to that which Hacker News usually represents/reflects, but one that is very similar in many ways.
(And I missed mention of the Gerontology Research Group, and Gregory Benford and Genescient, amongst others).
It is a balkanized community online - much the same as most. Hacker News is an unusual thing in that respect.
So you'll find some of the research community, mixed in with tech journalists, advocates, and other interested parties, posting to the Gerontology Research Group mailing list.
You'll find a mix of activists and researchers of a different type posting to the SENS Foundation forums.
There's some side-discussions at the long-running Extropy-chat list, but less so these days.
And the standard fragments of the community in LiveJournal, the other social networks, a range of Yahoo groups and Google groups like New_Cryonet. The loose network of occasional and regular bloggers. And no doubt a range of other watering holes and mailing lists I'm unaware of.
Again, Hacker News is an oddity in the general scheme of things for a community of any size.
As a parent who made the decision to pull my kids out of school and to home school them, it is a scary thing. Every parent that I've met has struggled with the question of "Is this the right choice? if I choose differently will my child have a 'better' life?"
Once my wife and I decided, we were 'all in' as it were and put the angst of 'what if' behind us. It turned out to be the right choice for our kids, they thrived, and while it certainly had an economic impact, its hard to say of the three choices, private school + two parents working, public school + two parents working, or homeschool + one parent working what the opportunity cost was or would turn out to be, the opportunity to engage kids in learning for learning's sake is priceless.
TL;DR: I think there are social benefits to traditional schooling people these days often neglect.
I have a boy. He's almost 2. It pleases me greatly when I see that natural curiosity sparkle in his eyes. In fact, there's not much I wouldn't give up to ensure that spark never dies.
However, I also see the large small, the giggles and laughter that comes so naturally when he's interacting with people, young and old. I'm not sure I could live with myself if I somehow deterred his possible happiness in my quest to preserve his childlike curiosity.
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).
This may just be the skeptic in me, but could you provide some references to the claims you are making?
I do however fail to see how it's possible for kids to develop the same type of social lessons in a closed environment. I believe even events such as bullying and popularity contests aid in the development of a child. This is especially true if they are exposed to team settings (competitive team sports) at an early age.
I'm happy for her but I hope she realises how lucky she got.
I've been considered to be pretty smart since I was born and when I was younger I devoured all knowledge around me. But the problem was that I didn't have parents that knew a lot of physics, biology, chemistry or whatever, nor any other people in my environment. They somewhat supported me but there was just so much they could do. I quickly went through all books in the library about interesting subjects (not a lot). And that was it. My parents didn't want to buy me any books or give me access to any more information, something for which I still resent them to this day. The internet wasn't nearly as big as it was today.
And of course the school system tried to break me too. I did biology, maths, physics, English etc... with ease but I almost failed my last year in high school because I was unable to discover the meaning of certain poems. I got literally sent to the police for peeking around in the school network (no editing grades, cheating exams or anything even remotely malicious).
I still ponder sometimes where I would have been had I had a mentor or more supportive parents.
Yes, I agree. I'm curious to know how old you are though, I was kind of hoping things would be better for today's K12 students given the emergence of the social web and so much open source software. Maybe not.
I'm 20 years old what will make my original post sound a little exaggerated but it's still the truth. I also don't live in the USA which might explain the relative lack of educative books in my libraries (although I don't really know the situation outside of the big cities there). Of course, I'm still at the start of my life but I still feel like I missed a good part of those important formative years. Yet today I'm studying quantum field theory and general relativity so I guess I turned out fine anyway.
I feel out of place in the bay area a lot of times because I grew up in a small shitty town in New Mexico. Thinking back, I didn't know anyone with a college degree growing up besides a few of my teachers. My parents social circle was grocery store workers and oil field workers. Once I hit algebra in the 6th grade I was on my own. I probably could (should) have started college at 16 or so, but I wouldn't have really known how to manage that on my own.
This girl, if anything, confirms what Peter Thiel ignores:
College is a resource. If I had access to these resources this girl had, I could probably be in a similar position, but I didn't so that's why I went to college.
20 (who grew up with social, intellectual, economic and/or academic capital) under 20 doesn't have the same ring to it, I suppose.
Agreed, but not sure if we call this selection bias.
Anyways, here's my perspective from someone who realized this even while growing up in a suburb in the Bay Area. My parents are blue collar workers (we've lived very comfortably through their hard work however), and so are a good portion of the folks in their social circle, but my city is largely made up of upper middle class and wealthy professionals, mostly tech workers.
When I hit junior high/high school, I was taking the advanced classes with the kids of those professionals. I was among the more talented kids in my class, but in my senior year of high school I was working a drive-thru, while one friend had an internship at an architectural firm, getting an awesome chance to learn from a talented and successful architect (the friend's intended profession), and he wasn't the only one doing something like that over the summer. So one difference was that the other parents had connections that mine did not, and were able to give their kids a kind of exposure to the world that I didn't have. Even though the Bay Area has a wealth of resources for those interested in technology, I didn't know what existed, and nor did my parents. Nor did I know that I should have been asking around to dig these up.
The girl that this post is about is undoubtedly gifted and deserves to be recognized as one of the 20 under 20. Even if I did grow up with social, intellectual, economic and/or academic capital, I probably wouldn't have achieved that. But these sorts of differences do make me wonder about how many more geniuses could launch world-changing careers if all students had access to the resources this girl did, as well as being taught how to make the most of them.
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.
In what way? She applied, is very intelligent and has shown her project, which the mentors must have liked. Why shouldn't she get in? It was likely nothing to do with her parents contacts or upbringing. Rather how much she had achieved and what she wanted to achieve.
If you speak to all of the fellows you'll see that a lot are just startup guys and girls working all kinds of projects. No correlation in previous experiences or contacts. Anyone that can show why they deserve to be there has an equal chance of getting in.
I think what vaksel means to say is that Thiel's 20 under 20 project will prove nothing about the value of a college education because his sample consists of 20 of the most brilliant kids around. It would be like trying to demonstrate the worthlessness of a programming course by taking 20 brilliant programmers and having them skip it before starting inevitably successful careers.
Oh I see. Think how much more they can achieve with the freedom and time they have, of course to each of these points there are disadvantages. But for those that are truly self directed and succeeded on their own accord this won't matter. I think college isn't for everyone and for those it is for, it may be very valuable.
Some require this security and mentorship more than others but those that do it will allow them to learn and succeed faster. A number of them may not have realised their full potential.
It's a tough one, it could be unfair to read a bio or look at the overall fellowship and just presume each of the fellows are in the same situation and making an opinion on the fellowship before we see how far they go and study each fellow individually.
Many will get a lot out of it, which is the important part. Others may not have needed it but it will allow them to do what they want.
We tend to leave anything complicated out of our stories because it's just easier to understand. It's hard to judge anyone or a collection of people on these brief stories. Look at startups like Pinterest which waited two years before 'Overnight success'.
Seeing death as a problem, and possessing a discomfort or fear of all the suffering death causes is often dispelled by gaining a fuller perspective over time.
Not many years ago, when I was that age, death and human suffering seemed to be the most fundamental problem to apply myself to solve. In fact, I was obsessed with biotechnology for very much the same reason.
Now, I think death the least of my concerns, for the most important and exhilarating parts of life come independently of the time spent here. For those things, like life, are fleeting, and lingering for an eternity would not bring them back.
Unfortunately, in most of Europe, home-schooling continues to be illegal - as in, the police show up at your house and pick up your kids if you try...in extreme cases you can go to jail. So we are forced to send our kids to the public school or pay up to send them to a private school.
So sad. Hoping some hard research on the benefits of home-schooling (and even un-schooling) might end up changing minds, but it seems doubtful it will happen any time soon, at least for my kids here in Germany.
Its a double sided sword. If you make it easy to take your kids out of school every nutcase religous freaks takes them out am teaches bullshit (witch is kindof like crippling them).
On the other hands if you have parents that can handly it, cant do it its bad too. How about hacking the system and open your own school let the kids pay 100'000 a year, then your kids will be the only ones going :)
Edit: Im from Switzerland an I think we have the same rules.
I was cooperatively-schooled (i.e. a small group of parents getting together and taking turns to home-school their children) in England. It was ensured that what we were taught complied with the essentials of the national curriculum (which gave a surprising amount of leeway - I was taught creationist science!) and the authorities were notified of what we were doing. It was very successful.
I don't know about Germany but it's possible that it may be similarly easy to tick the right boxes for the local authorities there too.
Sounds like a very unconventional and interesting academic path and she seems like one of those innately brilliant and curious minds but.. she wants to "cure ageing"?
I guess my question here is "Why?" I certainly hope her answer is contained in one of her future blog posts because to me ageing is one of those things that would not only be unethical to "cure" and commercialize, but also extremely problematic for the future sustainment of humanity.
So it is unethical to try to help save 100,000 people from a painful, struggling death each and every day? I've always found the mindset bizarre in which abstract ideas and concepts (like "future sustainment of humanity"), utterly disconnected from any form of rigorous examination or critique, are thought important enough to justify the sacrifice tens of millions of lives - every year - and perpetuate the unrelieved pain and madness suffered constantly by hundreds of millions more. You would drown the world in blood to make yourself feel just a little more comfortable in your own self-delusions.
You don't have to go far to see that rigorous examination of the world shows overpopulation, "sustainability" concerns on a global scale, and other outgrowths of Malthusianism to be myths and illusions, things that vanish as soon as you start looking into them.
Malthusian ideas were wrong when they first emerged, and have not stopped being wrong at any time since then. They are wrong now - and dangerous, as they lead people to support destructive acts of relinquishment and regulation.
It's a straw man -- overpopulation is not the only reason to be against anti-aging remedies. The so called "sacrifice" of death is necessary for progress -- death is a prime mover of dogma, nepotism, wealth, and many more. Humanity benefits immensely from the periodic refreshing of the old guard.
It's a question of whether you want a better life for yourself or for your children.
It's not the only, nor by a long stretch the best reason to be against "ending aging". Human culture fundamentally depends on death and the passage of time. Our myths, rituals, literature and sense of history depend on death. I may be an old romantic, but to me life without the sense of impermanence and transience would be an impoverished life indeed.
Furthermore, death comes at a huge cost of losing the accumulated knowledge of all those people.
Really, "cure aging" is the same as "cure cancer" or "cure diabetes". Disease prevention is just a shortsighted version of curing the problem of aging in general.
I didn't know what Malthusianism is, so thank you for educating me on that topic. I can definitely assure you that I wasn't referring solely to overpopulation as the only problem to curing ageing. I AM mildly (and perhaps, based on the links you included, naively) worried about overpopulation several decades down the line but I don't have the stats nor the expertise to passionately argue in defence of this view.
I was more referring to the problems associated with commercializing the "anti-aging" drug. Making such a drug in the corporate funded environment of our biotech industry would certainly result in an extreme imbalance of the availability of the drug. So in a world where the balance of food supply, resources, income and power of influence is already impossibly and unfairly askew, it is very likely that the existence of the anti-death drug would be the final nail in the coffin of many impoverished populations. What chance would a smart, young African (who is already faced with overcoming hunger, poverty and lack of health care) have in a world where Americans and Germans, for example, have a near unlimited supply of food, money, influence... and now time.
> Malthusian ideas were wrong when they first emerged, and have not stopped being wrong at any time since then
Funny you mentioning Malthus, he reminds me of Hobbes, very few people have actually read their works but they've been demonized and thrown "they're utterly and completely wrong"-phrases at that you begin to wonder "if Malthus is wrong, why is every discussion about world demographics mentioning him in one way or another?" (the same goes for Hobbes, you just have to replace "world demographics" with "politics" and "geometric population growth" with "we're always one step away from (civil) war").
Or maybe I like Malthus just because my dad had bought his "Essay on the Principle of Population" and I read it when I was 16.
The Green Revolution was a one-time technology transfer. We didn't hold further advances in reserve which could spur another radical increase in worldwide food production, nor do we have an ever-expanding supply of petroleum-based fertilizers. Those articles assert that the free market will somehow provide enough food to meet any demand, but unless there's immediate and unprecedented progress in both cold fusion and nanotechnology, I don't see how we can expect that to happen.
Just as a thought experiment, what would be wrong with extending the vigor of youth twenty years beyond our societally imposed retirement age, 65?
Two decades out from under the thumb of the expectations and institutions would seem a just reward for the labor of our elders. How many people work for the chance to travel the world, and then find themselves physically kept from doing so?
Absolutely nothing. But reward for labour is a Western notion. So yes for us living in Canada, USA, Western Europe...etc there would be absolutely wrong with living forever and rewarding ourselves for all our marvellous work with exotic travels until we're bored and then we can just take the "death" pill at a time of our own choosing.
In your retirement travels to distant lands, however, it is very likely that you would encounter people who do not view life in those terms. You might discover that they work simply to survive, and perhaps have some kids for whom they try to make life just marginally better. And maybe in 50-60 generations, the ancestors of those hard-working people would be able to enjoy themselves a little more and spend their 60s travelling the world just to see what other places look like. With an anti-ageing drug in the hands of rich westerners, it is very unlikely that that day would come.
She answered that question already, in paragraph #3:
"I idolized Archimedes, Galileo, da Vinci, Faraday, Newton, Maxwell, Tesla, Pasteur, and Darwin. I couldn’t believe they were all dead, and that I would never get to meet them and hear them talk."
You have a point there considering that a few of those were considered either lunatics, heretics or idiots in their own time. And I'm not convinced that we'd be able to recognize their genius even with an additional 20-30 years with them.
That was my reaction too. I mean, no one likes to die but if we look at it objectively - death is one of the very effective ways in which society changes from old ideas to new ideas. In a hypothetical scenario where every generation lives till 120, I would assume that current US congress will probably continue with the same members for so long (if you notice, most of them keep getting re-elected so many times). And that would mean no infusion of new ideas. It would also means abolishing of social prejudices like slavery, child marriages etc would have taken a lot longer.
You'll find out quickly that off-the-cuff humor isn't tolerated on HN. Humor only very occasionally survives the downvote democracy, and usually when it's an extraordinarily nerdy joke by someone recognized. This may seem hurtful or annoying at first, but it keeps the signal to noise ratio very high here.
Or combine your one-liner with follow up insight. That way it's not just your joke that is being judged but also your (hopefully) sound argument as well.
Those two are probably not uncorrelated either. For homeschooling to be good, you'd need parents who are sufficiently knowledgeable and well-rounded and have enough time to invest.
(Though I get the impression that there are plenty of kids who are also homeschooled because their parents are determined to "save" them from things like learning about evolution.)
Yes, with wealth you can work much less (if at all) and spend time with your child. Furthermore, wealthier parents have jobs which exercise their minds, so they're not deadened and just want to plop in front of the TV. Their managers are much more polite to them, so they're not so angry. Less financial woes means less family fights and likelihood of abuse.
For a zillion reasons, I agree, and would never want to put a child through a family institution without sufficient wealth. Because in the world I live in, kinship and economic institutions are horrifically dysfunctional. Lucky people get to reach their potentials; most certainly don't. They go to schools whose interests are something other than supporting the child's personal interests.
Having academically experienced parents is different enough from the status quo to merit mention. People who could hold a discussion on "Archimedes, Galileo, da Vinci, Faraday, Newton, Maxwell, Tesla, Pasteur, and Darwin" are rare. It's cliche to say that a child's success starts with the parents, but that's quite a positive influence there.
I agree that having parents with a broad base of knowledge is a hugely positive influence--but I think you're misattributing the genesis of that base of knowledge when you refer to "academic experience". The rarity of those people, I think, is tied more towards (smart) people's willingness to over-focus. If, like a lot of computery folks I know, you choose to devote your time almost exclusively to computery stuff, you're going to be limited outside of that area--but you can choose not to do that.
I found it fairly easy to avoid over-focus by seeking out new stuff to learn about. I'm 24, with a bachelor's in CS from a state school, and I went to a pretty normal high school; the works (and in most cases) lives of each of those people listed in your quote are pretty familiar to me, though some more than others, and I could recall offhand enough of substance to at least be able to hold my own in conversation.
I think three things in particular helped me. I credit a lot of it to my dad taking away my computers when I screwed up as a kid. It forced me to entertain myself, and a lot of that was going to the library and reading everything I could get my hands on. Another factor was that (against my parents' advice) I explicitly refused to get a B.S. in CS in college. Instead, I took a B.A. so I could get out of the CS building more often. I hung out in the honors college of my school, which was heavily humanities-focused and where the students skewed towards the humanities and towards real engineering degrees (zero other CS students). I had to broaden my horizons just to keep up. The third helpful factor was that I started programming computers when I was about eight years old (I started in on C around 11 or 12), which provided much more to get good at what I do while still leaving a lot of time to follow up on other interests.
(I am skeptical of unschooling largely due to what I see as the predilection of very smart people to hyper-focus--unless a child's parents are sharp and have a broad set of interests, the child seems incredibly likely to become one of these hyperfocused people. I can see it being really valuable and effective if parents have that baseline broad-scope curiosity.)
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).
They are related, but even being smart and having smart, dedicated parents isn't enough. You also need to be motivated and have staying power.
I know so many smart, but unmotivated people who drift through life, rarely achieving anywhere near their potential. The same goes for people, like me, who get bored too quickly, and can't manage to stay dedicated to any one subject for long.
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.
As unlikely as it seems to someone who has been through conventional schooling, what actually happens in these cases is the child's natural curiosity is not squashed by rote work. As a result they drive their own learning, motivated by the natural curiosity of all humans. It is hypothesized that punishment and boring tasks are needed to squash this natural state, and some like educational reformer John Galt [edit: sorry, I meant John Gatto; freudian slip there] even claim that doing so is the purpose of conventional modern classroom schooling which was established in the late 19th century to create an underclass of unquestioning factory workers who can obey directions from authority figures.
Regardless of how this all happens, unschoolers tend to be the most interesting and well educated people around. This idea is very threatening to most people, so reactions are often hostile when they are encountered and it is frequently claimed that each achieving unschooler is an aberration.