That said, I tend to think rather strongly that there are some foundation skills that don't seem all that useful in and of themselves, and which few children are intrinsically motivated to master... but which make higher learning later pretty easy by comparison with those who DID NOT master them.
I *want* to be an unschooler, but I do "push" (as in "require DS to work on") reading, math and Japanese (his father's language). I think that other things like history or art and so on can be more unschooled rather than the basics. But our core group of friends are primarily unschoolers, so I always feel like such a brute.
I think it strongly depends upon the kid, honestly-- at least in the specifics, it does.
What I saw most pointedly when we homeschooled in much the way that Madoosa describes is that my DD (headstrong is an understatement) figured out that she could simply REFUSE to do anything that wasn't easy and pleasant and already at "expert" level. If she wasn't instantly "good at" whatever it was-- she refused to try it ever thereafter, using every passive resistance trick in the book.
That's okay when they are 3-7yo, but as another poster noted, being entirely autonomous and refusing to, say... learn any new math concepts, or practice written expression... well, that's not so cool.
Unfortunately, HG+ kids are
highly inventive in using their astonishing academic STRENGTHS to mitigate and skirt those areas which are
not such extreme strengths.
This is precisely what my DD did when we homeschooled. Not having anyone but
me telling her "you need to learn how to do this thing" was simply not motivation enough to even TRY. We were pretty inventive about finding ways to make learning interesting and fun, btw-- it wasn't that we weren't providing the right kinds of challenges or opportunities, so much as that she so strongly preferred to TALK and to READ that she simply turned her nose up at anything else. In fact, she was quite defiant about the fact that she simply
wasn't going to do those things. At all.
