read yeah yeah or they're just disinterested as well that's another huge factor and if I

can just add one other point to that sure put a fine point on it is one of the things you hear over and over and I talk about this in the book as well is that those quote-unquote later readers those children that read maybe at eight or or later tend to become very proficient readers very quickly so they may not be reading at all or very little and then once they hit that kind of peak point of proficiency they're reading Harry Potter within a couple of weeks and that's an interesting anecdote that I heard over and over and that's also captured in in some of these

data yeah yeah great points there's examples in the book where kids who are late readers end up reading way more complex stuff way sooner because once they decide they're interested in it it kind of takes off and I have developed an interest in the work of Rudolph Steiner to a degree and some of the stuff he says about education is just I really like things I don't expect to hear and he's has some really off the wall ideas and one of them is around reading like he didn't think kids needed to learn to read until way later that the structure of language and reading actually hindered their creative spirit and I've thought about Waldorf schools as an alternative and then when I hear about that I'm like I don't know there's also a couple other things I don't love like having to sign a document that says there'll be no technology in the house it's like okay you know I'm not Amish we're gonna have a little technology around that doesn't mean I want iPads in the classroom but you know it is what it is there's a lot of these alternatives Montessori Waldorf you find and in the book you talk about this they're different but not necessarily different enough they're still built on similar scaffolding and a similar foundation to traditional schools and unschooling is really a much bolder and much more different situation maybe you could talk to us about that through a couple of stories about your own kids because I've heard you tell stories about how this has worked and that really sounded like it's working pretty well for you.

Yeah I mean I think it's interesting you know so we have these alternative learning models that are very child-centered Montessori and Waldorf being two examples you're right that in many Waldorf schools they don't even begin to teach reading until much later than children would learn to read in traditional schools because they do recognize that bell curve of reading confidence and do kind of push it more towards the center of the bell curve there so that's interesting and they're just they're beautiful educational philosophies you know one of the things I often say is that my preferred educational philosophy and approach is self-directed education and unschooling but my larger priority is to expand the amount and diversity of education options that families are able to access you know I have my preference but other families might find that something else is a better match for their child's individual needs and interests or their family's you know vision and values and that's great and I think that's what's so exciting right now about the micro school movement and education entrepreneurship more broadly as we're just seeing this abundance of options and diversity of options ranging from these unschooling learning centers and micro schools to Montessori micro schools to classical models of micro schooling you know kind of something for everybody so that's just great to see and it really is just about what individual families preferences are but in terms of unschooling and self-directed education you know I write a lot about in the book about my children's experiences of kind of learning outside of schooling through you know following their own passions and interests I talk a lot about the Sudbury model of schooling modeled after Sudbury Valley School which was founded in 1968 and continues to exist today my younger kids actually attend Sudbury Valley and Sudbury the Sudbury model has now expanded across the world to dozens of other Sudbury style schools and Sudbury was modeled after the Summer Hill School the famed Summer Hill School that was founded in England in 1921 by AS Neil and then AS Neil ended up writing a book in 1960 called Summer Hill School a new view of childhood that ended up selling about two million copies in its first decade in print and inspired other educators like John Holt who I mentioned earlier on was the person who coined the term unschooling as well as Paul Goodman who wrote compulsory miseducation and Yvonne Iliach who wrote the schooling society and so on so it's interesting just to see where all of this kind of fits into the self-directed the modern self-directed education movement today.