How great minds were once formed

Learning that has stood the test of time and why school stifles this

Beatrix Potter with a border terrier, photographed by Rupert Potter, 1897. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

For all the default acceptance of modern education, we forget how much of an experiment the concept of school still is.

Homeschooling is a historical paradox. As much as it feels “fringe” relative to modern schooling, it has existed for far longer than school itself.

The Lindy effect suggests that the longer an idea has survived, the more likely it is to endure. Like the foundational texts of antiquity from Aristotle to Euclid that still shape our thinking today, many traditional methods of learning associated with homeschooling have been around for centuries: apprenticeships, one-on-one mentorship, and Socratic dialogue. By contrast, modern mass schooling is a relatively new enterprise only emerging 150 years ago. School as we know it today is not lindy.

Not unlike many busy, career-minded parents, Karel and I initially dismissed homeschooling for our future kids, theorizing all the common anxieties: Will they be socialized enough? How will we balance it with our demanding careers? Where do we even start or find like-minded groups? But we challenged these assumptions in our earnest desire to learn more, and after speaking with many homeschooling families, realized our initial definition was far too narrow.

From first principles, "homeschooling,” as not one single method of education but an umbrella term for everything outside formal school walls, offers an opportunity to recreate older, more durable forms of learning our current education system often displaces. It’s not that these are just lasting forms of learning worthy of preserving, but that they actually cultivate purposeful, high-agency adults more likely to succeed in today’s world.

Some of history’s greatest thinkers, writers, and inventors never stepped foot in a formal school, but became masters of their craft despite this. Benjamin Franklin, John Stuart Mill, Beatrix Potter, Virginia Woolf and a host of other exceptional individuals were all homeschooled.¹ Beatrix Potter would later say that she was grateful her education was "neglected," as a more formal education "would have rubbed off some of the originality.” While these examples represent a privileged few from history, their experiences offer valuable insights into learning methods that have proven remarkably durable, and are now more accessible than ever before.

Most of these homeschooling records are limited to accounts found in autobiographies and diaries; written excerpts that discuss at length their moral and intellectual development and methods of self improvement—the "what" and "how" of their learning, not the detailed day-to-day schedule (with Mill being an outlier here). Books that shaped them, observations of society and nature, and experimentation were woven into the fabric of their daily life. Across all of these remarkable individuals’ homeschool education though, there were timeless ingredients that cultivated their genius.²

A few patterns emerge consistently across their learning:

Early integration of life purpose

It’s too often assumed children must first develop their skills in order to do meaningful work. Maria Montessori proposed a radical inversion of this logic, arguing that the opposite is true:

It is not that man must develop in order to work, but that man must work in order to develop. The work of the hand is the expression of psychic growth.

This core belief reveals perhaps the most profound differences between these historical learners and their modern counterparts—the absence of an arbitrary waiting period.

There was an astonishing lack of separation between a child’s role to learn, and an adult’s role to work. Education and learning had an immediacy and purpose to it. A young Edison was not treated as merely a child who would one day grow up to do great things in the world, but a child who was doing great things in the world.

Benjamin Franklin, who left formal school at age 10 began working an apprenticeship in his brother's print shop. As he later reflected:

I was scarce sixteen when I wrote a piece for my brother's newspaper... it was an anonymous contribution signed 'Silence Dogood'. The letters were so popular that a whole new style of writing was adopted in Boston and the other provinces. The public curiosity was awakened, and my brother was much flattered by the credit given to his paper for so original a turn of writing. For some time, neither he nor anyone else knew that I was the author.

The ability to communicate to a real audience and discover that his own words had the power to “awaken public curiosity” was a formative experience that nurtured his civic leadership and desire to contribute to society. Just one year later Franklin left his brother’s printing shop to seek his fortune as an independent printer in Philadelphia, and shortly after formed the Junto, where his political aspirations continued to manifest.

It’s true Franklin’s autodidactic giftedness and drive were unusually prominent, however what might he have been doing in his twenties had he been forced to sit in a classroom for the first eighteen years of his life resigned to a modern-day classroom of formulaic five-paragraph essays only read by his teacher? In hindsight with all we know about Franklin today, this sounds absurdly stifling.

The same can be said for many others:

Thomas Edison’s home education began in his mother’s cellar and later a train baggage car after a brief, unhappy stint in formal school. His experience revolved around experimentation. By fifteen, he was running a makeshift chemical laboratory and publishing a small newspaper.

Florence Nightingale’s education was so deeply interwoven with her life purpose to reduce human suffering, she reported hearing several humanitarian calls from God as a teen. This was catalyzed by the frequent trips across Europe where she was deliberately exposed to suffering and institutional failure of hospitals and churches, and regular visits to the Nightingale family’s estate in rural England where she would tend to the sick far before receiving any formal training. As a teen, Nightingale studied mathematics and statistics independently, but unlike school math, this was applied and relevant to her interests: population data, hospital records, and health outcomes.

Whether it was through apprenticeship or book publishing, these exceptional minds were not perpetual students, but actually valued, contributing members of society. Homeschooling, in whatever form that took, gave them the flexibility to pursue their passions actively.

Agency is contingent on this kind of deep, immersive exposure. It’s how young people decide who they want to be and how they want to contribute to the world.

In the absence of an early integration of life purpose, we get apathy. Education’s systemic stifling of curiosity and agency—when school is a place to defer real-world contributions—has a cost. It is precisely how millions of potential “Lost Einsteins,” as research by Raj Chetty has shown, are never discovered for lack of early exposure.

Learning through dialogue

Doing and discussion were inextricable in these learning environments. Socratic dialogue, both as a formal and informal practice, was commonly relied upon for the exchange of ideas but also identity formation. These exchanges often unfolded within sustained mentoring relationships, with a parent, sibling, tutor, or family friend, who would not only guide but challenge the child’s thinking over many years.

For John Stuart Mill, who was taught by his father James Mill, Socratic dialogue was a core part of his rigorous education. From early boyhood, he was not just memorizing facts but expected to defend arguments, and interpret meaning. As he recalls in his detailed autobiography:

Anything which could be found out by thinking I was never told, until I had exhausted my efforts to find it out for myself.

Mill credited this constant dialogic pressure for his ability to reason, write, and make sophisticated connections across disciplines from a young age.

Bertrand Russell’s early education, while eclectic, was also steeped in discussion. His older brother Frank taught him mathematics in a way that demanded rigorous logical reasoning. He wasn’t allowed to accept any proposition without first understanding and proving it, a method Russell described as one of the most formative experiences of his life.

Even in solitude, Russell saw thought as a kind of internal dialogue. Mathematics and philosophy, he reflected in his autobiography, gave him something to “talk to himself about.” These early habits of inquiry and exchange laid the foundation for a life devoted to logic, debate, and public reasoning.

George Herbert Mead described thought as “the conversation of the generalized other with the self" and that all thought is a preparation for social interaction. Frequent opportunity and the psychological safety to share and refine these internal thoughts is precisely how these individuals developed their intellect, but also formulated their identity in the world. The absence of new inputs and “challenges” to inner dialogue is upstream from confirmation bias and limited intellectual growth.

In these homeschooling environments, learning through dialogue occurred daily and often in informal settings. Walks in the garden, dinners with family friends, salons and social gatherings. While many had designated time with tutors, the nature of their one-on-one education afforded time and opportunity to discuss ideas deeply without the constraints of a strict schedule.

And beyond these anecdotes of exceptional people, we know today, 200 years after Mill’s primary education, that dialogue has a tremendous impact on learning. Research consistently links Socratic discussion with:

• Better initial learning than traditional teaching

• Greater retention across long periods of time

• Higher scores in domains not already taught

• Higher scores on general intelligence tests

Studies across different educational levels have consistently demonstrated these benefits. A study of elementary school students found that Socratic reflection prompts were effective in developing critical thinking skills, with particular benefits for students' analysis abilities. Research with middle school English Language Learners showed significant improvement over five weeks of Socratic instruction, with an effect size of 0.70 (Cohen's d), indicating a meaningful degree of change in critical thinking skills development.

Despite these far-reaching implications, traditional schools have mostly resisted meaningful adoption of Socratic dialogue and dialogic teaching.

Where efforts have been made, execution has been shallow; instead of adopting discussion as a core and constant instructional method, discussion questions are tacked on as a unit assignment or one-off activity.

Many families and educators still operate on the belief that you need to know facts first in order to have this type of conceptual discussion, or that only some intellectually gifted people can engage in high level reasoning. Beyond these deeply held beliefs, modern education is time-bound and fixed around 45-60 minute subjects, leaving little room for sustained dialogue amid the competing demands of content and testing requirements.

Unstructured time in a prepared environment

Unlike modern education’s monolithic structure, these home educated experiences were full of unstructured time to explore and play.

Beatrix Potter’s childhood was almost entirely free of school’s fixed schedules. She roamed the countryside for hours at a time, sketchbook in hand, drawing every plant, insect, and animal she could find. She wrote in her journal:

It is all the same, drawing, painting, modelling, the irresistible desire to copy any beautiful object which strikes the eye… Last time, in the middle of September, I caught myself in the back yard making a careful and admiring copy of the swill bucket, and the laugh it gave me brought me round.

What she lacked in friends as a child, Potter made up for with animals. She and her younger brother Bertram kept a rotating variety of pets in their nursery including snakes, salamanders, rabbits, and frogs, many of which became “muses” for Potter’s characters in her stories. At home, her parents’ library gave her endless reference material. Potter's education was not so much a curriculum as a daily immersion in the living world around her.

Though the environment took a different form, Blaise Pascal’s home education offered similar exploratory freedom. His father deliberately withheld formal mathematics until he was fifteen, convinced that premature instruction might dull his curiosity. Instead, Pascal explored languages, philosophy, and the natural world without pressure or deadlines. He entertained himself with experiments and thought puzzles, what he later called games of the mind. When finally introduced to Euclidean geometry, he absorbed it in weeks, a mastery fueled by years of unstructured intellectual play in a home filled with books, ideas, and conversation.

Many of the great minds of the past did not concern themselves with packed schedules and formal extracurriculars as we expect the modern-day high achiever to do today. Yet, a commonly shared attitude today believes kids need highly-structured and organized activity all hours of the day in order to be adequately socialized, stay out of trouble, and avoid “boredom.” But unstructured learning environments, like Potter’s and Pascal’s, can avoid these traps if they are intentionally curated—books and home libraries, immersion in nature, access to skilled adults and mentors, tools and materials to create and experiment.

Just because school has set a precedent for highly structured, test-driven environments as the “correct” way to learn, does not mean it’s actually what’s best for healthy, well-adjusted children.

Learning through unstructured play is the basis of psychologist

Peter Gray

’s research and advocacy. Gray grounds his work in hunter-gatherer societies; play was the foundation of social life and cultural education, and thus a valuable transmitter for skills, values, and shared practice. It also fostered autonomy and egalitarian norms within the band, something he argues in Free to Learn we have completely lost through the traditional education system:

We have forgotten that children are designed by nature to learn through self-directed play and exploration, and so, more and more, we deprive them of the freedom to learn, subjecting them instead to the tedious and painfully slow learning methods devised by those who run the schools.

Gray points to compulsory schooling as a primary driver of anti-play attitudes including the increase in adult control over children’s lives e.g., children start school younger than ever before, the school year has become longer, and the opportunities for free play have diminished. School has extended beyond the six hours of classroom time and intruded into family and home life with homework and assignments. There is a pervasive attitude that adult-directed learning is vastly superior. This is coupled with the belief that what can be measured through performance, regardless of whether deep learning occurs, is what matters most:

But school has taken over children’s lives in an even more insidious way. The school system has directly and indirectly, often unintentionally, fostered an attitude in society that children learn and progress primarily by doing tasks that are directed and evaluated by adults, and that children’s own activities are wasted time.

For many in compulsory schooling, Gray suggests the Internet is the only space left where children can gain independence and agency without intervention from adults.

While we know historically, as evidenced by the homeschooled greats, that unstructured time and play-based learning has clear academic and developmental merit, modern research also supports this thesis: Children with more of it have improved self-directed executive functioning, better cognitive flexibility and working memory, and schools like Montessori where children have more autonomy in how they spend their time (with an intentionally “prepared environment”) routinely outperform children in traditional schools across a variety of standardized measures and divergent thinking.

While traditional schooling continues to tighten the rein on children’s free time, this is one of homeschooling’s most enticing selling points as a medium for education.

A new look at an old idea

While I have no intention of romanticizing homeschooling through the lens of these historical anecdotes, their home education provides a window into many of the enduring forms of learning we know today are optimal practices, despite most being neglected in schools. Rather than dismissing homeschooling as fringe, it deserves to be considered as a real option by more people. My goal with this series of posts is to help demystify homeschooling and dispel common concerns by showing a variety of ways real people have and currently are going about it.

Besides, the sharp line between homeschooling and attending a school is fraying with the countless à la carte options for families to choose from. While homeschooling may have only been an option for the elite in the 18th and 19th centuries, or most strongly associated with conservative Christian families in the late 20th and early 21st century, there are now infinite opportunities at our fingertips to expand the definition of what’s possible. Rather than a retreat from innovation or something reserved for a select ideological or privileged few, I see homeschooling today as an opportunity to advance toward practices that research shows are most effective for learning and that are accessible to all.

Deciding to opt out of school can feel risky, but I’d argue the real risk today is blindly accepting the status quo.

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In the next post of this series, I’m featuring contemporary examples of families homeschooling. There are some incredibly creative and intentional ways people are approaching this - if that’s you or someone you know, get in touch!

If this post resonated with you, consider sharing it with someone in your network who might also be thinking about these ideas.

As always, thanks for reading.

-Sam

1. For the purpose of this article, I use homeschooled here loosely to describe anything outside of formal schooling, including self-directed learning, tutoring, and anything across the spectrum of structured homeschooling to what we might now define as “unschooling.”

2. There’s clearly a selection bias looking back at these particular individuals, and of course, many came from immensely privileged families. The goal is not to romanticize their lifestyle but rather use it as a lens to examine the validity of homeschooling as a contemporary method of education and to demystify homeschooling beyond narrow interpretations.