There has been a lot of questioning of student-paced methods and whether or not the actually work. It is not surprising that these questions have arisen, considering that there are a lot of homeschoolers who are using relaxed methods or unschooling today. These families feel that humans are learning animals. But do these methods really work?

First of all, it is important to understand that these families view school structure as limiting natural curiosity. This is because schools make students adhere to schedules and pre-determined units or themes. On the other hand, homeschool permits children to become self-directed learners. Herein the child has the opportunity to pursue knowledge. This works because the child desires to learn the material and is not forced to learn it. As such, the child will be able to retain much more of this information. In Ivan Illich's words, "most learning is not the result of instruction. It is rather the result of unhampered participation in a meaningful setting."

In the homes where this student-paced homeschooling is taking place, parents are acting as their children's guides. They see it as their job to expose their children to education and not to impose it upon them. This means that children are not simply left on their own to learn or not. Parents are surrounding these children with meaningful learning opportunities and not just allowing them to participate in meaningless pursuits all day long. Herein these children are able to learn things such as business skills, socialization, earning money and life long hobbies through the "real world" that they engage in on a daily basis.

While this type of homeschooling really is a leap of faith, it does give children the opportunity to do their own thing and learn whatever they want to learn. This means that if some of these children decide that they want to attend high school, parents will usually allow them to do this as well. Most of the time, when these children are place into this type of this learning environment they will excel. Somehow these children have a way of figuring these things out regardless of how they learned things before.

Of course, this will also happen whenever these children decide to attend college as well. Many of these children who have grown up in a student-paced environment have been admitted to a lot of universities, even ones that are considered to be Ivy League.

You may be wondering just how these children can actually get into these universities, especially the Ivy League ones, without a transcript or high school diploma. Well, these universities are allowing these applicants to submit samples or a portfolio of their work, letters of recommendation, and CLEP and Stanford Achievement Test scores.

Some of these universities consider the children who grew up in these student-paced homeschools to actually be an asset because these children tend to really enjoy learning, be self-motivated and know what they want to get out of their college experience. Another reason why these colleges like having these children is because they have intellectual vitality and everything they do is responding to it and showing that they have it.

So, in short, the answer is that student-paced learning environments DO work.