Most importantly of all, I learned to trust my own instincts. It's all too easy, as a child raised in the hothousing-heavy environment of New York City, to associate self-worth with grades, external standards, whether or not a teacher approved of my stance, whether or not my sixth-grade geography test would get me into Harvard six years later. As Dr. Carlo Ricci, unschooling advocate and professor of alternative learning at Nipissing University, put it in a telephone interview: “Even students who are successful, getting straight A's, the highest accolades, by being students in school have fear and anxiety about maintaining these types of grades. You don't really get a sense of who you are, what your interests are, what your passions are [but are] being filled by other people's idea of what it means to be a human being.” As a typically neurotic straight-A student at a New York private school, I'd internalized the idea of education as a means to an end. As a homeschooled teenager, without grades or teachers, I learned to love knowledge for its own sake, and, just as importantly to trust in my ability to attain it.

Far from destroying my ability to function within a traditional setting, however, my time homeschooling only enhanced it. When I returned to traditional education as a high-school freshman at a New England boarding school known for its rigor and expectations of independence, I found myself surprisingly well-prepared for its demands. I knew how to manage my time effectively, how to approach the hours of homework as an opportunity to learn rather than a chore to be cleared away. I knew, too, how to defend my academic arguments, to not back down simply because another student disagreed with me about the causes of the American Civil War. In the absence of external signifiers of success, I had learned how to measure my own.

My experience was certainly anomalous even among homeschoolers. The time I spent living outside my home country provided me with a set of advantages and was a privilege, one that goes beyond the bounds of what most homeschooling models can typically offer. (Though some homeschooling parents, like the itinerant family behind the blog SoulTravelers3, take the nomadic lifestyle to the extreme). Still, I'm far from the only homeschooled student to find that the experience helped, rather than hindered,my education as a whole.

Alice Ensor, now a graduate student at the University of Vienna, recalls her own experience re-integrating into the collegiate system after spending middle and high school “unschooled” according to the Teenage Liberation Guide model, “follow[ing] wherever my intellectual fancy led me,” from “examining protozoa” in the local creek to devouring books about the Ancient Phoenicians. “Even though it may seem counter-intuitive considering how laid back and unstructured my homeschooling experience was,” writes Alice of her transition to Missouri Southern State University, “because I had spent the previous three years managing and taking responsibility for my own education, I had developed a certain amount of self-motivation and maturity that better prepared me for the rigors of academia than any traditional education could ever have.” Certainly, the numbers seem to bear out the notion that homeschooled students can, if they desire, succeed according to more traditional metrics. According to reports by the Home School Legal Defense Association, homeschoolers consistently score above the national average on both the SAT and ACT college entrance examinations.