Exactly. Say, worst case scenario, you're 25 years old and have never learned division and realize that there's something you can't do because you need to divide some numbers.
First of all, you're probably recognizing that this is PRETTY unlikely, to make it to 25 years old and to have never encountered a situation where you'd have to divide something.
Once you've realized that, ask yourself this -- you're 25 years old and realize you have to divide something. You've never done it before. Do you think you're not going to be able to learn how to do it now???
This is an absolute WORST CASE scenario, a 25-year-old who never, ever learned to divide and never had it come up as anything necessary in their life before. So now, you open up an elementary math textbook, and you learn how to divide in like 10 minutes.
Voila, problem solved.
One of the biases we all have to overcome, because most of us were traditionally schooled ourselves, is the notion that children MUST be carefully fed bite-sized bits of information, little by little, in carefully graduated and incremented portions, and they MUST be done at certain ages and in a certain sequence. Or else...
Or else what? Or else they learn it later. Big whoop lol... And they learn it faster, and all in one go rather than spread out in tiny bits over YEARS, because their brains are more mature AND because they have self-motivation to learn it.
There's a famous case, you can probably google it, of a child-led school where a group of 12-year-olds, who had never done formal math at ALL, decided they wanted to learn their math now. They worked hard and completed the entire grade 1-to-6 math curriculum in 6 weeks. Done, finito, mastered.
Anyway, the point is, yeah an unschooled kid might end up with "holes" in their education. But find me just ONE public schooled child who does NOT. All kids have some holes, they're just in different places. If a child has a love of learning and self-motivation and has learned HOW to learn, then as they uncover their holes they will fill them. A child who has only been passively 'spoonfed' information might not.
After saying all that, of course unschooling isn't the best fit for ALL families. But I will say this -- I know of more cases of families who started off doing strict "school at home" curriculums, who gradually over time became more eclectic, relaxed, child-led and "unschooley"... than who start off radical unschoolers who gradually added more curriculum. Of course the latter does happen, especially as kids get older and more mature and start WANTING to enrich their knowledge in a more structured way -- but just from my own anecdotal observations, it's less common.
I would say the majority of homeschoolers (again just my anecdotal observations) are eclectic, with lots of unschooley-child-led stuff, but with a few curriculum-based subjects for whatever areas they personally felt were too important to leave to "chance" or did not believe their children would take to on their own, etc. We're like that, in fact. I do a certain amount of planning and guiding for "core" subject work and my son lacks inner motivation and drive, he does need a minimum amount of structure. But it's just 'minimum'... the rest of the time is his own, and he learns just as much that way too.
Lillian
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). Kids don't even need to know about it. 
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