One of the things that makes Unschooling so Radical

Something that comes up when people worry about unschooling is: What if the kid grows up and feels that the parent has abdicated responsibility for educating them and the parent should have done a better job and forced them?

I've tried to explain that when unschoolers want to know something and feel like they need it, they simply pursue it.  Ask for help if they need.  (For example, when Chen took a college course and realized she didn't know exactly how to write an essay, she asked me to run through it with her and I told her about introductions, stating points, backing them up, and conclusions, and she began writing essays.) Today I read something by Caren Knox and it gave insight as to why this is and how it works and it absolutely resonated with my experience (bolding is mine):

Someone said that they find watching their children feeling bad about failing painful.  She responded:

One thing I’ve noticed in most long-time unschoolers I’ve known is that they inherently understand that they’re learning all the time, and that they experience not reaching goals or not quite getting something, not as personal failure or a shortcoming, but as one step in learning. I doubt they’d even be able to express that, unless they’re particularly self-reflective; for them, taking “failure” personally isn’t part of their experience of life. (This, of course, also depends on the personality of the child. What I’m saying is what I’ve noticed, generally speaking.)

They’re able to assess what happened without self-recrimination. “Oh, I didn’t know xyz was part of this thing I’m trying. Now I know, so this time I’ll add in xyz and maybe it’ll work now.” “Jeez, I am not so great at organizing this thing. I’ll ask Banu how they did it for the thing they did.” [<——- Very doubtful any unschooler has said anything like this out loud. This is my clumsy attempt at portraying the inner, perhaps even unnoticed by them, thoughts of an unschooler facing something not working as they planned or imagined.]

In school, something not working means FAILURE. You had one chance, and you screwed up, so that’s it. You get an F or a C or some other measurement that means you did not get this thing, and you will not get this thing, because this is the only time in the curriculum this is done. And people seem to think that means something about you personally. “You’re bad at math.” “You’ll never be an engineer.” “You’re slow.” “You’re a bad student.” “You are falling behind.” “You have a disability.”

Unschoolers have experienced life differently. There is plenty of time to do what they’re trying, so not getting it the first time means they can assess and try again, learning each time. (They might learn they don’t want to do that thing as much as they thought they did.) If they see they’re not skilled in a certain area, it doesn’t mean that *they* are failures; they can choose to learn about that, or ask for help, or outsource, or all of those.

Most always-radically unschooled kids or long-time radical unschoolers are comfortable with the process of learning, which often involves failure.
It’s like a lot of video games. You move your character through obstacles, and if you fail, there’s another life right there for you to take what you learned (“Whoa, a Goomba comes at me there”) and make different choices (“I’ll kick this Koopa shell first, then go”). There’s no real-life failure or death, and there are infinite opportunities for you to start over (or from a save point) and take another go at it.