That's why I started this thread. I needed to know two things: is it really possible for a child to learn to read without being taught, to just pick it up when they're ready??
And if anyone has Unschooled and decided it made a mess of their children's lives. I can't find one single parent online that says it turned out badly. Is it possible it never turns out badly?
No, it's possible the people for whom it turns out badly either aren't going to go posting that - especially on sites where they know what will happen, or that hey don't grasp that it turned out badly. Like, in the way that if someone is wedded to the idea that not encouraging anything and letting kids do whatever is how they become 'free' and find their 'true selves' then if the kid ends up jobless, homeless, living in their basement playing video games all day and never getting a job or going to college or anything else, or maybe ending up a 40-year-old grocery bagger - they tell themselves that this too is what makes their child happy and they have found their true path and desire.
They don't get that had the child been guided and educated, the child would have other options to choose from and that the defaults above are generally less a choice than the only alternatives available.
As for the first, yes and no. Some kids learn to read "on their own," at a young age. It's not truly on their own, no, as you cannot take a feral child and just hand them a bunch of books and walk away and think they'll eventually learn to read. That that will not happen is testament to how kids will not just figure it out.
Sometimes, small kids who are read to incessantly, who are interested in books, who have parents who are not formally sitting down with the intention of teaching them to read but who go over letter sounds and shapes and etc., can pick it up "on their own." Usually they do so because they're very interested in books and memorize books that are read to them and learn to associate the words they've sight memorized with the sounds and pictures. This stuff happens only with parents who are reading to, pointing to the words in the books, associating the word 'ducky' with the picture of the ducky, etc. Those toddlers who say like 'you skipped' when you drop a word, they've memorized the book and are showing pre-reading abilities.
I posted earlier from an article about reading fluency that covers some of the things required to be able to read, the precursors. Those need to be present before a kid will pick it up "on their own" and even then, they cannot read with fluency.
English is a righteous mess, if you haven't noticed. Even kids taught to read a traditional, phonetic way, who were read to, developed all the correct pre-reading indicators and can read early reader books with confidence will need a lot of sounding it out, learning the rules (whether by explanation of the rules or vigilant guidance with words) for, say, long vs. short vowels, when y is a vowel and when it's not, when c is pronounced like k and when it's not, etc., etc., etc. That stuff isn't obvious to anyone at all, it's all learned.
The further and further behind someone falls in learning all of this, the worse it is, because there is a window for making all of those connections neurologically in a way that it will become something you don't have to think about and it's years behind a 9-year-old. Same as the feral child who never learns to speak fluently because they were only discovered at 8. The pathways aren't as readily formed and in some cases cannot be formed at all.
Kids who get cochlear implants late have to spend a year or more learning to hear. They can hear immediately with the implant, but the neural pathways to decode and understand the meanings of sounds were not established when humans are set up to establish them. They can read lips fluently, they can read, but just because they can suddenly hear does not mean they can connect the sounds to what the sounds mean. It takes a lot of therapy and practice trying to establish the connections - and those are people who can read lips and read and write, so they have something to connect TO. A kid who cannot read and has no real fluency? Reading is not a sense, like hearing, it's a very complex activity. So... no.
