Slashdot Mirror
Schooling, Homeschooling, and Now, "Unschooling"
ciaohound writes "The Baltimore Sun has a story about 'unschooling,' which is like homeschooling except, well, without the schooling. '...unschooling incorporates every facet of a child's life into the education process, allowing a child to follow his passions and learn at his own pace, year-round. And it assumes that an outing at the park — or even hours spent playing a video game — can be just as valuable a teaching resource as Hooked on Phonics.' If you have ever been forced to sit in a classroom where no learning was taking place, you may understand the appeal. A driving force behind the movement is parents' dissatisfaction with regular schools, and presumably with homeschooling as well. Yet few researchers are even aware of unschooling and little research exists on its effectiveness. Any Slashdotters who have experience with 'unschooling?'"
Sounds like a fancy name for goofing off, skiving and truancy.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
"Unschooling: For those kids who aspire to be the dish washers of the future"
But seriously, is there any less way to be prepared for higher education (higher, meaning anything from 3rd grade on up)?
>> "What would the robut do? Frame someone!"
everyday of my life. lol
Sounds like 'uneducation' to me. The problem with learning at your own pace is that not all students are naturally curious, and even those who are are most likely not naturally curious about every subject that needs to be taught in the world. Learning should be fun whenever possible, but not all things are pleasant, and children need to learn that some things require work and discipline. Outside of research labs, very few individuals in life are able to do or think about just what they want to do.
Rhymes that keep their secrets will unfold behind the clouds.There upon the rainbow is the answer to a neverending story
Old fashioned good parenting. At dinner time, I'd make a game of learning, with Q&A, and they loved it. It's taking the time to answer your kids' questions and satisfy their innate curiosity, rather than stifling it like the public school system does. A walk in the park CAN be a learning experience.
Free Martian Whores!
It worked great for him, not so hot for his brother. my take on it is, it depends on the kid.
tach315
These parents are in for a nasty shock when their precious snowflakes head off to university and can't get in. What you will discover, and many homeschooling parents have already found out, is that they don't care how good a job you think you did or how proud you are. You pass their various admissions tests, or you go somewhere else. They are not at all interested in your ideas of how education should be. Your reading comprehension, writing, and math skills had better be up to spec or you are sent packing.
After my kid goes to school and finishes university, graduates of unschooling can rake up the leaves in the back of my kid's nice big house.
This is sort of an interesting idea, but it's obviously a bit too unstructured, I think. What you need is intervals of self-directed learning punctuated by short periods of guidance from a teacher with a reasonably broad range of knowledge. In sum, I'd bet on Montessori over this any day.
Me's was unskooled and its did me a lots of good.
Doon't nock it.
Seriously, no sarcasm there. As long as there is some sort of underpinning to the whole thing ensuring that kids are in fact learning what they need to, this sort of structure can be really good. I know I had tons more fun, and probably learned more building houses with lego, putting together erector sets, going out camping, not to mention trips to the library and the local museum than I did most days in school. In fact, even as far as college is concerned I learned more in my internships than I ever did in a lab environment. So long as kids are doing, and there again is some guidance I think this is a great idea.
The musings of just another geek and his junk.
The kid is only in school for 6 hours in the day. Use the other 8-10 of their non-sleep hours to do this stuff. School isn't a substitute for parenting, and it shouldn't be their only source of learning.
I am the richest astronaut ever to win the superbowl.
Except that the passion for learning needs a base to build on, which means parental support and inborn natural curiosity.
The level of knowledge we're talking about in homeschooling isn't a good avenue for autodidactism anyway, as it should be about basic, general knowledge. Kids are learning too little in primary/high school in the first place.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
How is this in any way appropriate for a technology news site?!?!?!?
If children don't spend hour after endless hour sitting behind a desk in the classroom, how are they going to adapt to spending hour after endless hour sitting behind a desk in the cubicle?
Good parents would do well with this, poor parents terribly. If only there were a way to decide who gets to do this.... but then who gets to decide? We can't, that's who.
I've taught before, I know there are both kinds of parents out there. If you're pessimistic about this you probably had the bad parents, optimistic you probably had the good ones.
Think of how the kid feels - learning what's needed and being interested in what's being learned. The only fear I have is that lots of kids are forced to take certain classes, learn that they actually like it, and have a happy and successful career. We just need a guarantee that the students will be exposed to more than just their interests, and then I won't have a problem with this.
This is a great idea for kids who are curious, inquisitive and have a passion for learning...and a horrible idea for those that don't. No system of education is a one size/fits all. The educational system will never work well until we realize that kids are different and we need parallel programs for how each individual learns.
What's up with this box everyone has to think inside of or outside of? Why does there have to be a box?
That's veree well sed. I jest don't think it had the meening the awthor intended.
actively use everything as a teaching tool, then fine, otherwise it's just creating a steaming pile of ignorant burger flippers.
Of course, if they were already doing that, then the school system would be fine.
Most homeschoolers I know are people who aren't sociable and just don't want to deal with the daily social 'grind' of dealing with people. Also they ahve some fear the child will be exposed to something outside there own beliefs. Political or theological.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Sounds like a another way to continue the trend of child-proofing the world, so that "everyone can learn at their own pace." Right. What these people are unable, or unwilling, to recognize is that the world meets nobody half-way. We either work hard at learning how to succeed and survive, or we fail hard.
"Unschooling" is just another way for lazy, stupid parents to coddle their children toward a lifetime of failure, mediocrity and narcissism. In 20 years, when these kids turn out to be useless tools who are unable to work for what they want or even support themselves, they will turn around and blame the government and you and me, for not doing enough to help them. (And no doubt they will do the complaining in a petulant, entitled tone that makes you want to punch them hard in the mouth.) Is this what we, as a society, want?
Yes, let's have more unschooling! Looks like a winning strategy to me.
goes over this, actually. It's a translation of a book written by a famous TV icon in Japan about her childhood growing up, titled "Totto-chan: The Little Girl By The Window." It takes place pre-WWII in a school that does things very differently even by today's standards - kids in each grade level were given assignments for each subject, but were allowed to work on them in any order they pleased for as long as they pleased, just so much that all assignments were done by the end of the day. The teacher in the class was there to help any student struggling in a subject.
Not quite unschooling, but along similar lines, and a very good read.
Considering the dismal state of science education in public schools, if you have kids and they have an interest or aptitude in science, home schooling or tutoring would be the only way for them to be prepared for college. Otherwise, they'll be spending their first couple of years taking remedial math and science.
It's NOT me! It's the meds! I'm on 1000mg of Fukitol.
While many are arguing against this from the point of view of economic and social success, I really question whether this is at all healthy for the development of a human being. I mean, to never be told "no". To never be made to do something you don't want to? That sounds like it'll raise one hell of a whiny, never-satisfied child.
Then again, I'm typing this from the work even though I'd rather be at home with a beer in my hand....
This sounds like new age BS to me. Most parents know nothing about the world around them. Kids will ask questions such as "why is the sky blue", "how does the sun heat us", and "how can a bird fly?" and most parents won't have any idea how to respond. Even when looking at the humanities most people fall flat on basic knowledge. In fact, I would suggest that most parents lack the creativity and understanding of the world to really challenge their children to grow. Feynman might be able to pull it off but I know that most people wouldn't be able to pass a grade 4 science class. We have to get kids to sit down and read books, memorize times tables, and learn how to socialize. The school playground is a very important part of the process that home schooled kids seem to miss out on.
----
Go canucks, habs, and sens!
But I can see the appeal. Basic math can be taught in just about ANYTHING. The problem with schools is that they either teach you A) Just the numbers and its boring as hell, or B) They choose scenarios that are boring as hell so you don't want to learn it. However if little jimmy likes WoW and the teacher simply makes him do the Math with all his stats... There you go he knows his math.
Things like social studies and literature are what I'm wondering about. If a kid doesn't find the French Revolution interesting, how on Earth do you plan on teaching him about it? He can learn to read by using the internet and other worldly things like signs, but things like Resumes and Cover Letters can't be taught on the fly.
There are things in school that you think "I didn't learn Jack all" but they DID come in handy later.
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Doesn't sound so bad... as long as the kid has had the essential basic such as reading and arithmetic. It's actually what I did my entire junior high period where I self studied computer science during the nights and slept in school during the days.. pretty much in protest in the teaching method and some useless content of the regular classes.
My teachers back then pretty much referred to as 'a failure that will never amount to anything'. Then the Internet boom came....
Although, the child's own drive to learn would be paramount to this method of education. Some guidance and support from the parents whenever needed would probably be nice too.
And they want their personal tutors back.
No seriously... Throughout history, back before established private schools and universities, the well to do would hire a educated person to basically follow their child around and given them instructions pretty much all the time.
You know... Socrates and Alexader the Great
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
This visit to Slashdot right now is an experiment. Will I get paid for following my passions?
Sounds like a laissez-faire parenting (or schooling) on steroids.
This is not new, Unschooling has been around for years (since the 70's).
I have three unschooled kids, 7, 10 & 13 and combined they've read way more books than I have in my whole life (I'm 48 and have been an avid reader since 9).
These kids of mine devour books at an astonishing rate. Don't kid yourself, unschooling does not equal lazy.
I've also done my own share of unschooling by quitting public school in grade 9 to get a full-time job. I'm now a independent Contract ASP.NET/SQL Server developer (completely self-taught) and I make over 200k a year.
If you believe that learning is "performance art," to be enjoyed and appreciated for the act of doing it, then that's great. The problem here is that it took millennia of great minds to reach the point at which we find ourselves now. There is no way that a rich exploratory learning environment can replicate this entire history. Yes, it is a wonderful, possibly necessary thing to supplement the more mundane aspects of learning; however, there is no substitute for learning by absorption and critical analysis. The cure for boring classrooms is simple: smaller classes, engaged (not enraged) parents, and better teachers.
You mean the parents fail the child... In my experience - Given that I live in a big city with all the wealth and greed that adult have. Parent assume and expected their children to just soak up information like a sponge, and it may be possible for some children to gain some knowledge from experience... No amount of teaching in the world can make a kid (or adult) the idea student in any subject if you distract them with toys.
i.e. XBox, Playstation, cable/sat tv, etc.
and I are totally fine.
And my sister! And our daughter!
My sister did something like this with her daughter. My niece is smart and naturally curious, and it worked fine for a few years. This year my niece is in regular school fir the first time, in, I believe, Grade 4. She was behind most of her classmates when it came to reading and writing, but spent some time with a tutor at the end of the spring and into the summer and I believe she's about caught up now. My niece was ready to go to school this fall and last I talked to her was really looking forward to it.
We have an 18 month old girl and depending on the quality of schools where we live at the time, we're considering not sending her to school until maybe second grade. Almost certainly not for junior kindergarten if they have that wherever we are. We'll see where we are, and how much our daughter wants to go to school, what her peer situation looks like outside of school, and make a decision from there. We can teach ABCs, recess and naptime as well as a teacher can, I think.
I recall a friend of mine in high school. He said he got horrible grades until around 5th grade because someone had told him grades didn't matter until then. He made a point of learning but didn't worry about his marks. Everybody thought he was a dumb kid but once 5th grade kicked in he went to straight As. From an academic standpoint, I don't know that school offers any advantages up to maybe Grade 4-5 over a household where at least one parent is home all the time.
www.clarke.ca
It seems they are as well adjusted and engaged in their communities and prepared as those "socially promoted" from some of our lesser public no-choice schools.
http://www.mitadmissions.org/topics/apply/homeschooled_applicants_helpful_tips/homeschooled_applicants.shtml
The freedom to learn what you like, when you like, how you like it is probably best granted after you've learned how those decisions can affect your future. Most of us learned that before/early in college, though a few (like me) learned that many years into college while trying to get a doctorate. The point is, unschool your kid (particularly in B-more) at an early age when they can't conceptualize the future beyond what they want for dinner tomorrow, and those kids are probably going to be on the corner in 5 years.
I wonder what will this generation of kids achieve when they are finally exposed to the mean, harsh and unforgiving world of the job market, menial work and personal relationships. Another generation of "flower children"?
As long as you learn everything you need to learn, pretty much anything would most likely work better then High School at teaching.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
For most kids, its going to take a huge investment of time and energy from a parent who is knowledgeable and eager to teach and nurture.
I have first hand experience with something not entirely unlike this. I was very ill and was able to attend school less than half the time. my father was out of the picture due to extreme violence. My mother was out of the picture due to college and working to try to support us on her own. I was not a normal child, I had an unquenchable thirst for knowledge, I would watch education TV and read textbooks for fun. When all the other kids were watching cartoons or sleeping, I remember waking up one saturday morning and flipping over to the shuttle launch instead of cartoons and I got to watch Challenger blow up live. My mother once had to make a rule that I had to check out at least one non-fiction book from the library because she was worried I was to analytical. I didn't learn anything at all in any of the time I spent in a classroom until I went to college. I absolutely rejected home schooling because the only home schooling available was more than 50% religious brainwashing material. By my mid to late teens, my health had improved. But I missed so many credits from "truancy" in middle school, despite being officially handicapped, that I could not graduate HS until I was 21, so I had to get a GED and entered college at 17.
Most children faced with that? It would never work. Their desire to socialize with their peers would far outstrip their desire to self educate
There are some famous examples of this working. But only because the parents had time, money, and high standards.
One of the Rockefellers, the son of John D., wrote that when he was a kid, his father gave him an allowance. He was required to keep a proper set of double-entry books on how he spent it, and the books were audited by an accountant. He didn't get the next allowance payment until the books balanced.
Henry Ford II was promised a car for some birthday. On the appointed day, he was taken out to a garage, and there was the car - totally dissembled with all the component parts laid out. A full set of tools was supplied. Eventually, he did get the car assembled and running.
If you have the resources, it can work.
I have experience with unschooling. We looked into it for awhile. It's perfectly normal and natural, and EVERYONE does it. You learn doing everything you do, especially as a kid.
The problem is that some things -- as a parent -- you think your kids should learn, they won't want to learn on their own, probably. Whether it's fractions or Spanish or botany, you're going to run into things they won't learn unless you sit them down and teach it to them.
When you can teach via unschooling, it's great. But it's, for most people, not going to be a very effective way to teach kids all that parents want their kids to learn.
For serious, my momma, a bit OCD/MPD/ADD/GAD/as well ass hooked one lesbionics, well, she sorta did thus to me, an when I finally DID muck inn sckool, wells, I sorta got booted from the arts department,... Only cause I was tyring to form a lil alliance twixt the sculpting dept. an teh roboticks dept. BUt she dint like what she saw, too much passion, she puttered that on ice reel quickness... an booted me. and such is lyfe. Putter round now, trying to keep afloat integers to inegral structural analysis, wherever and whatevr keeps me intuit... Also faierie into the freeflow of words ATT thymes.. ifn' ya couldn't tell, well, ya/...J.MB.(Unpapered/not-yet-paupered jack-ass off all trades/trax/trix/skools...
Let's here the cry aloud folkn'!! SKOOL FER LYFE!!!!!
Who wants to be teh 40 y/o still keepin teh record length in kegstand times, the one who can outfunnel the frat pressy??? Me? Hmmm
*thinks aside to self and wonders if that click/send/submit/preview button is a good idea.....* **it glows!!** Maybe the trix toy fund teh wright unskool... Hmmmmmm Need to find fone.... *sighs* -- "There'll be no smoking in the gas chamber." - Jimi Hendrix
I was homeschooled and I know we stretched the definition of school work by claiming nearly any activity was educational. But my mom was at one time a public school teacher. We still had to hit the books and learn things comparable to other kids our age. I honestly didn't know how I would compare with public schooled kids until I applied to go to college. It turns out that my education was more than adequate in most areas.
Another family I know had the "unschooling" approach. Farm work, housework and canning were typical examples of their education. My friend can read and write and do simple math, but that's about it. Now in his 30's, he finds his employment options limited and feels shorted by his parents' choice to keep him out of school.
I knew somebody who was unschooled. It was more of her mom's excuse to not do any schoolwork at all. This family lived in the middle of nowhere--no water, electricity, or internet! Unschooling is exactly how it sounds, no school.
When my wife and prepared to homeschool our kids back in 2001, we both talked a lot about unschooling (yes, the term was in use that far back and longer). It intrigued us. At one point we may even have convinced ourselves that we were going to give it a try. But a funny thing happened on the way to unschool. By the time our kids were done with their reading and writing and arithmetic lessons, they didn't have much more time for learning through play than any other kids did.
Apparently our common sense was stronger than we gave it credit for. No way were we going to let our kids not learn the three R's. In time, we added the usual history and geography and science and so on, and though we never did subscribe to anybody else's curriculum, ours ended up looking pretty standard.
We did eventually join a homeschool group to give our kids a way to meet other kids, and that group included a few unschooled children. We saw nothing to make us think we had erred in actually educating our kids. The unschoolers weren't unpleasant to be around; they just didn't know much, and even the other kids could see it.
[This is all in the past tense because our kids started public school this year -- eighth grade. They're on par with the kids in the AP classes in English (excuse me, Language Arts), and algebra. The other classes aren't tracked (grouped, stratified, whatever), so kids of all abilities are in the same classes, and ours are ahead of many of their classmates in those areas. They're experiencing a bit of culture shock, but overall we're pleased with how it's going. FYI.]
You must unlearn what you know, before you can, uh, know what, uhm, you've unlearned? No, wait. When you unlearn what you think you know, you unthink what... crap, that's even worse. Give me a minute here...
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
I like to call myself a homeschooling survivor. My mother chose to educate my brother and I for reasons that I've never gotten a clear answer on- it was not for religious or political reasons. On the one hand, I actually had an interesting free-form education and I did learn some things better than I would have in a school setting (we did lots of science experiments).
The thing that I missed was the day to day social interaction with peers. I saw kids my own age just a couple times a week and it was normally at my house or theirs. They were always friends. I never had to deal with a conflict with peers because I simply never had them.
The social aspects of school are just as important as sitting in a classroom- you need to learn how to deal with others. I'm 30 and I still struggle when i have disagreements with co-workers.
We need serious school reform in this country, and although there are advantages to homeschooling or unschooling, I think there is still something to be said for classroom learning.
Can parents do a good job teaching their kids? Sure. Will they? Well that depends. Plenty of parents think they are smarter than they are, or more problematically, think their kids are smarter than they are.
I work at a university and because of the problems with home schooling and charter schools, they instituted new entrance tests some time ago. Just having a reasonable SAT score and a diploma wasn't enough (it's a public school so admissions aren't harsh), you had to pass their own English and math test. These weren't hard, but made sure you had the basic skills needed.
The English test is the one that seemed to trip up alternate education kids the most often. It was a fairly classic reading comprehension/critical writing test. You read an essay, you write your own analysis on it. However many seemed to have problems with that. Why I don't know for sure but my guess would be because that was the sort of thing they weren't taught. English for them was reading books or the like, which is not what the university is interested in.
My experience in public school has been a great disappointment; it wasn't until I started college I began to learn anything in a classroom.
All my life, I've read books and fooled around on the internet. I soaked up trivial information from every source I could but it seemed the least nourishing places were at school. No school teacher could explain to me Roman numerals, I had to sit and stare at examples until it suddenly made sense. No school teacher taught me the alphabet, how to read or write... I looked at books, I asked my parents and those around me what words meant and how to say them. No school teacher taught me arithmetic, books and practice did. I didn't even learn algebra until last year.
I can appreciate the steps parents can take to get involved in their child's education, and this "unschooling" business does sound like it can give children hands-on experience beyond what time behind a desk ever might. Unfortunately, parents do not and can not be expected to do everything.
The failure of schools to satisfy parents, to me, does not seem a good reason to eliminate the school system completely. It actually says to me that the education system needs to be forcibly improved by these parents who are so concerned for their childs' educations.
We do need school. Maybe from 5 years old and up without stopping is too much time away from proactive parents, maybe the expectation of everything is learned in school is just too extreme, but the problem here is the bare minimum of the education system is simply not acceptable in the years when children will sponge up every drop of information they come across.
"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
what Mark Twain said - "I have never let my schooling interfere with my education".
Schools theses days are about indoctrinating and conforming to useless standards, not about learning. If you want to learn, you have to do it outside of school.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
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"You must unlearn what you have learned.", Yoda, 'Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back'
...was with my ex-wife. She supposedly "home schooled", but in reality- "no school" was a better description. I have to say this though- her two youngest "no schooled" kids (who were living with us when we were together) actually turned out pretty well. Both are articulate and excellent communicators and had no problem at all getting GEDs. The last I heard- one of them is doing well in an art school and one manages a local restaurant. Frankly- from what I have seen of local public-schooled kids the last few years- I think she made the right choice.
I never finished high school and actualy had a grade point average of 0.00 one semester. Yet today I am a systems administrator for a well known company and do some consulting on the side. I did serve as an IT in the Navy to get training and a few lines on my resume but I already knew a lot about computers and networking because It has always been my hobby since I was 13. I am a people person I dress very well so that alone puts me in another category of IT. Bottom line if you want success bad enough you can make it happen without traveling the cookie cutter path. I am currently enrolled in school but I only take classes which I have an interest in and will directly benefit my career. I could care less about obtaining a degree.
because as most people who know anything about homeschooling are going to be more than willing to tell you.
They submit to more rigorous requirements than the majority of public school children. Quarterly reports and tests in many districts. I would submit that more children are ill served by percentage or numbers by the public system than home schooling. Why? Because the later already demonstrates more involvement in a child's life than the former. What I have usually found in the anti brigade is either jealousy or religious bigotry. The first being they are upset someone has the means to stay home; totally ignoring the sacrifices many make to do so; and the later being the typical home "schoolers" are just a bunch of religious nuts.
So, next time you see that national spelling bee, geography, etc, champ, pretend to ignore the fact that many are home schooled. Whats next, claiming that private schools are just as bad ? They would be next on the chopping block if home school got the axe.
If anything, unschooling is the perfect description of what the public suffers through today.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
This is fucking ludicrous. A large part of the failure of school is because the parents don't get involved. Studies have consistently shown that schools with high parent involvement produce better-educated children, and parents who engage their children outside of school produce better-educated children.
If parents aren't getting involved in education when the bulk of the burden is on someone else, why would they take any more time to do the whole thing themselves?
Schools are necessary. Very few parents have the necessary knowledge or experience to properly educate a child. If there is a problem with the school system here in the states, it's up to us to fix it.
I certainly don't want a society full of uneducated twits. We have enough of those now.
I knew our society was starting to distrust intelligence and education, and making ignorance a virtue, but this is fucking ridiculous.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
allowing a child to follow his passions and learn at his own pace, year-round
Barring a learning disability, that's the worst thing you can do to a healthy, learning child.
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How many of us earn a living using skills they learned at school ? Certainly some of us do, but I bet a large fraction don't. I personally don't... my most marketable skills are computer science and statistics, I learned these by myself and never attended a course in these subjects.
Reading and counting are the base curriculum, the rest should be left to follow one's interest.
\u262D = \u5350
I was about to write that this would never have worked for me as I didn't gain an interest in educating myself until I left college. However, it was immediately after college that I gained this interest. I'm wondering if that might mean that this actually would have worked for me. What if I hadn't gone to college, would I have gained a desire to learn after high school? What if I hadn't gone to high school, would I have acquired my current thirst for knowledge after middle school? I can't help but feel that it was the structure of education that fueled my apathy. While attending school, I never read anything that wasn't assigned. Now reading is the majority of what I do outside of work.
On a related note. I was home schooled two years. One of those years my parents were somewhat busy with various things and I was left to work on my own sometimes. I mostly just worked on programming (if you consider Visual Basic programming). That leads me to believe, that, left on my own for 12 years of education, I may have acquired highly specialized knowledge in my chosen field, and not much else. It is debatable whether that is good or bad.
I would love to see some studies on this subject.
It's those uninspiring teachers that everyone can remember having. You can also remember those few teachers that made you want to come to class. A good teacher can make a total flunky interested in anything. School systems need a better way to weed out the crap teachers, and pay the ones that are left standing more money. The parents that think they need to go this route(homeschooling, unschooling), need to get their teaching credential and contribute their time as a teacher at their local public school. Inspire 30 kids instead of 1.
There's plenty of unschooling in the area I live. My kid meets other kids in the park who are homeschooled but the parents don't teach. 'Go do a craftwork' is fun for small children but it's not going to amuse a 12 y.o. or help them get a job or prepare them for life. That said, very little that I learnt in school applies to my job but I learnt social skills, don't bite, don't fight, don't spit, how to make friends, how to lose friends, how to help friends with problems in their life, how to ask for help. I also learnt about responsibility, deadlines, homework and why you have to do things you don't like. Around here the homeschooling is sometimes motivated by a parent's desire to isolate their children from people not like themselves. Life can't be like that. A school helps you meet different/strange/weird people and you learn they are just like you. I agree with giving kids lots of extra experiences and challenges. If you can do that for your kids then be grateful that you have the time, money and ability to do it. There's lots of struggling parents that want to but can't
I've never used the term "unschooling" before, but it's what I actively do with my kids before I let them loose on any other educational approach (around age 7) and they thrive on it. Kids are learning machines and teaching - especially at young ages - can rarely be done more effectively than simply giving them the information and resources they need to explore what they are interested in.
By the time my kids get anywhere near a formal educational setting they are usually far ahead of their peers because they have been allowed to learn (and kept away from the TV)
Back in the day I learned all sorts of things from library books while waiting for games to load on my Commodore 64. (Not to mention patience!)
I wonder how different I'd be if I'd had a Fast Load cartridge....
My cousin's son. He went to schools that sound exactly like unschooling ... so I guess his folks paid for nothing (well, maybe "day care"). Ironic, but true. The kid is working at a golf course now. He's either in the pro shop or giving lessons.
Unfortunately, I've seen the effects of this happening with someone I know. They pulled their son out of high school, and "home schooled" him. In reality, they unschooled him in the truest definition of the word. He played xbox for a while, went on some bus trips around the country with some friends (to concerts I think mostly), and mostly just slept late and loafed.
Fast forward to today... the kid is now about 23 years old, lives at home, has no job, and doesn't even have a drivers license. He still has his xbox though, and boy I bet he's good at it. This is our future. This is the generation we are trusting to support us in our old age, to carry the torch and continue the research, development, and advancements in all areas of science and medicine. If you are educated, and willing to work in a job, I hope you weren't planning on retiring anytime in the next 300-400 years!
Come on, seriously. Why would you have to have to stick with "unschooling" above classroom schooling? Isn't the concept of "unschooling" just to encourage your kids to learn in every way they can? Why is this even a discussion? If you are not encouraging your children to ask questions and stoking their curiosity on a day-to-day basis, you are not doing your job as a parent.
Our neighbor does this to her kids.
Her philosophy is essentially that if one of her kids wishes to learn something, they will seek out the information themselves.
Kinda like the way Neo learned how to fly a Bell Helicopter. Just wish "I want to learn X," and the knowledge magically appears in your brain.
I'm sure it's just coincidental that every single one of her kids has now been diagnosed as having "learning disabilities."
It could go right if both parents support and provide resources and children follow their curiosity and put effort in it. It would end up being a kind of home schooling, but I don't know if parents can spare enough attention to their children to this go right nowadays.
It could also end up with parents not caring and children caring even less.
The good, the evil and the vacuum tubes.
As a parent that homeschools their children, I can tell you that one of the greatest gifts I have to endow upon my children is the experience of what it takes to make it in this world. While I create activities that focus on their individual strengths, this does not mean that I let them engage in a ïhedonistic approach to their own interests. There are things that my children are loathe to do such as working on their multiplication tables or perfecting their usage and grammar in their native language. This is important because some of my children want to become video game programmers. While I don't discourage their passion for gaming, I recognize that it takes more than simple enjoyment of a thing in order to be successful at that thing. Having the fundamentals of programming and finding effective ways to make them enjoyable will help to remove the tedium that comes with any profession.
Even a monkey sounds smart compared to a bunch of retards.
...in his book _Mr. God, this is Anna_. "Page 171 - Her ability to ignore the excesses of information, dismiss the useless frill and uncover the heart of things was truly magical." There is so much that we, as "Adults," can learn from children. If I ever stop wanting to learn then it's time to pack it all up.
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Umm, you keep preparing your little tyke jd-wannabe for the slave pits, why not? It's certainly better to rot from the inside, right? At least that way, precious thumb-fu master won't have any useful organs to harvest. Good plan!
On the other hand, an ignorant (but insufficiently insouciant) indolence is very much prized by the livestock industry. Yum!
marble more, you hobbled whore!
rot your brain, for highest score!
cauldron filled with fun-fooled
children "skilled" but unschooled:
less/time ground/under, o life/low lock/mor!
We unschool our two kids after a horrid experience in one of the top ranked public school systems and public schools in that system.
Both kids are considered extremely bright and were in the gifted and talented, advanced, whatever you call the 'smart kid' program.
Unschooling can be referred to in some cases as child led. With the internet (google, wikipedia and other free resources) it is very easy for kids to get information and research their interests. You don't have to spend the day sitting at a desk of following the curriculum from 'Everything a Xth Grader Should Know' is required to learn. Humans are curious and living life everyday is a learning experience. When a child asks a question, and they do, teach them how to find the answer. Soon they are trying to gather more knowledge than you could imagine.
You might be surprised how much you can learn in a few minutes compared to 30-50 minutes in a classroom.
Unschooling, all the smart kids are doing it.
Aside from the science, language, and math classes I took until the end of high school, I'd say the it was pretty effective "unschooling". I've learned more about British aristocracy from Wikipedia than I ever learned in school--and far more interesting things than were present in any of the text books that we were tested on. History, Psychology, Social Studies... all of it was filled with crap I ultimately replaced with real education in the real world.
For example (and this may be only my experience), I never got exposed to the *whole* "states rights" argument about the Civil War in school, so for the most part I ended up thinking Lincoln was Jesus' second coming. 9 times out of 10, (especially if you come from the North) you leave school thinking that the whole point of the Civil War was about freeing the slaves, when it really had to do with a lot more things like taxes. Hell, the Emancipation Proclamation didn't come until well into the War. Then some of the things you learn about Lincoln outside of the heavily-doctored, high school textbooks makes him look like a generally nice guy that could be a real dick--which sounds a lot like a recent president I'm familiar with. In fact, in certain lights, he seems like being an agent of Empire than of Democracy. Either way, we can thank him for the world we live in today, as Americans, for better or worse.
My point is that I don't necessarily believe the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, had been imparted in school--making the substance worthless. And while I personally had some great teachers, there were far more "from the book" automatons which made the whole process uninteresting, and useless. But this is a perspective I didn't have until after I exposed myself to information outside of the classroom. Until then, I thought I had been fairly well schooled. Now, I'm certain I had been "unschooled".
What I think is important about the schooling process are those subjects which require a structured environment to really learn: namely science, language, and math. I would not hesitate for a moment to assume that those would be the weakest elements of a wholly "unschooled" individual. Which is a shame, as they are more important than anything else and serve as the best foundation for assimilating the world.
Thank you for reading One Man's Opinion. No participation necessary. Offer void where deemed by law or PATRIOT Act.
Do we really need another class of uneducated hippy children. Or even barely educated yuppy spawn. I would have thought that we had learned this lesson already. Most but not all of the home schooled kids i know were home schooled by bible (or religious book of your choice) thumping fundys that were upset that their precious spawn couldn't pray in school. Alternately they were too sick to attend school. Some of them were even home schooled so that they could be slave labor for their parents business. Some of them were yuppy spawn that had parents that were just fringers and believed that no one could educate their precious better than they could but they were wrong too.
Now here comes "Unschooling" yeah we just let them do what comes naturally and they somehow absorb an education by osmosis. Sorry, if that worked we would never have invented school in the first place. Charlemagne was right, get over it.
Why bother
Never let your schooling interfere with your education.
The parents are usually the ones who barely got out of 9th grade, couldn't now pass the sixth and think they're more qualified to teach K-12, start to finish, than a dozen people who collectively have more years of tertiary education than said parents have walked the earth.
Textbook cases of...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning-Kruger_effect
Besides, a major component of schooling is in fact /just being in school/ so you'll be, hopefully, a vaguely functional human being who can navigate all the various and sundry organizations of life and put up with all the other dysfunctional members of the species with a minimum quantity of blood spilling.
I am kinda partial to the "Little House on the Prairie" era schooling technique. Kids of all ages sit in the same classroom while the teacher instructs the older children on more advanced subjects those kids then teach the younger children things they learned from the older kids the year before. It teachers learning as well as teaching instructing. I know many intellectuals that are completely unable to convey to others information about what they are experts on.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
It's called childhood. After school, weekends, and the summer.
A man with a gun is called a citizen. A man without a gun is called a subject.
I'm just waiting for all of the stories of "unschooling" kids either (a) being highly intelligent/successful/nice or (b) being poorly educated, completely lacking social skills, sheltered, and closed minded. Personally, I've heard and seen stories of both from general homeschooling. Neither has given me a good picture of what's happening.
"it's not about aptitude, it's the way you're viewed" - Galinda
Yeah, they're called hunter-gatherers
I think boredom is a useful tool, to encourage young minds to think for themselves. Also to encourage young minds to not get boring jobs. If you've never experienced boredom you won't understand how tedious it is.
With this in mind, I think unschooling should be taught in schools. Students should sit at their desks for many hours a day with a teacher droning on and on about some book to be examined in microscopic detail until nothing of interest remains.
Oh wait.... that happens now.
With Unschooling you can make the claim that you're self-smarted, just like this guy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jB0u9crejUw
you have ever been forced to sit in a classroom where no learning was taking place
You mean like Obamas supposed back to school special next week?
I attended elementary school, was homeschooled for a few years, was unschooled for a few years, attended high school for a few years (because Canadian Universities wouldn't accept only SAT scores, my understanding is US Colleges would), and graduated with a Bachelors in Software Engineering. I think the amount of learning in any environment is really dependent on the child. I learned just as much when formally homeschooling as when my parents were taking a complete hands off approach, because I still read math and science textbooks for fun. But I had siblings that definitely needed structure (either school or formal homeschooling).
And your citation please? I'm open minded about this and want to learn, but don't counter a hyperbole with an anecdote. If you want a citation, please provide one yourself if you make a counter claim.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education"
- Mark Twain
This "unschooling" as the only method of learning is IMO pretty clearly not going to instill the basic skills an educated person needs -- the typical reading, writing, arithmetic. Nor is it going to help much with the less concrete things an educated person needs -- e.g. history and literature. Nor with the more formal parts of the sciences. But if the kid is reasonably bright, he simply doesn't need to spend anything like 6 hrs * 180 days per year to reach competence for his grade level in the basics. Which leaves lots of time for less structured activity like this, especially at the primary school level when the more advanced stuff isn't being taught in the regular system either.
A thing that frustrated me is that you have to follow the program designed for the average kid. When I was young, I was particularly talented in science and jumped two classes as a result.
However I do not think that my situation was ideal, I was bullied alot more than other kids because I was younger. And the level in science was still weak for myself.
A better system may be to teach earlier classes by level instead of forcing everybody to have the same level in all subjects.
That would have two side effects. First, you would be able at a younger age to show more interest in a particular subject and progress more quickly. Then it would solve the problem of the classes to follow the speed of the slowest.
(sorry for my English, it is not my first language and, obviously I always sucked at any non-science subject.
Don't you know it is now both immoral and criminal to think beyond the next quarterly report?
We homeschooled both of our daughters (23 and 16) quite successfully. The 23 year old is out on her own and graduated magna cum laude from her university and was the principle oboist for the university orchestra for her final two years. The 16 year old is looking at pharma or medicine (God help us - there goes any hope of retirement for me!)
The concept of "unschooling" has been around for a long time in the homeschooling community. While we don't specifically "unschool" our curriculum is quite eclectic and includes critical thinking and logic - something that is not commonly found in the secondary schools of today. We also include argumentation and rhetoric as well.
We started homeschooling when we decided the public schools sucked and there was no hope of a turn around. We faced a lot of challenges in the process, but it has made us a stronger family and the kids can enjoy a lot more of their lives as well. It's easy to take a field trip to Washington DC any time during the year when I have business meeting there!
If any /. ers want to talk more about homeschooling, feel free to contact me.
Chemgeek4501
Parents who can and will take the time to teach their children about the world around them and how to act and interact within it will, more than likely, end up with children who are well-adjusted, relatively well-educated and prepared children. Parents who believe that it's someone else's job to do all of those things will more likely end up with entitlement babies who will be leeches on society.
Some kids will be well-educated because of our public schools, and some will end up well-educated in spite of them. The same can be true of any other learning environment, if poorly and carelessly administered. My 15 year old, who none of us think is a genius, scored as post-high school in almost every subject. My son, who is very smart, started college at 16, because we had nothing left to teach him. Both would have been bored in public school, as I was.
The point is that parents should have the ability to choose that which works best for their children, so long as that choice produces acceptable results.
I don't have any experience with unschooling, but am currently trying out unworking.
I dropped out of public schools in 7th grade. From there I enrolled in home school and essentially did what ever the hell I liked. Unfortunately when I dropped out of public school I was behind in a few ways, including a understanding of mathematics that was on a 4th grade level.
So in one year of "unschooling" most of which was hanging around a college campus just talking to students, hanging out, and working odd jobs for local vendors, I had a apprenticeship as a jeweler, and inside ONE year, the kid who was never going to graduate obtained a regular high school diploma, with a average math score that had tripled inside one year. A level of understanding that had stagnated for 4 years inside a public school.
"unschooling" works for individuals with inquisitive minds who are having issues getting along with their peers, not for underachievers who won't think for themselves.
And all I can say to the folks who think this would have a person flipping burgers, is that I have had a lot of jobs... I've managed retail stores, construction jobs, and been a jeweler's apprentice. I've built hydrogen generators, repaired numerous automobiles, and yes... I was even once a dish washer. I may or may not have learned enough to help code some early hayed modem exploits, I may or may not have done some interesting things that may or may not have made the news...
"education" is relative, and real life experience can outweigh the text books and misinformation swiftly.
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Yes, for some subjects it pays to group people by ability level. Or, more accurately, by what is being taught and how it is being presented. This introduces time and money efficiences, which can and should be re-directed to those who need it most.
Unfortunately, most schools return those cost-savings to taxpayers rather than students. Instead of saying "ok, we can have larger class sizes and save 1 teacher headcount" they should say "ok, let's identify those students who would benefit most from smaller class sizes or additional attention and give it to them."
This would mean those who are less intellectually gifted, those less capable of learning independently, those more vulnerable to distractions (and who won't on their own make up for it by doing the work later), and others who need extra adult teaching, encouragement, or supervision can be put in smaller classes.
Those students who need teachers with special training, which means practically every student who isn't within a standard deviation of average on social development, intelligence, and other factors, would be placed with a teacher who has special training, or be given a part-time assistant teacher or tutor to fill in the gaps.
Students who are able to self-manage and aren't easily distracted may need very little adult attention, and can be put in larger classrooms. Those who are lost without direction or who are easily distracted to the detriment of learning what they need to know to be a responsible adult may need to be in average-sized or even small classes. Where it is safe to do so, some students, particularly older ones, may benefit from self-study in a quiet place like a study hall, with only a low-paid monitor to provide supervision and meet legal requirements.
All of this costs money.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
My wife and I were both homeschooled, and we plan to homeschool our children (13-month daughter, gender-as-yet-unknown on the way). We are both very appreciative of the investment our parents made in our lives, and want to pass that on to our kids. I particularly relish the fact that my longtime friend who was private-schooled and constantly ridiculed me for homeschooling is now planning his wedding with a homeschooled girl he met college. I teach computer classes full-time, and my wife is pretty sharp too. As with homeschooling, I think the success or failure of "unschooling" is determined by the commitment and ability of the parents. Homeschooling worked out great for my wife and I, but I had friends in homeschooling circles who were ill-prepared for life outside the sheltered garden. I have a friend whose mother credited him on his transcript for many units of Spanish even though he never took the language. I took it at the local community college in 11th and 12th grade. The children of the one family I know that implements unschooling are unruly and socially domineering, but I blame it on the parents, not the method. I would love to see unschooling implemented by a family I agreed with on other issues. I certainly benefited from structure, though. I had to do math, even though I didn't like it, and logic (which I believe was instilled by math lessons) is now one of my greatest professional assets. I hated writing essays, but now I make a living talking to people and writing courseware. I think that wise parents can implement a balance of structure and reinforcement of the student's passions that will serve the student well throughout their life. That is all.
I think this might be possible but would actually require structure, a great deal of discipline and a lot of work on the "teachers" part. I doubt most people are qualified or have the dedication do this effectively. So I suspect most people who try it will end up really hurting their children in the long run.
We used to live next door to some people who tried something similar to this and their kids didn't learn to read until they were 10 and even then they were likely functionally illiterate.
Additionally society and the work environment have some measure of structure and school is what introduces them to that. Without that the kids are at a disadvantage when they are flung into society and the workplace.
Summerhill was started in 1921 based on the notion of 'free schooling'
http://www.summerhillschool.co.uk/pages/index.html
I know this is slashdot so anything that is anti-authority is going to garner interest, but come on. Leaving kids to learn to read, write and do math in a vacuum? I like to be open minded, but let's apply a little bit of common sense here and realize that this idea is dumb beyond words. I can't believe a serious discussion about this is even occuring.
Sigs are awesome huh?
Yeah, I remember those times. Most of them were centered around standardized tests.
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These children will end up only having any knowledge in their parent's areas of interests, having a very poor range of knowledge, and no qualifications that will be worth anything when job seeking. Good plan.
-- Lattyware (www.lattyware.co.uk)
I have never seen a group of people that complained about school more than the Slashdot crowd. This includes when I was actually in school.
What about children E to ... V? ... ummm ... X? ...
Anyway, what about the rest of the kids?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
We should alternate between locking all the students in a library and force them to write essys about who they are, and letting them drive around Chicago in classic sports cars.
This sounds like the Montessori Method.
What we tend to forget is that if you are home schooled, you must have a parent at home. Where are most parents during the day?
With out this glorified daycare, society would be entirely different. Self reliant, virtuous, and aware of their family lineage. In other words, a bother for the kings.
Yes, probably a lot of slashdotters did just that. What we are talking about is a career of dishwashing.
Ctrl+h
The Baltimore Sun has a story about 'schooling,' which is like homeschooling except, well, without the schooling. '...schooling incorporates every facet of a child's life into the education process, allowing a child to follow his passions and learn at his own pace, year-round. And it assumes that an outing at the park â" or even hours spent playing a video game â" can be just as valuable a teaching resource as Hooked on Phonics.' If you have ever been forced to sit in a classroom where no learning was taking place, you may understand the appeal. A driving force behind the movement is parents' dissatisfaction with regular schools, and presumably with homeschooling as well. Yet few researchers are even aware of schooling and little research exists on its effectiveness. Any Slashdotters who have experience with 'schooling?'
There, that's better.
This updated passage speaks so many truths, even if it is very short.
Public schools, private schools, all it is about now is money.
I started using a pc when I was 5, an Amiga 500.
I saw it for what it was. The future.
Since then it has become 90% of my life, not the Amiga of course, but computers and technology in general.
Now I work at a multi-billion dollar corporation as the tech support, still only as a contractor because I have no schooling at all, nor certifications.
But let me tell ya, all those that work here, have bachleors or masters in computer science and the like, and not to sound full of myself, but it surprises me daily the lack of intelligence these people have, and the complete lack of knowledge they have in the area which their degree should cover.
Let's just say that when something goes wrong around here, and someone can't figure it out, they come to me.
I've also worked at 4 different corporations, all global, umpteen million/billion dollar companies, 2 of which I've walked in and reformed their processes to such a degree that it's astonishing.
Of course I'm just a contractor with no schooling, so what do I know... ;)
Btw, all of these companies had managers that knew nothing about computers... personally, I think that's the worst business practice ever.
Don't give me that bull about "they're there to manage, and keep those who know things working"...
It's stupid, they're being paid more than the people under them, who do all the work, and only relay wtf is actually going on, because the managers don't have a clue.
So yes, from my experience, it is completely possible to NOT have schooling in a serious field, and still do well.
Unlike colleges or universities that move at a slow pace, and have degrees for such things as computer science, that DON'T even teach how to change a cpu~
The internet was my resource, and passion my teacher.
Now it is through wisdom I can look at someone with a masters in any computing field, and still have the edge compared to their tunnel vision given to them by these so called schools.
I ran into a lot of hippy's on Hawai'i that said they were "home schooling" their children and every time it was clear and well understood that it meant NO SCHOOLIN'. To be clear, I am talking about the Puna district white people who were there to escape the world. - Just screwing their kids for life in the process (that would be my opinion, since only a few self taught people ever amounted to much; did I say ever? most of us are to lazy).
6.8SPC TR of 550, l xwind at 6, drift rt at 26" drops 77". AT has 503 ft-lbs at 1403 fps. FT 0.86
I agree but we want that to be a supplement to regular schooling. Outside the school learning is valuable but I don't think it should replace it.
The problem is that if you put just one disruptive & unteachable kid in a class you're wasting all of them.
Still, I suppose that's "fairer".
And the trees are all kept equal - by hatchet, axe and saw.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
We're friends with a family who "unschools". I've known people in public, private, and online schools as well as homeschool & unschooling. I really can't say that any one is definitively better than any other. It really depends upon the child and the parent. There are some kids who need to be away from their parents and some who just get lost in a traditional school and homeschooling/unschooling gives them a much better education.
For the family I know, "unschool" isn't really a good description of what they do. They don't have a structured day, but she (the mother/teacher) makes sure they are surrounded by educational toys and are constantly being challenged in some way or another. They don't just sit & watch TV or play video games all day. She spends a tremendous amount of energy researching different toys, preparing experiments, reviewing books, planning educational field trips, and reading to her children. The kids are younger (4th grade or lower) but they don't seem to be any further behind than any other kids and in some aspects they are very advanced. Our state requires testing every year to homeschool and they've always passed without problems so they are learning something.
I couldn't do it, but it works for them. I don't know if she'll continue as they get older or switch to a more traditional method. Her biggest goal is to get them accustomed to learning & researching things for themselves and (so far) it seems to be working very well.
Actually, unschooling is what happens at most of our schools already. But to then say, you know what, let's do that at home, that'll make it better for sure, seems a bit rash. I would feel much more comfortable about our nation's future if we were to get some actual schooling going on, at school or otherwise. I'm not saying it can't be fun, but if the child's "own pace" turns out to be unhealthily slow he or she may need some not so gentle nudges, because it turns out there are skills you simply need in adult life, either to survive, or to be a responsible citizen (and voter/jury member).
I can start putting my experiences from Blackrock Mountain on my resume as education credit!
Many of the comments so far imply that unschooled children will not be able to get into college, and will ultimately go on to become dish washers or rake leaves. I won't go so far as to call the comments I've read offensive, but please, don't make assumptions about things you don't have any information on. As someone who was unschooled for what would have been the high school years, I feel that, if anything, it gave me an unfair advantage once I got to college. While the rest of the population was sitting for seven or more hours a day, listening to a teacher drone on at the front of the class, I was learning about the things that interested me. Computer programming, graphic design, physics, chemistry, literature, history, art history... The list goes on. It's amazing how much you can learn in four years when you don't have someone telling you what to do.
My experience with the established education system during this time was limited to the many painfully boring hours that the state required me to waste filling out papers to avoid their otherwise compulsory education system. Some of this was (theoretically) useful, and documented that I was, in fact, educating myself, and not merely watching television all day long. Most of the paperwork, unfortunately, appeared to have no real purpose. Though the paperwork consumed a large amount of time, the number of hours I saved (and was able to devote to getting a real education) by not being in high school more than justified my decision to withdraw from public school.
Colleges are certainly willing to look at, and accept, unschooled students. It is necessary for unschooled (as well as homeschooled) students to take more standardized tests than those in conventional schools. It would not be reasonable to expect schools to accept the high school transcripts we craft for ourselves, and so we use the standardized tests to establish that we have, in fact, learned something. I took the SATs, the CATs (California Acheivement Tests), and several SAT 2 exams, among others. Several good schools accepted me based on those test results.
Another charge often leveled at unschooled and homeschooled individuals is that we don't have any opportunity to interact with others, and we do not learn to socialize. This might be the case if we were locked in a room for four years, but that's really not very realistic. I can answer this point in detail if anyone is interested. For now, suffice it to say that we do interact with other human beings, just like everyone else.
Yet another stereotype of homeschoolers and unschoolers is that we are religious fundamentalists who don't believe in evolution. While those people are out there, and some of them do homeschool their children, they are nothing more than a vocal minority. Unfortunately, they get a disproportionate amount of publicity. The vast majority of homeschoolers and unschoolers are doing it to gain a higher quality education than they believe they will receive in conventional schools, not because of any fringe ideological or religious beliefs. Yes, we do believe in science. Many of us go on to become scientists.
My experience taught my something very important about the nature of education. You cannot be taught unless you are motivated to learn. Excellent professors (and, I'd assume, excellent teachers) are able to help you gain that motivation, but learning is something you must do for yourself. I recognize that some people do receive an excellent education in high school, and I admire those who have been able to rise above the many difficulties high school presents and still gain an education.
I now run my own business, and I am still using many of the skills I learned during those years. I'm still very glad that I escaped the high school experience. I'm also happy to have gone through college. I live with my beautiful and geeky girlfriend, so hopefully that disproves the notion that the unschooled can't interact with others. I'm posting this story in the hope that it will cause s
A couple of years ago, we had a clan of wanna-be-travelers 'renting' the house across the street for three months. Their deposit check bounced and they never paid any rent and then disapeared. The four adults worked as a make-ready crew for apartment complexes, or at least claimed to. There were 5 children aged 16 to 8, the sixteen year old being pregnant and because Texas has no regulations regarding home schooling they were able to not send any of these kids to school. Instead they had the 16 year old pregnant girl baby sitting the other 4 all day long and they called this 'home schooling'. These people were creating the next generation of criminals right before our eyes and there was nothing anyone would do about it. At some point the state has to make some minimal regulations as to what a normal child of given age is supposed to know and have a way of verifying this.
By the time a student graduates high school, he or she has effectively had somewhere between 50-100 different adult supervisors, learned to work in groups, learned the importance of deadlines, had to follow rules outside of their parents, and met a variety of people. I'm sure there are plenty of home-schooled individuals out there with a high IQ, making big bucks. However, I also believe there is probably a large percentage of them who have social problems because of their lack of "social experience". There is also another group I'd like to bring into this and I'll refer to them as "testers". Testers are students who turn in very few homework assignments, but still pass the class due to their ability to soak in knowledge without homework support by scoring high on tests. In a way, testers are a hybrid of unschooling and class room students, because they spend their extra time doing something they "love", rather than doing pages and pages of math problems. I know quite a few "testers", especially in the IT/CS field because they were so addicted to their computers at a young age.
With luck, they won't. That's no way to live. Cubicles are the factory farms of the working world. I'm surprised PETA hasn't shot some video or made ads about the atrocious, inhumane, and unnatural practice of cubicle farming in our nations workplaces. Please don't mod this funny, I am not joking.
It's like the Home Schooling --except without the School.
Kids learn a lot as they pick up Skilz dodging cars and drug scouts. The streets are a harsh educator, and in this school, there is only pass or fail.
The resources and costs for Street Schooling are negligible, all it requires is the Tough Love and being dedicated to the total lack of attention and oversight that this method demands.
>>"ad space available -- low rates!!!"
Homeschooling parent here (well, my wife does most of the homeschooling, but I participate when I'm around).
I know upwards of 15 families who homeschool in my township, and attend events where I get to meet hundreds of families in Michigan who homeschool. I have not met ONE who purely unschools, and conversely, I have met not ONE who doesn't practice the principals of unschooling during the times that structured learning isn't taking place.
Unschooling isn't a "new movement" in the Homeschool community, it just hasn't had a name put to it until some recent books came out on the subject advocating using it full-time.
Literally every single encounter and event, year round, is treated as a learning opportunity. In the circles I run with, the parents are not happy with the quality of education their children receive, and as a result, they teach that life is one giant learning opportunity.
This doesn't replace drilling, memorizing and *gasp* even testing. The difference is that they can get through a drilling plan with their small group of children in two-three hours a day, spending the remaining time in practical application. "How can we use algebra in real life?" The schools don't tell kids these things and most parents aren't directly involved in their kids education to that degree.
Of course, I'm not surprised the media didn't get this one right. They, and the general public, don't understand much about people who choose to homeschool and fall into the typical traps.
We're not ALL freaks. My family is Christian, but that's not why we chose to homeschool (we chose to do so before we found Christ). And those who are, aren't *all* doing it to hide their kids from evolution, astronomy and science.
The homeschooling parents I've met are involved in some sort of co-op as we are. I teach programming to kids between ages of 7 and 15 once a month for a couple of hours (you'd be amazed how much kids *learn* from one another when they're not segregated into age groups).
We even have an atheist (oh my!), liberal family who's father is a professor at a satellite of a very well known college somewhere in the middle of Michigan. Granted, he's a minority among the four co-ops I know of in my township. Yes, we all get along.
Having been exposed to families all over the state that practice this, I've seen what happens to the homeschooled kids in "the long run". They enter college early. They don't fit in well with many of the college kids because they like learning, like classes and party a bit less.
They adjust very well to the outside world because they haven't spent the prior 14 years being "socialized" by other kids. Think about it, we teach our kids to not give in to PEER PRESSURE. The expectation is that in a normal High School setting, your peers are going to be trying to get you to do something bad.
In mainstream schools, teachers are asked to teach both technical subjects and moral subjects. Because morality and maturity are trained or grown in children, and it's such a *touchy* subject, these lessons are boiled down to catch phrases: "Just say No!" and "Don't give in to peer pressure." Meanwhile we want our kids grow up into adults who aren't afraid of their shadow, who are willing to stand up for what is right, who aren't afraid to take risks or to be creative. I DON'T blame the schools or teachers. The same result can be done by parents who treat the school as "partner" in their child's upbringing and education, but the mainstream schooling parents that my children hang out with get about as far as "have you done your homework?" in their child's education.
Before the "Department of Education" came around America had the BEST education system in the world and produced some of the smartest people. Now America is rated as the 2nd WROST in the world!
Let's take a look at a few of the reasons why this could be. Now there are many reasons and I am not going to go to deep, you will have to use your own brain and cognitive abilities and think about it yourself.
* Small class size
* Small teacher to student ratio (one teacher for a small number of students)
* Younger children and older children learned together, this enabled the younger more inquisitive kids to pickup and start working on more advanced items and for others to expose them to harder work.
* Once the basics were taught you moved onto specializing in an area of interest and often apprenticed under a master of that field.
You don't learn to captain a ship in a class room, you learn on a ship. Do we still need captains, yes.
You don't learn leadership in a class room, you learn in the world. (That scary place outside your momsâ(TM) basement)
You learn the basics of the world (reading, writing, logic, math and so forth) and more specialized skills (geography, cartography, linguistic skills and so forth) from a master and in the world not a class room.
For those that say the parent must be smart and know the material I say false. My teachers were morons (public school in a very bad/poor neighborhood) and lived out of the teachers guide, they didn't know the material and were pretty stupid.
A degree does not make you smart; itâ(TM)s a piece of paper and look how the kids with them now fairâ¦
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montessori_method
its a 100 year old theory, and is in widespread use
its not new, its not weird, its just an education theory with pluses and minuses, like any other
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
What everyone forgets (because we all forget about childhood unless we take childhood development courses or something), is that children WANT to learn. This is especially true of younger children; the younger they are, the more they want to learn. I can't say for sure how this applies to unschooling (I only took a few undergrad courses, and that is PhD material), but keep in mind that any system which encourages this natural learning tendency (as opposed to out current factory model of schooling, which essentially discourages it) is going to work incredibly well because it just feeds a natural hunger.
About half way through 5th grade my parents finally got tired of the local school system (in southern California) and withdrew me.
Now, before you picture a couple of hick religies shoutin up the school board over sex ed... both my parents are college educated. Three out of four of my grandparents were college educated, and all four were professional educators (1 grade school teacher, 2 high school teachers, and 1 school principle). My father's an engineer, my mother an artist.
My parents briefly toyed with homeschooling but frankly the local homeschoolers tended to be religious (my parents are quasi-religious at most, I had proclaimed my atheism by about age 8) and that wasn't the best scene.
My parents toyed with correspondence schools, but any of you who have encountered correspondence education know there are issues with that.
Finally, they settled for a lot of far-reaching Socratic discussions, buying any sort of science or technology related toys they could afford (I had a Sinclare, Ohio Scientific, TI99-4A, SX-64, PC clone, Atari 800xl, Amiga 1000, and probably a few I've forgotten before I was 12) encouraging me to make the local library my second home.
When I was 14 I started charging for software development.
At 16 I was learning C++ and object oriented programming, to expand my market.
At 17? 18? I found Linux... MCC distribution. That would've been about 1992/1993. That was a real expansion.
At 19 I went to work full time for a software development company and stopped consulting/freelancing for a spell. I also bought a house.
At 22 I had migrated to running the technical side of a regional ISP.
At 27 I went to another local software company, this time as "Director of Engineering".
I'm now in my early 30s and am managing development of a handful of products for a publicly traded software house, making 6 figures. The house is paid off.
No college.
No high school.
Didn't finish grade school.
Biggest problem: early on, job applications would ask for the name of my highschool and I had to lie. Nowadays, I just ignore the education history and count on 17 years of job experience.
I don't think I'm exceptionally intelligent or capable. I think the public education system we have today is exceptionally good at destroying innate ability. That opinion is based on the number of seemingly intelligent and undeniably "well educated" people I meet who can't seem to do anything useful. But maybe I'm biased.
this is a catastrophically bad idea, just like homeschooling, and for the same reasons.
The most important stuff you learn in school isn't what you learn from books, or the teacher, or DURING class... it's the social interaction. It's getting your ass kicked on the playground, it's learning how to cheat at dodgeball, it's stealing from a friend's locker. These are the things that you are going to need to know to be successful in the real world. AP placement scores aside, homeschooled kids consistently misunderestimate the value of sleaze and dishonesty, and it hurts them.
In Soviet Russia jokes are formulaic and decidedly non-humorous.
And usually...turns out badly.
Looking back the only real advantage of school was learning to read, basic maths but not much else other then social interaction. I learned just about everything else much more out of a class enviroment, taking things apart and building things with lego, like a JCB digger, helped more with the profession of fixing laptops and other equipment and leading onto hacking things together like homebrew projectors. I never learned much in school in electronics class other then making a few very basic things.. I would have found the same things at home with a basic breadboard, leds and wires but I guess they would have to be around the house. I think it's a better idea which allows the child to foster creativity rather then ROT learning but the things the child wants to learn have to be accessible, The advantage is the things required in electronics were around to spark interest while at home I wouldn't even see electronic equipment, other then taking apart a few things like the parents VCR, so items need to be accessible to the child. If anything School ruined my interest of mathematics it was only when I later started to look for myself that I found such subjects fun again like reading "The Birth of Numbers" and other books. Having enough support and things to play with at home, for me, makes me wonder if I wasted the time at school getting bored of the same thing all the time when I could have been at home tinkering and reading what I can. The Internet, also slashdot, exposure from an early age made school so boring that I wondered why your forced to go through school and learn by sucking through a straw when you can take knowledge by the fire hose. The only issue I see is degrees you would need school education for grades.. but just how relevant are degrees now days? with information doubling soon at a stupid rate a lot of courses will be outdated by the time they reach print in a university. At least self taught people have the passion and drive to continue learning rather then the learn what you need, get a peice of paper and stop learning approach; they would soon find themselves outdated. I don't know, I think visual learning, tinkering and hands on approaches far outweigh the benefits of rot learning, considering that soon information in your field will be impossible to just "ROT learn" but more knowing how to index and search for things when you need it. Is it me or do self taught people learn more by building maps of the tasks at hand rather then memorise just a set of needless bits of information spoon fed from school.
I have some first hand anecdotal evidence to present to the slashdot community.
From 5th-8th grade I was homeschooled (by choice) which in essence meant I read text books (A Becca publishing), as well as books outside of traditional text books, attended art classes, participated in tennis lessons, learned to play the trumpet, and picked up paintballing as well as maintened my own N64 fan website and learned the basics of HTML and web development.
I went back to the public school system for my high school years. At the time I had no interest in doing so, but I see the benefit it provided me now. For one, I got into college, learned to communicate with people "not like me", and even attempted, but failed (at the time) picking up girls.
My neighbors on the other hand, had 3 kids around my age and after seeing me "homeschooling" they decided it would be fun to do the same thing. Well, they didn't exactly push their kids to do anything beyond playing video games all day. I guess you could say they fit the definition of "unschooling", that is they did nothing to further their education and instead wasted away their time doing nothing "productive". They never ordered text books, or participated in any sort of standardized testing. After they were "done" with school, they didn't attempt to go to any post secondary school, and continue (to this day) to live at their parent's house.
Their oldest son (25) got engaged at 19, got a job working at a TV repair shop, and has no interest in furthering his education. He is currently living with Mommy & Daddy, along with his wife. The other two sons, have not attended college, and also still live at home.
By definition both me and my neighbors were home schooled, but I think I used home schooling as a means to learn outside the box, which to this day benefits me greatly. Whereas my neighbors used homeschooling to take their kids out of the system.
Not that this is any indication of homeschooling successes (or failures) but I am currently employed being paid well above average for my peer group. My neighbors, not so much.
One of my favorite quotes is by Mark Twain: "I never let my schooling get in the way of my education". I truly believe this, and try to follow it every day. Even though I also recognize the need to go "through the motions" of school, or the "normal" way to learn. However I don't let it stop my passions or what I believe in. I think homeschooling works on a case-by-case basis but I honestly think anyone who chooses to homeschool their kids without the intention of teaching them anything is doing them a huge disservice that will severely limit their future potential as in seen by my neighbor.
So I guess you could say, homeschooling works for some people, but horribly fails others. Next topic?
If I can not smoke in heaven, then I shall not go. -- Mark Twain
I was into unschooling when it was still underground.
Seriously, I homeschooled, but not in any structured way. I often joke that instead of going to highschool, I mostly went fishing instead. I had a standardized curriculum with quarterly tests and as long as I was making progress through it my parents didn't care what else I did. I would typically do a week's worth of class in one day and spend the rest building dirt jumps in the woods, building model airplanes, modifying my go-kart, and starting and failing several small business enterprises (it's amazingly difficult to make money as a 15 year old).
I ended up getting a B.S. in Physics and a M.S. in Materials Science. Currently working on my Ph.D and I don't think unschooling hurt me one bit. If I had gone to highschool, I would probably be in jail or a mental institution. Public schools are nothing but indoctrination camps and would be recognized for the horror they are if adults were forced to do the same thing.
The problem with this approach is that children will just do what they want to do all the time, and neglect other things either because they can't see any application for it in their present life, or just plain don't enjoy it. It's nice when education can be coupled with enjoyment, but do you really want a generation of kids that don't learn basic life skills because they don't feel like it? There's the problem though. If they neglect things which typically are not popular (like, for example, mathematics) it can hurt them later on if what they like to do benefits by knowing mathematics, but is not absolutely required. Also, a lack of structure can lead to laziness. The problem with home schooling (which is a step more structured than what is being suggested here) typically is that it lacks structure, so it's easy to slack off and get nothing done. Most people given the choice, follow the path of least resistance. Additionally, home schooling and subsequently, "unschooling", do not allow good access to teachers who are well educated in their fields. There is only so much one person can know before you have to go to someone specialized to make sure you have your facts straight.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
How is this philosophically different from Dewey and Montessori? Students direct their own learning (or lack of learning) and adults serve as guides and help direct kids to resources that they need to advance knowledge. Actually, it's not even necessary for the guides to be adults. Anyone who is more knowledgeable and able to identify appropriate resources or expertise is fine. Do we really need a jargon for this?
I teach high school, and have always been a big fan of Dewey's concept of school. Teachers of any particular subject can be specialists, but should be conversant with the other things that go in in the school. Or at least have a respect for the other things. One major problem I have with schools (and maybe people in general) is that people are almost afraid of knowing what goes on in the other departments or even in the next room. It's hard to be a collaborative minded teacher when everyone else is engaged in individual play.
"Unschooling" is also a very luxurious option, it seems. You need parents with enough unscheduled time to be with their kids in the world they want to learn from. Parents who work several jobs to make ends meet just can't do this. Or if you live in a boring area (they exist), you might learn about life in your area but not about the rest of the world. In simpler times, that might have been enough for your life but I don't know that it is anymore. My sister is pretty much "unschooling" her daughter. I think they're lucky in that my niece is extremely intelligent. But she's not especially considerate or nice, and can't admit when she's wrong. I worry that she's going to have exactly the same personality as my sister, who also cannot do this.
When the axe came to the forest, the trees said, "Look out - the handle was once one of us."
"Do we really need school? I don't mean education, just forced schooling: six classes a day, five days a week, nine months a year, for twelve years. Is this deadly routine really necessary? And if so, for what? Don't hide behind reading, writing, and arithmetic as a rationale, because 2 million happy homeschoolers have surely put that banal justification to rest. Even if they hadn't, a considerable number of well-known Americans never went through the twelve-year wringer our kids currently go through, and they turned out all right. George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln? Someone taught them, to be sure, but they were not products of a school system, and not one of them was ever "graduated" from a secondary school. Throughout most of American history, kids generally didn't go to high school, yet the unschooled rose to be admirals, like Farragut; inventors, like Edison; captains of industry like Carnegie and Rockefeller; writers, like Melville and Twain and Conrad; and even scholars, like Margaret Mead. In fact, until pretty recently people who reached the age of thirteen weren't looked upon as children at all. Ariel Durant, who co-wrote an enormous, and very good, multivolume history of the world with her husband, Will, was happily married at fifteen, and who could reasonably claim that Ariel Durant was an uneducated person? Unschooled, perhaps, but not uneducated." http://www.spinninglobe.net/againstschool.htm
allowing a child to follow his passions
So this means that when boys hit puberty they will be allowed to spend most of their day, ummm, "entertaining" themselves?
It was a fantastic experience. I don't think there was a name for it when we started--I've been using the name retroactively since I've learned about it because it describes what I grew up with better than anything I could come up with.
When my mother decided that we needed to know US geography, my mother, my sister, my brother and I got in our beat-up minivan and drove the US for two months, camping and eating PB&J out of a cooler. I may not know the capitol of New Mexico, but I know the climate, and the geography, and what the cities are like, and what the people look like. If I need statistics or facts, I can look them up. Looking things up was a bit part of unschooling--we spent hours every week in the library, learning how to use the reference section, learning how to find information, and how to compare resources.
Math was the hardest part to learn--my parents were not math people, and they ran out of things to teach me at about algebra. But I was interested, and so they found a local engineer who agreed to tutor me before work in exchange for cutting his grass every week. He taught me out of the same textbook I used later in college, and he chose harder practice problems than my professor did.
By state law we were required to take standardized testing every other year, and we actually did it every year--all of my siblings scored above the 60th percentile in everything, and above the 90th percentile in most things.
It had down-sides, of course. When I went away to college, I didn't know how to take notes or format papers, and sitting through a two hour lecture was painfully boring and unproductive--I'd learn more by reading the textbook in class than I would listening. The upside was that I knew how to learn things, and how to motivate myself to get things accomplished. My grades were not great--that's a problem with unschoolers, because you haven't been taught to be motivated by letter grades. You learn things to learn them, and if you feel like you've learned something, jumping through hoops to please a professor doesn't seem like a useful way to spend your time. I got an A in any class I cared about, and a B- in any class I didn't--that was my threshold for 'passing'.
Unstopping can be very productive, and is a valid way to learn things, if it's 'taught' by someone who is curious themselves and is willing to try things. You have to grow up, I think, in a household that values education and learning for it to work, but I don't feel at all like it has held me back.
You have to account for both the child's ability and the child's own motivation. If we take this "unschooling" as a serious suggestion, it will surely only work for children who are both very intelligent and very motivated. Even then, some gruntwork is inescapable. Multiplication tables, foreign language vocabulary, etc - such things require memorization.
For the vast majority of children, unschooling will lead to uneducated adults. Just what we need more of...
The truth is, the people putting "unschooling" forward are dissatisfied with public schools - and unwilling to invest the massive effort required by effective home schooling. They then want to pretend that their children will magically absorb knowledge...
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Both 'unschooling' and home schooling are, at their hearts, reactions to a central problem w/the dominant educational problem of today. As I was told by a Rabbi, the main thing which would help the Philadelphia School District would be to roll back the calendar 50 or so years. Or, to put it another way, the dominant model of education today is predicated on producing two classes of kids: college-bound, + factory workers. The latter are almost unneeded today, and they typically outnumber the former, so you wind up w/schools that produce kids w/no viable means of support.
Vocational-technical education, ironically enough, could be incredibly useful as a model today, even as more and more vo-tech schools are being closed or converted into comprehensive high schools. While there is little use for 1950s-style factory workers today, and only a limited need for professionals, there will *always* be a need for plumbers, carpenters, electricians, etc. None of these jobs requires a college education, all pay well, and all are extremely difficult to offshore. An upgraded model of vo-tech education could certainly include technical fields as well- again, jobs for the 21st century economy, not the 1950s one.
-Z
This discussion is a waste of time. "Unschooling", or the practice of educating children starting from birth without the overbearing presence of an adult or non-effective learning materials or homework is already a 100+ year old practice called MONTESSORI.
I think the main problem with the idea of "unschooling" is that you can only get so far without some sort of regimented learning. Think of it this way, there's a lot of "unnatural" ideas out there that are very valuable to know and they have only come about because they have been built up over hundreds or even thousands of years of thinking and experimentation. Sure you can teach some of these concepts as part of the normal, "How does this work, daddy?" but a lot of ideas pretty much require you to have regular, involved, formal training over the years before you can have the framework to understand the more complex concepts.
I'm a proponent of a more mixed teaching style, some formal schooling and some "unschooling". Kids should have some degree of structured learning and they should also be allowed time to explore and find things they want to know more about on their own. I remember all the time I spent as a kid with Erector sets, Capsela, electronic kits, and chemistry kits. I learned a lot of things on my own using those tools and the local public library.
The other thing to note is that just because you can be a parent that doesn't mean you are a good teacher. Most teachers go through a ton of training on learning styles, how to present information, and how to guide students from simple ideas to more complex ones. They also are trained in the subject matter whereas a parent might not know, or be able to comprehend, the concepts that a child needs to learn about a subject. Yes, there are parents who are good at teaching and teachers who shouldn't be educating students but overall most students are better off learning some things from professionals.
Sapere aude!
It's easy to test this theory of education. Your local prison is full of people who were "unschooled" as children. Not every child is curious. Not every one seeks useful knowledge.
See works by B.F. Skinner, specifically Walden Two.
In think it is a bad idea. The essence of schooling is to enable a child to focus attention on one topic for some uninterrupted period of time. A child by temperament does not have the requisite will power. By going to a structured school (or homeschooling where a structure is imposed) willpower is trained i.e. "discipline" is taught. Granted, current day schools have taken it to ridiculous levels by forcing children to be cooped up for an entire day making no allowance for their natural energy and inability to focus for a long period of time. But this is an error in implementation which needs to be fixed and not an error in method. The school that i went to was from 11:30 AM to 4:30 PM, only 5 hrs; with one break of 30 mins ! It was great, there was enough time to sleep, play, socialize, extra-curricular activities and still attend school. What needs to be done is cut down the actual number of school hours and teach using shorter hours but consistently.
Knowledge has a series of dependencies. You can't really do quantum mechanics w/o calculus and other higher math, and you can't do higher math w/o algebra, and so on. The problem is that uploading, and validating these dependencies can take many years. In theory conventional education is like the Linux Standard Base, a set of common packages which minimize the amount of dependencies that have to be loaded. Thus, in theory, a high school graduate should be able to handle most forms of non specialized knowledge. College majors and prerequisites are similar in this regard.
Autodidacts are like folks who load every program they use without a package manager. A difficult task which not everybody can do. Also such systems are prone to crashes (massive holes in experience/training)
The problem w/ much of mainstream education is that the 'IT department' is doing things by rote and doesn't really understand packages.
What would be interesting is an educational overlay on wikipedia or the equivalent which would explicitly identify and specify these dependencies.
First of all do not make the mistake that the "Homeschool Movement" is a homogeneous "one technique fits all" group. There are many styles of Homeschooling. We use a blended style of some time spent with an "expert" (art class) and some unstructured time (wandering a museum). "Unschooling" has been around for a while and its appeal for this Electrical Engineer (Rambling Wreck, class of '80 - Thank You!) is the ability for us to implement the learning style that we developed in college. We learned basics and then discovered the rest...more of a ongoing learning technique as opposed to cramming their heads with facts relevant to topic A and then ringing a bell and moving on to topic B. Teach them to read, do basic math and help them along the way and they will accomplish much. Something about "filling a bucket vs lighting a fire" (attributed to William Butler Yeats). If you prefer the "fill the bucket" of institutionalized government education, then more power to you. My spouse makes a decent living tutoring your kind and I would hate to see your species become extinct! Seriously, homeschooling has be great for us (judging by the SAT scores), but YMMV. As Un-schooling is not for everyone, neither is Homeschooling, nor public, nor... Although this is my first post, this IS SLASHDOT...let the fun begin! (Flames cheerfully ignored!)
Schools are, indeed, a mess largely because of those who don't want to study, and go to school every day anyway - but to chat, meet friends, pick fights, and party. While I see the benefits of forcing everyone to go to school, I could also see the benefits of a system where there are simply a bunch of tests people can take whenever they want to prove what they know or don't, and let everyone study any way they please, to stop the nonsense of everyone pretending to study, pretending to teach, and most importantly, pretending to be learned because they completed some period sitting in class.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
Call me old-fashioned, but I don't like this one bit.
This sound like an excellent way to raise children who are spoiled brats with zero social skills and even weirder ideas than usual about their self-worth and place in society. With no structure in their life how are they supposed to know how to attend class on time when they go to university?
Formal education plus home/parental enrichment is the way to go, IMNSHO. Once you have that structure, you can go your own way. But you need that structure first.
...laura
Most of the time, stereotypes suck, but virtually all home-school parents fall into one of two categories (or both). They're either religious fundamentalists or they're morons and it seems to me that there are more of the latter than the former. So many people in this country have bought into the meme that public schools suck that they just think that they can, naturally, do a better job. While I agree that there are plenty of places in this country where the school systems need to be improved, the truth is that theyâ(TM)re nowhere near as bad as people make them out to be.
The simple fact is that most states (such as NY, IL, and most of the northeast) require full-time teachers to earn masters degrees in order to get a license to teach in public schools. In NY they also, slowly, increase their pay rate if theyâ(TM)re willing to continue taking advanced classes throughout their careers. Since, in most cases, they do this as a career dealing with hundreds or thousands of students over the course of their careers they get massive amounts of experience compared to a parent teaching a few kids. Also, teachers often stick to one grade level or shift within a limited range of grades. This means that a kid going through the system is more likely to encounter teachers that are specialized in dealing with kids their age/grade.
Beyond the experience of the teachers, you have obscene numbers of man-hours that have gone into designing the curriculums that public schools implement. There is much more to these curriculums and teaching systems than just the textbooks that a home-schooling parent may be able to purchase. Often, some of those advanced classes that teachers go to train them in the accompanying teaching method designed with the textbook in mind. These teaching systems (more common in the lower elementary school grades) are designed by experts in the field of education and use decades of practical results to justify their formulation.
You may be wondering why I know so much about this topic. My mom has been an early elementary school teacher since before I was born. For the last decade, or so, sheâ(TM)s been teaching second grade. Iâ(TM)ve seen what she goes through to succeed at her job, the hours of planning and paperwork before and after classes; the college classes in her spare time; the set-up and organization of her classroom; etc. Most of this stuff is never seen by the students or the parents, certainly not by the whiners that complain about how teachers are lazy and overpaid. Iâ(TM)m not saying that all teachers put this much effort into it, but itâ(TM)s a lot more common that most people think.
All this has additional meaning for me when I hear people talk about home-schooling because of the stories sheâ(TM)s relayed to me about her interactions with such parents. Usually, they go like this:
Rules of Conduct:
#1 - The DM is always right.
#2 - If the DM is wrong, see rule #1
This is exactly how it is done in all hunter gather and agricultural societies. It doesn't however work very well with societies that are advanced into the bronze age and beyond. So I guess it is fine for the USA which seems to be hell bent on rejoining the cadre of 'Developing Nations'.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
At the end of the article, it says that one of the unschoolers figured out how to read by herself. That's nothing special. I figured out how to read before I went to kindergarten, and the same thing happened to my smart friends whose parents read to them.
Anyway, reading between the lines, my BS alert is going off. Unschooling sounds a lot more like a semantics game to justify playing all day. I see it as an overreaction to putting too much structure into childrens' lives.
No, I will not work for your startup
says that not every human (child, adult, whatever) learns the same way. What works well for one person may not work well for another. Some people learn by reading, some by doing, others by doing it wrong a thousand times. Go figure.
See my blog at Who's Who
Public schooling has an externally imposed structure. Homeschooling still demands structure but since it isn't imposed externally it tends to encourage more self-discipline. I'm not just theorizing here, I have experienced these effect. As a homeschooled child, the transition to college was exceptionally easy compared to what I saw in my public schooled peers.
this will be a boon to the dangerously undeserved industries of burger flipping, ditch digging, and lawn mowing.
"Don't be a martyr -- BE THE ONE WHO GOT AWAY!"
Unschooler seven years, of Elijah, age seven. I've heard this particular argument a lot, funny thing is, I don't remember school being all that much of a social experience. In fact, I recall not being allowed to speak to other students at all for most of the day. . . Anyhow, (better) social experiences can be had elsewhere. We use the Boys and Girls club personally, but I can imagine that the YMCA, the local corner karate class, or the skate park down the street would be equally effective in instructing our youth in the swearing and witty comebacks required for a healthy social existance.
only one everything
I use to run the tutoring department at College and remember getting "homeschooled" kids who knew very little. Even worse, most of these were raised by Christian Fundamentalists and had an extremely narrow view of the world. "President Franklin Roosevelt? Wasn't he a communist? He lead the war effort in World War II? Didn't know that." I've had kids who couldn't do basic Math because the parents weren't that good at it. We also had kids who never read books like Fahrenheit 491 because it contained cussing and people smoked in it.
If these were the kids with the curriculum goals of Home School, I can imagine what type of people I get from the Unschooled set.
Yet, when my oldest son was ready for High School. We home schooled him. In fact, we pretty much Unschooled him. Why, because he has Asperger's Syndrome and couldn't figure out what to do in High School. His I.Q. is officially "over 140" which is about as high as it now gets measured. He took the SAT in 7th grade and got a 1250. He read almost every book we have in our house including the entire encyclopedia. He studied Calculus on his own for fun, and was already getting several science journals. In the 9th grade, he already knew more academically than most college graduates. What he didn't have was any social skills.
So, we spent the next three years having him do various tasks around the house, shopping, dealing with returning items from the store, joining social groups such as Boy Scouts, volunteering, and maybe a smattering of academics. By the time we finished, he could actually look people in the eye, smile, not get overly upset when anything went wrong, etc. In short, unschooling him was the best thing we could have done. It allowed him to advance in life, make friends, and learn to live in this world.
For the 12th grade, he took the GED and we signed him up for Community College just so he could get back into the academic swing of things before heading off to college.
However, my son is probably one in a million. Unschooling was extremely hard work too. I probably spent more time planning his "unschooled" curriculum than if I merely taught him the three "R"s. I can easily see this becoming shluffing off. You have your kid do a few math problems, learn to balance a checkbook, and read the newspaper, but never tackling harder literature works or even doing the more advanced non-Calculus mathematics.
The "Home school" kids fell into a wide spectrum, and I saw most of the lower ranked ones in my tutoring center. The ones with the Dad who's a nuclear engineer and the mom as the Shakespearian scholar I never saw, but those are probably quite rare. If you can pull it off, home schooling and unschooling might really be great ideas. However, if you aren't willing to put in the time and energy, it can be an absolute disaster.
I am very suspicious of much of the Home School and Unschool movement because much of it isn't simply "My schools aren't teaching my kids enough", but "My school is teaching my kids things I think they shouldn't know", and that's a big problem.
No, the purpose of the educational system in the U.S. is to create dumbed down people that will vote for Democrats that promise to "give them more stuff"!
My parents pulled me out of public school after the third grade. It stemmed from my utter frustration with the schooling system. For example we had timed math tests of 100 operations, you started with addition, 5 days in a row of getting all 100 correct you moved on to subtraction, 5 more perfect moved you on to multiplication, finally you moved on to division. If you got one wrong you had to start over with that section again. After not missing an answer until my fourth day of division I got one answer wrong and the teacher made me start back over from the beginning of addition. Needless to say I was rather upset and felt it was unfair I had to start over from the very beginning, my parents went in to complain and the teacher told them that I had gotten to far ahead of the rest of the class so and she didn't want to have to find me something else to do. My parents complained to the principal and he said that the teacher knew what was best and that he wouldn't interfere. It upset my parents enough they decided to take me out of public school.
Now they didn't call it "unschooling" but for the most part it was, the only lessons I really remember are a bit of spelling and grammar one summer. I had a natural interest in reading and science so it was easy to build in learning lessons on those fronts. I went back to public school for highschool as my mom no longer felt qualified to teach me adequately. For the most part I was worlds ahead of my peers, and we had more trouble proving that to the school system then anything else. Even in my "weak" subjects that I never had taken lessons in, geography and history as examples, I was well above average for my grade. Where I actually learned this things I don't know, maybe I picked it up through reading, I did a lot of reading, or maybe my mom worked them in without me realizing somehow.
I still hated the school system and I still ran into idiotic policies and teaching practices. But my time away from "schooling" had given me enough maturity to know that it was something you had to deal with as a means to end, namely getting into college. Had my parents not taken me out I imagine I would have become so frustrated with the system that I would have stopped trying.
As an unschooler I feel hundreds of times more motivated than before when I was in public education. I can honestly say I feel that I have learned tons of times more within the past year compared to the 10 years when I wasn't doing my own thing. Right now I'm "studying" Android and iPhone development as well as business tactics. It makes me laugh when kids are texting me during school saying how boring physics is for them. It was fun for me when I learned it via MIT's OpenCourse Ware 6 months ago.
comforting at least being the antisocial person i am i disliking large groups it does.
Conversely, the purpose is to create automatons who will follow the "guidance" of their leaders in their Churches and in the Republican Party no matter how much it contradicts with their own personal interests.
Don't make this a partisan issue. A complacent public accustomed to monotony benefits all those with power, independent of political affiliation. It's about serving the wealthy.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Thats health education.
All misspellings and grammatical errors in the above post are intentional and part of my artistic expression.
I do have a few observations on the subject. My wife and I became disillusioned with public school after seeing the results our son was coming home with. We did not have the money for private education so we had to figure out something on our own. We called it homeschooling. We discovered that there are 2 groups. The first wants more structure in a child's life than school offers. These people tend to be religious types. The other group wants less structure. These tend to be the unschoolers. In the end, it does not seem to matter. Both groups get involved with the kids. The kids benefit. When our friends heard we were homeschooling, a few things happened: 1. Is it legal? 2. You don't have a credential? How could you possibly be qualified? 3. How do you tolerate being with your kids all day? 4. My kids don't listen to me. You must be a saint. 5. What about the "socialization?" 6. And (mostly from teachers) If I had to raise my kids again, I would definitely homeschool. Fifteen years later, we have our 2 sons (18 and 20): 1. Each of them has 2 black belts (Iaido and Jujutsu) 2. Both of them are Eagle Scouts 3. One of them started college at 15. The other started college at 13. 4. Both of them are straight 'A' students. 5. Both of them are employed. 6. I still enjoy talking around the table. They bring their friends over and we enjoy them too. We did make compromises. Homeschooling does take time. My software business would be more successful if I had devoted the same time to it. But I don't regret a single minute I spent with my sons. I could not be prouder of the results.
I think the main problem with the idea of "unschooling" is that you can only get so far without some sort of regimented learning.
Well, sort of. It depends on the subject. Some kids can get very far with this method in many subjects (most obviously, reading, of course, but also -- depending on the kid -- math and history and even science). But it is the rare kid who can get very far in all subjects this way.
Think of it this way, there's a lot of "unnatural" ideas out there that are very valuable to know and they have only come about because they have been built up over hundreds or even thousands of years of thinking and experimentation. Sure you can teach some of these concepts as part of the normal, "How does this work, daddy?" but a lot of ideas pretty much require you to have regular, involved, formal training over the years before you can have the framework to understand the more complex concepts.
I can't think of a single idea in public K-12 school that someone needs such "regular, involved, formal training" for understanding, except for maybe calculus and other advanced maths. So that's just wrong.
You're right, of course, that we have built up our knowledge over thousands of years, and we can't figure out things entirely on our own, but we have this thing called "the Internet" and "libraries." Unschooling is not "try to figure it out without any help," it is about having undirected learning. You don't eschew a book to help you learn how photosynthesis works, you just don't set out to learn about photosynthesis until the kid is interested in learning how plants grow, and you let his questions direct the learning.
The other thing to note is that just because you can be a parent that doesn't mean you are a good teacher.
If you are a good parent, you are a good teacher. It's that simple. Parenting IS teaching, and there's no significant difference between teaching good manners and teaching the alphabet.
Most teachers go through a ton of training on learning styles, how to present information, and how to guide students from simple ideas to more complex ones.
And if you are a good parent, you usually intuitively know how your child learns; if you have trouble figuring it out, you can always ask for help.
They also are trained in the subject matter whereas a parent might not know, or be able to comprehend, the concepts that a child needs to learn about a subject.
For K-12, mostly -- and K-8 entirely -- this is not a big deal, at all. There's nothing going on in eighth grade an average adult can't understand with a little bit of work. Further, there's a wealth of resources for homeschoolers out there, including joint instruction: for example, near me there's a homeschool co-op where the parents teach groups of homeschooled children, and the parents often actually are experts in the various fields of instruction.
Yes, there are parents who are good at teaching and teachers who shouldn't be educating students but overall most students are better off learning some things from professionals.
There is absolutely no data backing up your claim, either. In fact, the data we do have shows the opposite: across the board, kids taught at home do better than kids taught by professional teachers.
He ran the ultimate 'no pressure" school for kids who didn't fit into any other school, and has examples of kids who were illiterate at age 15, but had learned how to manage themselves as an adult and had spent a lot of time doing crafts. At age 15, they got serious, and in 2 years learned enough to get into British Universities in the 1950s.
In adult literacy programs world-wide, it takes 90 hours in the classroom before the student is able to complete their education on their own. At least some of those people make it through to college.
The modern curriculum is based on 18th century assumptions: take the kid early, because that was before they were old enough to work. Teach the same thing in more depth every year, because they could go to work at any time. From this, we assume that the knowledge gained in first grade is required for 2nd grade, despite all of the evidence that you could skip first grade and finish 2nd grade just fine, as it is the maturity of the brain that controls rate of learning.
Instead, spend the first 6 or so years building good brains: lots of languages (speaking multiple languages is proven to increase academic performance independent of class or income effects), lots of interesting videos, reading and writing and arithmetic as they are interested.
Then, lots of projects for another 4 years. More reading, historical novels and biographies to provide background. Writing and math as needed for the projects.
Finally, at age 16, they are mature humans and can start serious academic work. 2 or 3 years later, they would beat the hell out of the average public school product in every category of knowledge and imagination.
As a software engineer, I've learned different technologies along the way as I needed them, sometimes taking a class, usually just diving into samples and figuring it out. These include InstallScript, XSL, Java, JavaScript, JSF, Flex, and a pile of markup languages and other necessities. How many of you software folks out there have needed to learn a new language or technology for work? Did you take 2 years off and go back to school? I doubt it. When I've needed to know or understand something new it's always been easier for me to learn than when someone else thought I needed to know it. That's the core idea of Homeschooling, that when they need or want to learn something kids will dive into it and make it happen. Both my kids went into kindergarten excited about learning, and had their enthusiasm beat down in different ways mostly by the institutional one size fits all treatment. Now we homeschool, and though not "radical unschoolers" we're certainly somewhere on the unschool spectrum. It's brought back their enthusiasm. In fact my eleven year old expects a "sciencey fact" every night. We've been over everything from dark matter to plate tectonics to the importance of the magnetosphere. My nine year old got excited about a Nova Science now episode and went on at length telling me about how scientists hope to be able to use algae to create biofuel. All I can say is, its working for us, but it's not just about letting them wander aimlessly, sometimes its about putting things in their path and seeing what excites them.
like a 3rd world country, but without the child labor
Dear Sir, When I was at school, I was beaten regularly every thirty minutes, and it never did me any harm -except for psychological maladjustment and blurred vision. Yours truly, Flight Lieutenant Ken Frankenstein (Mrs).
I was not homeschooled, per se, but I taught myself from age 10 on to program, by myself, without any help from my parents, outside of school, and started by copying BASIC programs out of COMPUTE! magazine. By end of high school I had taught myself BASIC, 6502 Assembler, and Pascal. I am now a professional software developer on my 2nd business.
Required reading for anyone who considers critiquing homeschooling would be John Taylor Gatto's "Dumbing us down." Gatto is an award-winning New York school teacher who spoke publicly and wrote many essays about why our current school system is not good for children, or education at all. A great, quick, read and it spoke volumes about my own experience with public and private school as a child.
Finally, we homeschool our three children (8, 5, and 3 years old.) For those who think homeschooled kids will become lazy, jobless, drains on society obviously have some vein of laziness in themselves, or no work ethic at all.
It's easy to call names, or discredit us, and harder to consider your own education and how much better it could have been if you weren't served 50-minutes of American History, then 50 minutes of being half-naked in a room with red balls flying at you, then 50 minutes speaking Spanish. Nowhere in life does that happen, so why do we teach our kids like that?
The whole point of homeschooling is to:
From as early as possible we communicate with our kids that:
Obviously, as a parent, my job is present structure and facilitate the learning. Making pancakes? Great, a good time to explain fractions (1/2 cup, tablespoon, teaspoon). Interested in video games? Great, let's animate something in Flash.
We read to our kids every day. We read things all of the time in front of them. You think with that kind of example, kids won't learn to read?
And some kids take longer. I've known kids who were 12 years old who weren't ready to read. When they made the decision to read, it happened within 6 months. Are they going to suffer as a result? I doubt it.
Just plug "Homeschooled Children prepared studies" in your local search engine to find plenty of studies which show that homeschooled kids tend to be well prepared for college, and as a group, tend to go to college more.
Yes, if you're a deadbeat alcoholic Dad working at Wendy's and let your kids run around "unschooled", then no, homeschooling is not the answer, and sending your kids off to school to be babysat at the local school for 6 hours a day works great. But most homeschooled parents take the commitment very seriously, and guide their children lovingly into a rich, knowledgeable future.
"The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom." - H. L. Mencken
This is quite possibly the most ignorant group of knee-jerk response i have seen in years of reading /.
At least the fanbois have used an apple or linux. For anyone interested in actually learning what
unschooling is, and even all of those who think it is some kind of joke, i would highly recommend
"The Unschooled Mind", by Howard Gardner.
Mr. Gardner is the John H. and Eisabeth A. Hobbs Professor In Cognition and Education at the
Harvard Graduate School of Education. He has received both MacArthur prize and Guggenheim
fellowships, as well as being the first american to win the Grawemeyer Award for Education.
Unschooling has nothing to do with fundamentalist homeschoolers, lazy parents, hippies,
Dr. Seuss jokes, or stupid philosophical statements like john cage's 4'33''. If you feel like
secondary educators are smarter than the average parent, then i certainly sympathize with
your parents' lack of intelligence. If you feel like children should be educated according to a plan
which only takes into account the benefits to society as a whole, then you should probably move
to a country which is (overtly) communist.
-broot
Were there any kids at your high school that didn't go to college? Are there any kids that you graduated with living at home with Mom and Dad?
Any Slashdotters who have experience with 'unschooling?'
Sure! I've been unschooling for 21 years...ever since I graduated from high school.
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
It's another option. It's not the right one for everybody. Get over it.
I see it as a good thing, having more options. The biggest problem I have with the education system isn't that it's one of the biggest expenses taxpayers must bear. It isn't that teacher's unions seem to have more power over any other party coming to the table. What bothers me the most is the defacto monopoly of the system. Unless you have the resources far above average, you have no option besides public school. And you get to pay for it whether you like it or not, whether you use it or not. If you have no kids - you are paying for schools. If you are retired - you are paying for schools. If you have school-aged children and send the to a private school - you are still paying for the public schools.
Some districts have voucher programs that allow parents some choice in schools. For example, send your kid to the next town over and some small portion of the school's budget gets sent there too. In effect the tax you paid toward the public school is allowed to be spent as you choose. Unfortunately the details of programs like these are as different as the administrators that create them and most of the ones I've seen only work between public districts - private schools must still be paid over and above what you already got taxed for the public school system.
So, to sum it up, if something like this (yes, even if it does sound like a dumb idea to most people) allows a few edge cases to squeak into a situation that works better for the child then I'm all for it. If public schools aren't meeting expectations there is very little parents can do about it due to the tax-funded monopolistic nature of the beast.
If a law student never went to college, but passes the bar exam with flying colors, does he know law? Could he be a newbie lawyer?
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
Just being the first to use the next overused tagline
Without a doubt.
I guess I should have added that the strangest part of my experience was that I think it is weird that a family where the father pulled in $100,00+/year, which allowed the mother to stay home and "home school" the kids, didn't think to prepare their kids to be able to do the same when they grow up.
If I can not smoke in heaven, then I shall not go. -- Mark Twain
No, don't turn this into class warfare when it IS a political issue.
An informed electorate that would have been forced to understand just the basics of civics would never have elected our current President. Which is why I wish all voters had to answer 5 simple questions:
1. Who is the current President?
2. Who is the current Vice President?
3. Who is the Speaker of the House?
4. Name one of your Senators.
5. Who is your congressman?
But, of course, Jim Crow would be drudged up to defeat this easily. :(
There has been a long going effort by the left, lead by the education unions, to stifle learning and continue to promote ignorance. Every Republican (or I should say, Conservative) attempt to improve education by providing competition (vouchers) is shot down by class warfare mongers like yourself.
The Sudbry School in the UK has been doing this for decades:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudbury_school
and if you think theres a shortage of research papers to read you could always read some of the books on the subject or even watch on of the documentaries on the subject.
There are no IQ's "over 170" IQ is a statistical measure conforming to a standard bell curve with a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15. Like all such measures, any value beyond 3 standard deviations is an outlier and can not be considered accurate.
My "MENSA ego stroking BS IQ for people stupid enough to pay to be told how smart they are" is 186, my real IQ is 143.
Well, IQ categories are defined for the range above 175 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ_reference_chart, but IQ is a rather dodgy metric per se. In fact, I'd argue that a person does not have a single IQ score, but rather a broad range of test outcomes, depending on which test is actually selected.
When I was in senior high school (about 35 years ago), I was given a few IQ tests, taken some weeks apart over a period of about three months. The range of scores was remarkable, partly being explained that each test was considered "valid" only for some range of outcomes. My highest score was 193, the lowest was barely 130, the other two were spaced between those extremes. So, what was my IQ at that time? I have no idea, but the scores were somehow important to me, since I was merely a schoolkid with no real accomplishments. What's my IQ now? Probably lower due to age, but I really have no idea and don't much care - I have my degrees in two engineering disciplines (one a PhD), numerous patents and technical publications, family, houses, and so forth. Accomplishments count for more than an ability in crosswords and pattern recognition and the like.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
My oldest is now almost 17, my youngest is 12. They are 2 of the brightest, most sensitive, most caring, most intelligent, most free examples of human life that has yet evolved on this planet. They taught themselves everything they needed to know when they came to a time when they felt it necessary to learn and this includes reading and math and things those of us raised in institutional learning establishments have been trained to believe is important. At the same time they never had to get up early or waste countless hours of their lives in boring classes and they got to spend important time with their family and friends that we all missed growing up. I know its popular to insult this lifestyle as slacking off and write it off as poor parenting or worse. I don't understand why. Why would a lifestyle motivated by a family's desire to spend as much time together as possible and enable your children to live free lives unencumbered by unnecessary authoritarian learning systems developed before WWII? Do some research on this if you're a parent or plan to be before you judge these ideas so harshly. Its easy enough to find information on how our present system of education evolved, and since we experienced it all first hand ourselves - we all know its shortcomings. Finally, I recommend this book: Parenting a Free Child, an Unschooled Life by Rue Kream (shameless plug, full disclosure; author is my wife) at www.freechild.info Its really time we allowed our children to learn to think for themselves again
Un-Schooling = You DON"T get to brainwash my child !!!
Unschooled children are unschooled.
As the eldest some of a single mother keen on distributing housework to the idle I find myself as an adult sometimes longing to be bored. What some people might take for granted is how exceptionally motivating boredom can be. When your mind becomes your playground there's less to propel you to do things or make changes.
Quack, quack.
I can see merit in some of what the "unschoolers" are saying. However, I do think that it's crucial that at least some portion of a child's education be structured in a way that guarantees they learn certain essential skills.
I was home educated from first grade all the way on up through high school. My parents used a hybrid approach. I had basic language, math, social studies, and science classes scheduled throughout the week. Additionally, my parents allowed me to substitute some of my hobby or play time as school subjects. So, for instance, I never had to take "gym" class as I was always riding my bike down to local basketball courts and playing with the local kids. When I expressed interest in 3D modeling, they allowed me to substitute playing with POV-Ray and Raydream for some of my art studies. Playing in a local metal band counted towards my music requirement (awesome!).
From 7th grade onward, my parents allowed me to decide my own course of study. They provided me with all the necessary textbooks and a copy of the school calendar. However, I had to follow the basics of our local school district's curriculum for my grade and be able to pass New York State approved exams at the end of every school year. Incidentally, I am actually largely self taught. Thanks to this system, I was an accomplished C++/Java programmer before even arriving at university!
Growing up, I knew some people that used what might be called an "unschooling" approach. Many of these people ended up having significant gaps in their education. Outings in the park are a nice supplement to textbook education, but (unless your parent is a scientist) they are not a good replacement. I believe allowing your children to pursue their interests at their own pace is a really, really great idea. However, the idea that your child has the wisdom or know-how to design their own curriculum is flawed and could end up harming them in the long run.
I had just average schools myself, never finished college, but when I look at my parents, and their piles of books, just about anyone would have to learn something living in that house. But that's just random, there are all kinds of parents, coming from all kinds of backgrounds.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
I was homeschooled after gradeschool about thirty years ago (Unschooling originates with John Holt, look up to see when those books came out). My parents followed the idea of Unschooling, which doesn't mean "truancy" - it means what it says, learning all the time - and allowing the child to decide what interests them as a focus of study.
My choice was computers, and now I program them for a living. I'm hardly a delinquent, unless you dislike my chosen brace style.
The thing you are not grasping is this model of choosing what you want to study and a focus of interest - well, that's college in a nutshell. Instead of having to spend a year unwinding my head from high school I went right in to college knowing what really interested me, and also understanding self-directed study. Frankly, I was far better prepared for college in just about any way you can think of than were most of my school-attending friends. That includes socialization, since I was used to a more mature mixed model of socializing than were my high-school friends who knew how to talk to - other high school kids.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Yes, i have first-hand experience. I was a combination of home/unschooled until college. Unschooling really isn't new, it's something that came about heavily in part due to a man named John Holt in the 60's like the article gets started on. Learning-by-doing is nothing new, learning by classroom is. It's hard to levy a wholesale argument against or for unschooling/homeschooling/school-at-home because each case is extremely individual, just like each person's learning strengths. In my case, i was ahead of almost all of my classmates. I'm nowhere near prodigal or top-of-my-class since graduating, but i have a host of skills i have taught myself, a pretty intimate understanding of how i am best able to learn new skills, and a certain understanding that has been extremely helpful in expanding my abilities to get new jobs, and take on new responsibilities. The only problem i had with getting into college courses was the archaic way that universities are organized. The major problem is not one's ability to meet the educational requirements which are often not that stringent, but dealing with a system that cannot comprehend any alternative to its own self-importance. It's rare that i see any really useful or comprehensive reporting on any alternative methods of education. There is a certain point where it's a novelty again and someone does a filler piece that re-ignites a usually thoughtless or already entrenched debate. I don't think that un/home/schooling at home is an answer to our public education system, but American public education is in need of serious scrutiny and help without the chronic political boilerplate that plagues it and prevents useful reform. It's hard to share opinions on this as a participator in because as the article reflects, there is a clear minority of people who have undergone this process since mandatory education in the U.S. began. You often set yourself up as a lightning rod for the debate, and especially for someone like myself who is used to a calmer, more rational discourse, that's rarely the response you get.
You have huge partisan blinders on.
I know you're not going to remove them anytime soon, but if you believe the Republicans are not as much a party to the effort to keep the general public ignorant and complacent as the Democrats, then I pity you.
School vouchers aren't about competition in educational systems for the purpose of better education (despite all the PR crap you might have read). They're about putting religion into education. It's the conservatives trying to expand their base by allowing kids to circumvent getting an education where they *might* learn to think for themselves.
Every conspiracy your poor addled mind sees on the left can be matched with an equally plausible conspiracy on the right. You choose to believe the conspiracy theory that bests suits your ideology.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
No direct experience with unschooling, but I know plenty of slack asses who do unworking....
Because you asked...
I am an example of an individual who grew up with under this exact educational philosophy and I beg to differ on the outcome most of the above commentators anticipate.
Unschooling is a set of principals and ideas about learning in general which emphasizes the individual's instinctual intellectual desire and capability over institutional time based curricula. It's in no way a new concept, with people like John Holt and Ivan Illich establishing most of the modern ideas in this educational arena several decades ago.
Though purely anecdotal, my own case is evidence that the method does indeed work, at least in my example, and I would argue it works quite well indeed.
I grew up without school until the 12th grade, and decided to enroll as a senior in an area High School mostly out of a desire to test my knowledge and socialization prior to venturing out to the greater world the following year. I was presented with a series of intensive placement tests and tested into the top levels of the senior class, where I completed the year and graduated at the statistical top of my small class without much trouble at all.
Since graduating a dozen years ago, I attained a roll as a senior software engineer at a major financial firm where I continue to design and implement technical solutions to complex problems which interest me. I'm also considered by some a bit of an expert in political strategy and consult a number of elected officials.
All this while declining to pursue higher education and instead learning from the experts in the fields which interest me.
I find that learning from those who do is much preferable to learning from those who decide to teach instead.
Additionally, the most crucial ability a critical thinker can have is the desire for and access to written knowledge and history.
The sad state of affairs which our educational system finds itself in is one which can obviously be improved. I would think that an open system with 100% subsidy which is open to the learner to take desired courses when they see fit would benefit society immensity.
Cost of such a system would indeed be high, but quite a bit less than dealing with the problems which a lack of self-motivated education hoist upon the systems of our limited resources. In a light improvements in our system to produce better learners could be viewed as the most cost-effective move we could make.
Isolation is certainly a terrible reason for homeschooling, but I appreciate you not extending that to all homeschoolers. Most homeschoolers I've ever met do it out of a desire to give their children a quality of education they don't believe they can get anywhere else, and of course out of a desire to have their children learn about certain subjects, especially evolutionary science, sex and politics outside of the government's prescription.
But I think that it's, perhaps, shortsighted. The idea of "unschooling" is to eliminate formal presentations of information in favor of personally motivated exploration. It differs from home-schooling in that there's no curriculum and it hinges on personal motivation and curiosity.
The problem is that not everyone is curious enough to explore things in depth, nor intelligent enough to make sense of their experiences. One might easily develop an anthropomorphic or superstitious understanding of things, for example. Further, your environment is somewhat limited. You're not apt to learn, nor appreciate, much of world history, cosmology, quantum physics, anthropology, etc. from that sort of exploration, -- and you're definitely not going to develop a foundation in any sort of truly abstract discipline (e.g., math beyond arithmetic).
The trick is that optimal development of your intellectual faculties is dependent on the proper balance of rote learning, theory, practice, exposure, and play / exploration. For some, drills are really the only way that they will learn basic concepts, for others, it's a terrible waste if you don't hand them a toolbox and challenge them to convert a used car into a mill. "Unschooling" basically focuses on the play / exploration aspect and hopes for exposure. Public schools perhaps put too much emphasis on rote learning, and perhaps exposure without integrating the others. Either might be appropriate for an individual for whom those are the only ways that they can assimilate information and experiences. However, in the general case, you need all of them and get the best results when you can play up to the strengths of the individual.
Currently, at least in the United States, school is a wonderful place to learn how to take and pass tests. That's it. Just because someone can pass a test doesn't mean they've learned *anything* about the subject tested. Today's tests by their very nature ask simple questions whose answers can be easily graded. Real knowledge doesn't fit into such easily-designated cubbyholes. As a result, we are rapidly building C.M. Kornbluth's world from "The Marching Morons", if we're not there already. Change is badly needed.
School should be a place that prepares a child for living in the real world, not fulfill the fantasies of Liberal Arts graduates who seem to think that being "well rounded" is the goal of every human being on the planet.
Horse hockey, as Colonel Potter is fond of saying!
What subjects should be taught? Here's a short list:
Reading, Writing / Speaking (i.e., how to effectively express yourself), Math (up to Geometry and your basic Algebra), Logic (i.e., how to think and reason in any situation), Social skills (i.e., how to deal effectively with people), Computers (how to use them safely, how to find information using the Internet), and everyday technology (basic home repairs -- including simple electrical, plumbing, and carpentry, basic car repairs, and everybody learns how to drive a car *properly*), and what they used to call "home economics" -- buying a home, paying bills, buying groceries, etc. Add "how to get and keep a job" to that list.
Optionally, we might want to teach a foreign language (not everybody may have the ability to handle it, though), but only if the first priority is *speaking* it, not reading a paragraph and answering a bunch of questions. After all, language is for communication first and foremost.
Oh, and about testing? Absolutely *no* written tests other than for Writing (essay, of course) and Math (a sheet of paper with a question and lots of blank space for the answer). Everything else is a "show me what you've learned". Explain it verbally, demonstrate it with your hands, something, *anything* but use a number 2 pencil to answer.
Call this whole thing "Modern Urban Survival", and the Final Grade will be given *after* graduation in the real world.
"My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right." --Senator Carl Schurz (1872)
I have no blinders on. But it is typical rhetoric for someone on the left to try to focus on the person or assassinate character rather than stick to the issue.
I listen to Rush & Air America and XM Left Politics. I watch O'reilly and Fox & MSNBC. I read Red State and News Busters & Huffington and Daily Kos. Just to settle your worried little heart and remove your pity.
School vouchers ARE about competition and not one conservative recommendation says that you MUST choose a religious private school. Look at DC and all of the politically left black parents that are PISSED at President Obama for canceling that program!!
It seems to me you are looking for conspiracy where there isn't any, not me ;)
I am sure that alot of the comments were negative on here, but for my family this was the best of all decisions. We did not give the kids a planned learning experience, instead allowing them to follow their passions. My daughter who is now 18 wrote many books and articles, and did tons of artwork. She then found a love of cooking and began to train herself to make ever more difficult meals. She is now attending a chef school, and I believe will be following her passion many studies have shown that if you follow your passions you will be more successful in life. I can only say she is much happier then her public and or private school friends.
My son who is 16 takes after me I guess and began writing software a few years ago. He has made a number of small games mostly for his own enjoyment or to share with friends. He too seems to be following his interests.
Another friend of ours is a young man by the name of Freddy who is currently unschooled. He is currently very active with the pirate party and is traveling the country working to that end. He has traveled to 37 states and is 16 years old. He has met with Business Leaders, Mayors, and political consultants. He has also experienced living nearly homeless and in multi-million dollar mansions. He is experiencing more then he ever could in a class room.
For those who are hating on this style of schooling, I think you need to determine why.
My kids learned to read and are above average readers, but were taught by things that interested them. My son learned playing MMORPG's... he needed to read and write to enjoy them. So with the 3 kids I know who are unschooled 100% know how to read. See if your local highschool has that high of a literacy rate. When my daughter needed to half or double a menu item she learned to do math on fractions. When my son was writing code to figure out how much damamge a bullet did to a head for his game he studied geometry, physics, and anatomy... On top of this they learned that they can learn anything they are interested in on thier own. they do not wait to be taught how to do something. I do not see this out of many public school kids.
Child A is taught to be inquisitive about everything around him. As he encounters things in his daily life he figures out how they work, rather than accepting them as magical black boxes.
You Wrote:
Child C, the one who took apart the toaster when he was 4.
As you can see, the two are equivalent. Except the original was better written, and of course there's the fact you misunderstood it - I guess we know where you got your schooling from.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I have heard about unschooling, and there are some aspects of it that I find appealing. The appeal has to do with my philosophy about the role of education.
Our schools are presently designed to help kids be successful in the context of economy (as we understand economy today). American schools are beginning to fall behind in this aspect, but the point is that they are designed to produce kids who work well together as managers, employees, businessmen, etc. We want our kids to get good jobs, be competitive, and become wealthy (or "successful"). This kind of system was imported from Europe, where it continues to enjoy good success toward these ends. There are a lot of amazing things that can be accomplished when people work together this way, there is no doubt about it.
On the other hand, people like me don't buy into the economic argument for schooling. I'm interested more in the educational, or intellectual aspect that Thomas Jefferson advocated. Schools should seek to build character and create men and women who are suitable for democracy, because they know how to think as individuals and follow their own, unique paths through life. Perhaps there is more emphasis on argument than on cooperation -- I don't know. We do not seek to bend to other people as employees, citizens, etc. Schools should engender the love of learning and help students discover their passion and life's work. The hope is that students will be able to find whatever it is that calls them to action, and then master it. We believe that talent is naturally profuse and must be developed outside of a strict format. This isn't facilitated by the "factory" style public schooling that is operated from the top down. It is more of a ground-up approach, but it could still work as a public system (in my opinion). True, it may not produce massive economic wealth or compete favorably in a capitalistic society, but I am convinced that it can contribute greatly to personal satisfaction and fulfillment.
What I find is that all my kids are autodidacts. I don't remember actively "teaching" the subject of reading, yet we read together all the time and my son quickly became the best reader of his peer group. On the other hand, some areas that he is not interested in still lag behind his friends because we don't force him to improve in those areas. We expect that he will eventually see a need to develop them. Under such circumstances, it appears to take far less time to learn the subjects that traditionally waste years of our time in formal schools. There, everyone must progress at more or less the same pace; not so with homeschool.
I realize that people who step outside of the accepted social norm, like I have done with homeschooling, can be feared by others. What if we are too dumb to raise our own kids? For instance, I am lucky to have a high-school diploma, yet I teach my own children. To some, that sounds like madness. What if we ruin the social commons by producing dysfunctional adults? Shouldn't our government protect us from that?
It's true that sometimes the plans that other people make for us are superior to our own plans for ourselves and our children. Maybe it can be argued that others really do know better, based on some official standard. What I worry about is the ability of these true believers, some who have posted to this story right here on Slashdot, to eliminate the sovereignty of parents over their families. In America, at least, I believe we still subscribe to the idea that regular human beings are fit to guide their own destinies. For me, that is the appeal of homeschool.
We're hearing tons about how education should happen (home/school). But nothing about "What are the goals of education?". What is the desired product/result of education?
Do we want happy workers? Independent thinkers? Drivers who use turn signals?
Until we know what the systems should strive to achieve, how doesn't matter. Once we know that we want kids to able to type, drive a car, read a newspaper, balance a checkbook, memorize pi to 100 places, know that using a condom is ok/evil... then we can figure out the how.
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
i wish my IQ was a high as the numerous claims attached to this story... then I could count them all.. what a glorious story for the /. masses to use in a giant "phallic" war of the minds... MINES BIGGER!
Don't anthropomorphize computers: they hate that.
Just because something has been done a certain way for a long time does not make it the best or only way. It seems to me that the biggest problem with schools today is that they have become little more than glorified daycare centers. There is far too much information in the world to cram it into a dozen redundant subjects per year that kids tend to forget as soon as they pas the test.
It would seem a far better idea to develop a curriculum that teaches kids how to learn instead of what to learn. It has been demonstrated that people have different ways which enable them to learn better; some are visual others auditive, etc. There are also a wide variety of intelligences that some people seem predisposed to (12 intelligences if i recall correctly).Teach them about knowing themselves, the reality of the world and the place they wish to occupy in it. How to stay healthy by eating the right foods and staying active. Teach each kid to explore their innate abilities and find the ones that better fit them. It is no longer enough to teach them a list of arbitrary subjects. The world is far too broad for that and it is getting broader. And so many kids are coming out with severe health problems such as obesity and depression. If anything i would say these are fare more important problems to deal with that bad grades.
And for gods sake teach them about the importance of paying their taxes!
I'm on a deadline at the moment, so I unfortunately can't get into all the details...But I was home-schooled from 1st grade through the end of high school, until I got bored with that and started college (higher school?) at 15. Out own journey through home-school started as a fairly structured, formal, almost classroom-oriented affair and slowly d/evolved into unschooling. It was a far more suitable approach, and not just for me, for my parents and two siblings as well, and we're all as different from each other as three kids can be. Unschooling isn't really a rejection of conventional schoolwork, it's an accepting that children all learn in different ways, and have been for millenia, (OK, so the wack-jobs you've probably heard about would say 6000 years, but you get the point.) while pen-and-paper curriculum is only a few generations old.
Having had such a wonderful experience with Home/Un-Schooling, and realizing it had a lot to do with giving me the freedom to become a liberal, atheist, Obama-voting, Latte-sipping-Elitist, It always troubles me when I see yet another right-wing nutjob "ruining it for the rest of us" by using home-schooling as a means of unzipping their children's heads and just pouring the bullshit straight on in. The parents I know who are taking the un-schooling approach I always have the greatest hope for, as these people are generally all about rejecting Dogma and finding their own way. More and more within the home-schooling community I still occasionally make presentations and speeches for, "un-schooling" has started to become code for "Yes, I'm homeschooling my kids, but I'm living in a place called reality, where the world's 4.6 billion years old, where Obama was born in the USA, and where the best source of news is NPR"....
I'm sorry to burst the bubbles of all the school reformists around here, but the simple fact is learning anything, and learning it well, requires a certain amount of effort, work and indeed hard slogging.
Learning something you dislike might require that.
I was unschooled, starting after gradeschool about thirty years ago. I had no problems picking up math because I wanted to - and there wasn't a lot of dreadful repetition to it. There are alternatives to learning Algebra, Trig and even calc that involve understanding the concepts rather than turning yourself into a living computer for a small set of equations. But those are too hard to teach in school because to some extent they involve figuring out how a child can grasp more complex subjects, and public school has only time for the knuckle-rapping repetition you find so endearing.
If someone is not good at math, making it hell on them isn't going to help and in fact is going to make them have less respect for the subject.
I program computers now so I turned out just fine, thanks.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
My daughter went to a Sudbury-model school for the last 3 years, which basically has the philosophy similar to unschooling, except kids have the social benefits of being around other children in a mixed-age group. The kids do socialize a lot and teach each other about the stuff they are passionate about. Many tend to focus on things they are really interested in: my daughter is into art, and she has grown tremendously as an artist in that amount of time.
Sudbury education aims to foster internal motivation, responsibility and initiative. The idea is that it's more important what worldview you absorb from your school environment than the various facts you might be learning which you are very likely to forget anyway. You can always look stuff up in Wikipedia if you forget; but if you are trained for 12 years to study what you're told and as much as you're told and be externally evaluated, it can really damage you for the rest of your life.
There were all sorts of hippie feel-good approaches to learning being tested on us when I was growing up and I still think that it was being beaten until I studied that paid off the most. The one thing that really becomes clear from all this talk about it is that we really have no idea how to teach our children anything and most of them learn what they do in spite of the system, not because of it.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Public education is about leveling the class divide, not exploring the height of intelligence among the top 5%. Notice that I said "public" education. If you don't make some level of sacrifice at the high end to accommodate people who need more development work, then you will eventually create a whole class of people so ignorant and poor that they will simply overwhelm and slaughter the others and tear down whatever you built. Any society that doesn't work pretty darned hard to care for its weak is doomed long term. Greed is already a force that creates a class divide over time on its own, so there's no good reason to reinforce that effect via your educational infrastructure which is supposed to exist to counter that effect.
I had no trouble getting into a few different colleges - After all, I had good SAT scores (like more homeschooling students) and also a transcript we compiled of the equivalent courses I had studied at home.
Oh, and this was about twenty years ago - homeschooling was a lot less common then than it is now...
Homeschooling helps you stand out, because by and large such students are far better at self-directing and thus less likely to flame out in college, which is such a change for most people over high school... I found college to simply be an extension of how I already worked anyway.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
there's a great model for this: http://www.sudval.org that's not only student-directed and student-paced, but thoroughly democratic.
Do you find, as you teach your kids, that you yourself wind up re-learning more than you imagined having forgotten and learning more than you imagined you didn't know? I sometimes consider homeschooling a future child and while I'm pretty smart and fairly well educated I can only imagine it as an exercise in learning together where the older person is just (initially) better at learning and at looking stuff up and at figuring out what the next interesting thing to learn is.
Bullshit.
As much as my teachers tried to cram them down my throat, I never bothered learning my multiplication tables; I just multiply manually or use a calculator on the rare occasion that I need to. It's extremely easy and quick, and it's taken a fraction of the effort the memorization would have.
Further, while I'm no writer, my ability to spell is, and always has been, superior to that of anyone I've ever met. I didn't learn that from some shitty phonics program; no one ever taught me to spell. I just read a bunch of books and naturally caught on to the (mostly) consistent rules of English spelling. At this point I've memorized any exceptions to those rules, too.
Despite what you suggest, I've turned out fine. Of course, I was a humanities major, Japanese, to be specific. Oh, I didn't mention that in high school I taught myself Japanese well enough in my spare time to be placed in the third-year courses when I first entered college, did I?
Of course, humanities are useless, aren't they? Who needs translators?
:p
And yet the reason they are supported so much by the right is because they know that's how the card will fall.
As for all the media that you watch/listen to/read, I couldn't care less -- that has nothing to do with whether or not you buy into silly conspiracy theories.
My concern is that you fail to realize that you're a victim of a PR snowjob intended to drum up support for a strategically valuable political tool.
I'm not opposed to school vouchers, by the way. What I'm opposed to is them being used as a front for de-secularizing school systems, which is the intention of many on the right.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
I was a product of "Unschooling". Originally, it was a tendency towards a true "homeschooling" environment. However, based on family difficulty and my parents becoming divorced our environment became more of an "unschooling". I was left to my own devices, to that end I had computers. Day in and out thats all I did, what every geek does, but at the age of 12-18; full time. In the end, I learned quite more about my passion than those that were in my classes with me. Yes, I went to college--University of Alabama, and am now employed by the NSA. Also just a few credits shy from competing my masters degree. Not saying it works for everyone. But, for me, it did.
Homeschool is not for everyone, but I've been pleasantly surprised by how well it seems to work. We have a few friends which unschool their kids but I don't notice much difference between the unschool kids and the more traditional home school kids.
As a father who goes to work and leaves most of the day to day schooling to the wife, here's some things I've come to find out which I didn't know about before we started home schooling.
Home schooling is probably more expensive then going to public school since you end up fronting the cost. However, it's nice that you can make your own schedule and not worry about some random gov. test that everyone has to take (i.e. you have more freedom with the curriculum and to go on trips).
The "sit down with workbooks" schooling only last an hour or two. sometimes the kids get into it and work on math for 4 hours straight (who would of thought) and other times they only get through 1 page in 20 min. When they get into something we try to take advantage and feed them all they will take in.
There are many organizations and events dedicated to home school. We belong to the Sonoma County Home School Association and have a lot of interaction with other home schoolers. In addition, many sports facilities offer home school discounts while regular school is in session (i.e. gymnastics and the roller skate place come to mind). I was concerned about the kids not having enough social contact but between all their sports throughout the year (gymnastics, soccer, baseball, ballet, tennis, golf), their home school groups (4H, violin), and their regular kids groups (cub scouts), that concern has been put to rest.
There are many labels for different kinds of home schooling, but rarely does anyone practice only one type strictly. There's also many different reasons people home school. My wife and I both hated going to public school (hours of B.S. in my opinion) but others may do it because of religious or other family reasons. I personally like many of the unschool ideas, but feel that there should be some structure so the kids can function in an academic environment; but that's just me and who am I to judge others. We'll go on trips and put away the books for a week or two and instead take more of an unschooling approach and just focus on what the kids want to learn (say geology if we go to some volcano). You'll find that the kids can come up with some very good questions which you then can follow up on for the next day or two.
Homeschool becomes a 365 days a year event. There's very little concept of "going on vacation". That said, we don't do much school on the weekend unless there's a learning opportunity to be had while we are out and about. It's a different way of learning then what I was taught; you are always looking for teaching opportunities instead of trying to manufacture them for 6 hours a day.
Anyway, I could go on but so far it's been a very positive experience in our family. My kids are under 10 still, but we've meet many teenage kids which have gone on to universities (Berkley, Stanford, Sonoma State, etc...) and didn't really seem to have any issue getting in. Seems like to get into a university you take the SAT and get your diploma equiv (not the ged); many don't seem to penalize you if you didn't go to public school (that' just secondhand observation on my part).
As much as I hated school, found it boring and resented stupid teachers I find this idea totally alarming. Learning to press on through boring material is a skill. It is learned. And it is necessary to be successful at virtually anything. If you only pursue something while it is interesting you will always quit and find the next new thing which holds the instant gratification of being more interesting because you haven't hit the boring aspects of it yet. I also think this totally misses the added value of a skilled teacher that observes your conceptual road blocks and tries to figure out ways to help you around them. Certain things are more quickly learned through repetion and don't hold much intrinsic value or deep meaning. Many of these boring things are necessary to get to a level that has those qualities. It is simply more efficient to do the grind. This sounds like a recipe for prep[aring a 30 year old with a kindergarden mentality.
That people even picked this crap up for a serious discussion. The person that thought this up is a moron. I may sound negative but you have to consider that this is coming from someone who just finished school and is going on to university. I for one don't see this working unless the child is a prodigy who is actually being held back by the schooling system. This was the case with Einstein contrary to what many people believe (he never failed at school and actually told his parents he felt that school was holding him back and asked his parents to buy him advanced textbooks so he could teach himself). For this to work, the child needs to be inquisitive and I doubt that any 12-15 year old is gonna ask why mirrors reflect light and what speed does light travel at. Hell, I doubt any kid would know that things are made up of atoms unless they were specifically told so. Also, why the hell would any child actually want to learn maths unless they were forced to do so and told that it was an essential skill? Why does everyone miss the fact that schools aren't the only ones to blame if a child is not performing at the level expected of him/her. Some people aren't academically inclined so it doesn't matter what environment they are in.
Yeah, unschooling is a geat idea. (sarcasm).
Then, when the kid is socially inept, and way behind others in his age group and unable to perform at levels as other his age who actually got an education, society will be blamed for their failure and everybody else will be left to pick up the tab.
Unschooling is apparently the same as NO SCHOOLING. Parents in this country already are barely able to function as parents, let alone parents AND teachers. I'll leave education to a credentialed teacher, rather than a parent who thinks its better to let her kids teach themselves on their own.
Seriously, something needsto be done about the shitty level of education in the US. This CERTAINLY isn't helping.
At least we are still able to discriminate jobs based on the level of education on receives. I can tell you, an actual school looks better than "Stayed at home. Learned on own.".
"Unschooling" A nice term for inadequate, dysfunctional, self-education.
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
I was basically unschooled until I was 6. I was multiplying, doing long division, and reading Goosebumps by the time I was 5. When I was 6 I started straight up homeschooling, and now I'm 15 starting AP Calc AB, and my second year of Physics. My writing is admittedly quite awful unless I have an interest in what I'm writing, but when I care about it I get plenty of compliments. But what's best for me isn't best for everyone. I'm sure public school would have slowed my learning, while my sister thrived because of the high level of social interaction. Different strokes for different folks.
I don't think anyone who objectively looks at the numbers could argue against the success of homeschooling. While there are certainly some children who are able to learn on their own, the majority need at least some sort of structured education. While I'm sure there are plenty of Masters of Education students who will argue the point, I believe almost any concerned parent with a high-school diploma, internet access, and library card can provide a superior education in a 1-1 environment VS a "trained educator" in a 1-30 classroom. Some may cite socialization as a concern for home-schooled students, but I would counter that with the proliferation of home-school groups in almost every area of the country, as well as access to community sports teams and activities, there is no reason a home-schooled child would be left at a disadvantage socially.
I believe we as a society should do everything we can to encourage and promote alternative forms of education that do not stifle the brightest minds, or leave behind children who are weaker in certain areas. On the other side of the spectrum, I would love to see more apprenticeship type programs so that young people who are interested in working in a skilled trade can spend more of their educational time working in that field. I think the societal shift away from family businesses and apprenticeships has left us with many individuals who are not scholastically gifted and do not have a solid skill set to fall back on. My family mechanic makes more than I do as an IT professional, but has not completed high-school. While that is not a path I would recommend, it worked well for him and would like to see some sort of apprenticeship program as an option parallel to in-school education.
Anyway, just my 2c, I'll leave you with an interesting take on public education by H L Mencken.
"That erroneous assumption is to the effort that the aim of public education is to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence ... Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States, whatever the pretensions of politicians, pedagogues and other such mountebanks, and that is its aim everywhere else."
I know what some of you are going to say, but the fact is, unlike a lot of parents who might home-school their children, teachers at traditional schools usually have specialized expertise in each of the areas being taught.
For instance, if I were to home-school my children, I'd do fine at teaching them math, science, and computers. But while I can write reasonably well, I'd do a miserable job at teaching literary analysis. While I know quite a lot about linguistics, I have only passing knowledge of a handful of foreign languages. With regard to health, I don't know jack about sports, although I do know a fair amount about nutrition. I played violin in high school, but I couldn't teach it or any other instrument. I know what I know well, but there are numerous areas of standard school curricula that I am unqualified to teach. So while I could get good books on those areas and read to them what someone else wrote, I would have little capacity to answer hard questions that might come up. By contrast, a teacher who knows their subject area is likely to be able to answer a lot more of those questions.
Of course, there are also disadvantages to classroom schooling. There are bad teachers. There are too many students in class. There is too much distraction and not enough learning. There are bullies (although learning to effectively cope with bullies would be a good interpersonal skill). And there is a lack of funding for a lot of areas that need resources to be taught.
Just don't lose sight of the value of specailized expertise and tutoring.
When I read the title from RSS feed, I thought are people trying to get their kids more cultured by sending them to be educated by the international organization?
Then I read the summary and sure enough, it just reminds me of that movie even more.
The only possible interpretation of any research whatever in the 'social sciences' is: some do, some don't
Wasn't much of human history the epitome of 'unschooling'? Wouldn't that be a reasonable explanation why there was very little progress for many hundreds of thousands of years with only a very few bright lights in all that time? Only since the advent of formalized and widely accessible education and knowledge dissemination has there been significant progress in recent history.
My brother was 'homeschooled' in a way that was effectively unschooling. The best he can hope for is a manual labor job because his education is only at the 8th or 9th grade level, if that. Unless these children are truly exceptional, they are being severely disadvantaged by their parents and will pay for it for the rest of their lives. It's amazing how non-forward thinking some people can be.
Omeganon
Absolutely. I was homeschooled myself, and when growing up, had some friends who were unschooled. Their mom was a stay-at-home-er, and she still taught her kids -- she just didn't use conventional methods. Because of that, unlike myself, they didn't get a fully rounded education, and they could only learn what their mother knew. They were (and still are) both history buffs, and very talented at the arts and crafts, but lacking in other areas. The one I keep in contact with is presently in a managerial position at a museum, married, and lives a very well-rounded life. Does it matter that she doesn't know anything about the mechanics of a car, or a lot about chemistry?
I, on the other hand, learned far more than you'd ever learn in a public school. Being homeschooled via complete workbooks, I learned a lot that my parents never knew, or, in one case, ever understood. Public school never taught my mom how to correctly solve algebraic equations; my school books taught me, and I was able to show her. I'm now a self-taught computer programmer, and upon taking my last placement test at HS graduation (at age 16), I scored within the top 2% of the nation for first-year college students.
I believe wholeheartedly that homeschooling is awesome.... unschooling, however... lets just say it takes an awesome lot of luck & planning on the part of the parents. And a lot of devotion!
A small comparison of interest:
Windows: Public School. Mac: Private School. Linux: Homeschool. Assembly: Unschool.
I am a father of two children who are being taught at home and one child who is in a public school (for now)
Every homeschooler employs some unschooling. These are not separate things. Homeschoolers have incredible flexibility in what and how they teach. They also have some requirements from their state about what must be taught.
There are rules and legally the teachers (which are almost always the parents) are the teachers.
Many of you seem to not have a clue about history. For most of all time parents have been their children's primary teacher. No one has more interest invested in the future success of their children.
Knowledge of reading, writing, math, science, and history are core to having a well rounded functioning adult. No parent will let their child not learn about these things. Take a breath.
What we are talking about is parents that see that a "school" like setting isn't always the best learning environment for their children.
My children go to museums, zoos, and places where history happens.
- We traveled to Mexico as a family and volunteered to help at an orphanage, work on a house, and see the culture first hand (From Illinois by car). We stopped on our trip and saw the Grand Canyon, Garden of the Gods, a gold mine, the Hoover Dam, Aquarium of the Pacific, Laura Ingalls Wilders home, Zion National Park, and the San Diego zoo to name just a few of the highlights. We saw the plains, the mountains, deserts, and river valleys. We talked about it all.
- We traveled to Washington DC by car from Illinois. We went to/saw Hershey, the Statue of Liberty, Independence hall, the Liberty Bell, the Smithsonian, the Capital, the Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial, and the White House.
- More locally we have seen the best of Chicago, St. Louis, Springfield (IL).
- We have also spent significant time in Michigan on history and natural wonders alike.
Perhaps it sounds like we are rich, we aren't. We are a middle class family with a household gross income of less than $60-70k raising 3 children.
I built a TV antennae out of coat hangers with my kids. We talked about TV, Radio, Cell Phones, and Radio spectrum in general.
My kids also have friends and take part in social activities including sports, group learning activities arranged by are park district, 4-H, and Awana.
My kids are avid readers. So much so that I recently was forced (by my wife and daughter) to buy a Civil war diary for my daughter. Rather dry material...but she loves history particularly from first hand stories. The true history. Not just what a text book says.
We have text books. The kids DO have to work on every subject from them. We use some of the more popular homeschool curriculum for that.
School takes however long it takes. Sometimes schoolwork may be done in a few hours. Sometimes it is well into the evening.
We use videos, computers, and hands on experiences to augment that teaching. They also do art and music. My daughter for example (age 10) can play the piano, recorder, and violin.
STILL my wife, who has a masters degree in instructional technology, is never satisfied. She always feels like the kids need more to reach their true potential and she struggles to give them that little bit more.
Our kids are normal but perhaps a little bit innocent.
I know many friends who homeschool and many that have tried. It's not hard and yet it is the hardest job you could ever have. Unlike a job the parent never stops teaching. Even chores are a time for teaching values that lead to a good work ethic.
Most certainly it's not just "goofing off". The state can't do it better and should not get involved any more than absolutely needed.
Proof of the kids being on track for their age (given any handicaps) every couple of years through standardized testing should be sufficient to satisfy the states interest. Only if the child is failing should the state get involved and then the initial work should be to assist
I think you nailed it right there. I'd be willing to bet good money that there are hundreds if not thousands of people out there that were unschooled and couldn't write an eloquent post like yours.
Yes, I'm using a Fox TV show to make a point on slashdot. If you assume that the kids are average public school students, and the contestants are average adults, then I think it's pretty obvious where kids should go for their education.
In all seriousness, the public vs homeschool debate is moot. What makes the most difference is parenting. Parents who care and are involved will raise successful and productive children.
Really, this is only going to work in a very limited number of situations. The parents have to be smart and be able to spend a lot of time with their kids (or a tutor). It only works if the kid is actually motivated to learn anything. And even then, I would hope the family has a lot of money or a business the kid can inherit because they are not going to be learning the things they need to get in to a college.
Really, the only reason this is appealing to people because there are many people in this country that don't believe in the education system. They want to force their political and/or religious beliefs on their child rather than to let them think on their own. You are much better off sending your kid to a top notch private school where they can learn and grow socially. Home schooling or unschooling is most likely dooming them to a life as an outcast of society.
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If I had enough time and/or money to personally educate my children at home, I would instead spend it by volunteering at their local public school, where my contribution would have more societal benefit. I don't doubt that spending 100% of my attention on my own children might improve their test scores dramatically, but what is the point of raising enlightened offspring in a society of fools?
If you value the education of your own children more than that of others, that's fine, but it's also selfish.
and eye turned owt fine.
Public school is taxpayer funded. Therefore, the customer is not the child. The people paying for it should be the people making demands. And the majority of them have kids of average intelligence. It makes sense for them to demand that the school cater to kids of average intelligence the best, and make exceptions for the special cases (at both extremes) only as a secondary priority.
If your kid is so smart and you think he could do better, then pony up the dough for a private school, or pony up the time for home schooling. If you can't do either...then too bad. The world isn't a perfect place and you don't always get what you want. Sometimes the needs of the many really do outweigh the needs of the few, and you are 'the few.'
Yes, some bright star may never learn to shine. But so damn what? There are other bright stars in the world and they aren't having any trouble shining. The world won't come to a horrible end because your damn brighter-than-average kid didn't like high school.
Get the hell over yourself.
This has been done, long ago. Get a hold of A.S. Neill's Summerhill: A Radical Approach to Child Rearing. An interesting real life case of a school where each "self-directed" child defined their own curricula. A classic gem of education.
Child B. Child B without a shadow of a doubt.
You do not know this, and you have absolutely no data to back this up. It is not possible for that blanket statement to be true.
There is no one solution that works for everyone. Many kids excel in public school, and many kids struggle with it. Many kids are much better off avoiding the public school system. I know I struggled with it quite a bit and spent more time avoiding people who were trying to beat me up because I was different (didn't listen to Poison and Ratt and didn't spell psyche "S-I-K-E") than I did learning anything. However, I know many intelligent people in my class who did well in public school. Although I feel I would have been better off without it, there is no way for me to know for sure.
My wife and I choose to home school my son because we found that by the time he was going to be attending first grade, he was already way ahead of where most of the other children were going to be in his class. He is currently 9 years old, and we get evaluated every year by a qualified, certified teacher. If we get to the point where he is falling behind other kids his age, we will reevaluate our plan. In the mean time, we have joined a local homeschooling group, and unlike in a public school, he gets to hang out with some kids his age, some kids older, and some kids younger (more like real life in the adult world), and learn to get along with people without the pressure of having to be ashamed if his own tastes may be different from the tastes of others. He gets plenty of socialization, and gets to hang around older kids who are great role models of how to be in charge of your own learning. I know 2 kids, one 15 years old and one 16 years old, who are homeschooled but are taking college classes to supplement where they have exceeded their parents' ability to teach more complex subjects. Neither is having culture shock due to lack of social skills. Neither is floundering because they can't acclimate to a classroom environment. They excel, and I believe that it is because they are bright kids and they feel that they are in charge of their own destiny. They do not sit around waiting for someone to teach them.
Just because you can imagine how something could fail doesn't mean it always or even often will. Just because you had a particular experience and turned out okay doesn't mean that everyone else should have that experience, too. There are plenty of parents who use the guise of unschooling as an excuse to not discipline their children. There are also just as many parents who use the public school system as a free baby-sitter so they can disengage from being active in their child's life. To dismiss a form of education because it can be abused is short-sighted at best.
... I could not know all that I do today without those mind-numbingly painful drills and lessons and test and reviews.
You don't know this, either. It may make you feel better to believe it, and that's fine for you, but all you've convinced me of is that you don't like to distinguish between fact and opinion.
When I have children, I am going to employ the internet in a simple but powerful strategy for homeschooling: I will have my children spend every minute of their day reading the comments on internet blogs, and then I will tell them, "From now on, be just like that, only the complete opposite."
I hope to produce intellectual and literary geniuses this way!
Snarkiness is inversely proportional to wisdom because it emphasizes feeling right rather than being right.
Well, being on the right I can tell you that I know of NO ONE that has that intention. I am a devout Christian, sing in the band at my Church, lead Sunday School, etc.
But, I could care less what school you send you child to, be it public or private. I just want you to have the choice and for there to be fair competition.
I have worked directly with groups that are pushing for vouchers. That is not the least of the concerns, trust me.
You just have HUGE secular blinders on making you see intent where there is none, that's all ;)
Oh, and as for where I get me information, it has a lot to do with whether or not someone will buy into silly conspiracy theories. The more information and sides to the story you read, the less likely you are to be blinded by "drinking the juice" or demagoguery. In my opinion, of course.
What about the following scenario:
Child A: Doesn't go to school and spends all his time practicing golf.
Child B: Goes to school with 40 other students in a traditional setting
Who do you think is going to be more successful?
The answer is we don't know. Every situation is different, and definitions for "success" can vary greatly
Some people would prefer to be an uneducated millionaire athlete, others a well educated teacher earning $30k.
D6 63 0D 70 89 81 BB 8E 7B 7C 5F 5D 54 EA AB 73
My fiancé sent this to me and I'm really not interested in creating an account, so I guess I'll be sharing my opinion as an anonymous coward...
I haven't read all of the comments, but several that I have read seem to denote that ALL children who are unschooled will grow up less educated, less socialized and less motivated than their public schooled counterparts. I'm sure that is true of SOME unschooled children, just as it's true of a certain percentage of public schooled children.
Several of you have stated that we need public education, and yes I think you're right. All human beings deserve a free education and the ability to learn. Where I disagree is the standardization and the compulsory nature of public education. Education should be available to everyone, but it should not be force-fed to the masses. Children should be allowed to pursue areas of interest to them with the assistance of teachers AND parents who will provide resources and guidance. Learning at a varied pace with a non-standardized curriculum has been successful in several independent schools within the United States and internationally (http://www.educationrevolution.org/aero-member-schools.html). These children even get into colleges, universities and go on to do great things with their lives (see The Pursuit of Happiness:The Lives of Sudbury Valley Alumni, Legacy of Trust: Life After the Sudbury Valley School Experience, Real Lives: Eleven Teenagers Who Don't Go to School Tell Their Own Stories).
However, as strongly as I advocate for public education (with extreme progress required) unschooling is no less credible than being educated at public or private school if the parents are involved and willing to support their children in the learning process. The unschooled children I know are bright, creative and motivated. They don't dread learning or see it as work.
For those of you who have cast a very judgmental opinion on the idea of children being allowed to study topics relevant and interesting to them (with the assistance and guidance of their parents and/or teachers) I encourage you to do your research before you assume that a child who does not pass through the American public education system will be an uneducated, unmotivated, or unhappy adult.
I think the original post asked for comments from people familiar with un-schooling... instead we get everyone's opinion! I only see a handful of comments from actual home schoolers who understand this.
My wife and I (mostly her) have home-schooled all 3 of our kids: 1 until grade 10, 1 until grade 9, and last until grade 7. They all had different reasons to attend "regular" school.
While we never agreed with un-schooling, the concept is not to just let them run around an have fun. The idea is that the WHEN the children require a skill they will be motivated to learn that skill. So when their friends (YES Homeschoolers do have friends) are talking about reading Harry Potter (before the movies come out), the unschooled kids have the motivation to learn to read. At least that's the theory. We don't agree with unschooling and felt that our children needed to be given a foundation of basic skills to build upon. But teaching a child to read when they have a desire to do it is much easier than when they don't care.
For those that think kids in regular school spend the whole 6 hours learning... they don't. Each piece of material is explained (taught) multiple times. Those that got it the first time are not learning during the 2nd/3rd/4th... time the concept is taught. Often homeschoolers can complete a "full-day" of schooling in a couple hours, because they can learn it at their own pace.
In terms of unschooling, every person has their own learning style (check wikipedia). Generally there are 4 distinct styles. Very few teachers can teach in more than 1 learning style. So if your teacher doesn't teach in your style, you don't learn. In unschooling (and homeschooling) the parent has a much better chance to adapt to the child's learning style than a school teacher who has 20-40 children to teach.
K
This whole issue of home schooling is complex. Since there have been multiple child A vs. child B, let me give my own.
Child A -- given standard curriculum surrounded by some kids brighter and some kids not so bright. Once in a while the curriculum is challenging, but most of the time it is easy and a little bit boring.
Child B -- Has a teacher that constantly challenges the child to push themselves so that at no point are they allowed to coast doing repetitive easy things.
I don't think I would get much disagreement if we were to say that Child B got the better education.
Who is one of the best people to give a "Child B" style education? It is clearly the parent and this is where home schooling can be a big winner. But this assumes that the parent has the intelligence, patience, and time (I have a full time job -- so this is not a trivial thing to ask for) to do this for their child. Most home schooled children I have met have clearly been quite well ahead of their peers and generally did quite well with their lives. But, like most Slashdotters, I tend to hang around people who know how to give a "Child B" style education and they are hardly representative of the general slice of humanity.
There is one point that is being missed here. I believe that the "child B" education is so dramatically effective, that probably it only needs to be done a few hours of the day leaving a lot of time for the child to pursue whatever interests they like. It can be so effective that a clever parent can sneak in such an education over the course of the day without even the child knowing it. It is because of this that some times "Home schooling" and "Unschooling" can seem to be the same.
I feel uncomfortable with the idea that any child can opt out of public education without any type of mechanism to confirm that dropping out was actually beneficial for that child. I can see certain religious cult groups taking advantage of this in ways that would make worry about what is being inflicted on the child. I am also uncomfortable with the idea that it would be a generally good practice for a random normal child to let them "pursue" their own agenda in education and pretty much let them do whatever they want. I have never met a child that succeeded this way that was not discernibly gifted at an early age. But my "sample set" is small, so maybe it is possible to let a "sports" oriented child to idle away their time choosing how they would like to be educated. But I don't think so.
I was homeschooled during highschool and I'm familiar with the whole "unschooling" movement. Traditional homeschooling tends to revolve around having a curriculum that mirrors what's taught in public school, but taught in a 1-1 or small group environment by parents. Some of the benefits of homeschooling vs just learning in the regular classroom is that you can usually move at a pace which fits the student (often faster), and avoid disruptions from people who have no interest in learning.
Unschooling was/is a movement within the larger homeschool movement. It's not a new idea and I remember people first talking about it 10+ years ago. The difference in unschooling vs homeschooling is that instead of having classes in particular subjects like math, english, biology, social studies, physics etc. the student directs the studies and these subjects get incorporated into things which interest the student. This can be a very successful way to learn since everything you learn is related in some way to your interests.
For example if you really wanted to design computer games your english/writing work could be incorporated into doing a design doc/writing a story/dialog for your game. Your math/science work would be incorporated into the project as well since you'll probably want to know physics/chemistry so you can make your game realistic, and you'll probably need math all over the place to design various game systems. The big trick with unschooling is that you and/or your parents have to see how to incorporate your interests into everything you're learning.
On unschooling story I remember was someone who wanted to breed championship race horses so they learned a ton of biology, enough math to manage a farm, and spent lots of time hanging out with their horses. Personally the few people I knew who did unschooling where really into theater and so focused their studies around acting, and skills which would help them get a career in theater. So rather than have someone take an math class with just "boring" numbers they'd have to learn about the costs of putting on a theater production, balance books, selling tickets, figuring out dimensions to build sets, and other theater related math areas. Sure these people didn't do calculus, but then again most people don't do calc in highschool (not needed unless your into science). Basically, the unschooling philosophy was let you kid do what they want and drive them toward learning what their passionate about. This is very similar to the environment one encounters in graduate school while doing Masters or PhD research. But not everyone can succeed in such a free learning environment.
The challenge with unschooling is that it only really works with a special sort of person who's HIGHLY motivated. These people are the types who tend to succeed wherever they are. If they weren't unschooled they'd probably be doing this stuff in their spare time (possibly flunky some classes they found "boring"). For every person I met who was really unschooling and learning real skills which would help them out, there was someone else who was unschooled because that sounded better than "staying home and playing video games". I always felt when I met an unschooler/homeschooler who's parents didn't push them or weren't encouraging learning did a big disservice to their kid. But I also met many people who learned a lot outside the regular school system and turned out to be productive members of society. The people who don't push and help their students thrive and claim they are unschooling by having their kids play video games all day just give a bad name to all the people who really benefit from such an open learning environment.
As per tradition I have not read the fine article. This appears to another hollow attempt with fancy sounding name. If you are looking for substance and original thought, google Ivan Illich or deschooling society.
Among the education choices, un-schooling takes the greatest amount of prep time, the most attentiveness to your children's interests, and greatest alertness to future "curriculum". This is NOT a method for those who like to get decisions over with. It is also not that new.
Long story short:
Some things you pick up. Some things you really do learn a lot faster from explicit teaching.
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Just to throw another anecdote out there for people to chew on:
I went through the (California) public school system through fifth grade.
In 3rd grade I tested (not sure now what test) in the top 1% of students, and got bumped up into 4th grade early.
Through all that time I found school pretty boring and tedious, and putting up with the other students even more so.
Early in 6th grade my parents pulled me out of the normal school system and had me home tutored through a program that the public school district provided for kids at the fringes of the academic bell curve. Basically each day a teacher would come by my house, return my graded assignments from yesterday, answer any questions I had, give me my new assignments and then leave me to work on them. This was some of the best (from my subjective experience) education I ever got; I was actually interested in what I was being taught and liked my teachers.
But that program only extended through the 8th grade, so in 9th grade my folks put me in a small, private, on-campus alternative school (~15 kids to a classroom, desks arranged in circles, first name basis with the teachers, environmental biology class that included mountain hikes, etc). By 10th grade that school had an online distance learning program and I went into that. Around that point I started spending most of my free time (after burning through my assignments) debating with college professors on UseNet, and learned more from them than I did from my official school. For 12th grade, in a different school district, I was in a similar program to my 6th-8th grade home tutoring, except I went to the teacher instead of them coming to me, and only once every two weeks instead of every day. I graduated high school half a year early, and went into the work force as a computer tech at a local shop.
When they went out of business a year or two later, I had to figure my own way into college/university (my parents are bright but neither are college-educated or really academic at all), got in easily with full scholarships, and went on to get two degrees (an AA in Multimedia Arts and Technologies and a BA in Philosophy) with straight As, and a 4.0/3.9 GPA (4.0 for the AA, 3.9 for the BA).
I'm now barely working part-time as an administrative assistant and occasionally tech/web/database guy at the same dead-end job I've been at since before I even had the AA, and have been searching in apparent futility for better work for the past two years since I finished the BA.
Where did I go wrong, and is my unusual education at all responsible for this?
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> Any Slashdotters who have experience with 'unschooling?'
Not deliberately.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
> And it assumes that an outing at the park -- or even hours spent playing a video game -- can be just as valuable a teaching resource as Hooked on Phonics.'
This may be true, but I suspect it's more a reflection on "Hooked on Phonics" than the value of video games.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Our kids in elementary school go to a charter school that focuses on progressive educational methods. The curriculum is emergent. The children end up collectively or individually choosing the topics, and the teachers guide the students through the process, assigning relevant tasks (sometimes individual work, sometimes group work) that teach them the same subjects they would study in a traditional school setting. Since the curriculum is based on the interests of the students, and they're empowered to control what they're doing, they're very involved in the coursework and always look forward to going to school. The school doesn't do tests, except those mandated by the government, and they always come out higher than the average for the state as well for their local, affiliated school district, despite having a higher than average number of special-needs children.
It's hard to argue with results like that.
Caveat: Our daughter was home-schooled through much of grade school, so I'm not saying this as a public school proponent. (Far from it.)
The descriptions of "unschooling" I've read so far seem like just another take on home schooling, where a savvy and well-educated parent can turn practically anything into a learning experience. Enh ok, fine. Call it what you want. I worry slightly that "Unschooling" will become a convenient catch word for putting your kids behind a doggy gate while you work on that next level in World of Warcraft. (See "The Guild".) Not in every case, but in enough cases that it makes the rest of us look bad by association.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Well, there have been some great responses from folks who've been unschooled, and I don't think I can hope to match those, so I'll settle for making some comments from someone currently in "Year 11" of unschooling my daughter.
We started homeschooling purely due to concerns with the "roundedness" of current public school education. So no religious or "those people" concerns here.
I was initially skeptical of the idea, with one of my comments in arguing against it was that "I survived public school", which I realized later on was a pretty telling comment. Once I agreed to go along with it, at least initially, I've been pretty impressed with the workings of it.
In unschooling, the role of the parent is something of a guide. We're here to point out potential pitfalls (like: "unplug that toaster before you open it. In fact, let's have a discussion about the role of electricity & the human body!") and provide resources (like: "Here's Wikipedia, have fun!" (kidding!)). Learning is up to the child. JUST like it is in public/private/any school environment.
If I could pick out a primary tenet of "unschooling" it's that "School doesn't just happen in between the rings of a bell". My daughter responds to kids she hangs out with who say, with awe "You mean you never go to school?" with a sometimes wistful "No, it means I'm always in school." Really. When in your life after you leave formalized education do you study a subject, a bell rings and you change subjects? Sure it may happen from time to time (phone rings, time for an appointment) but not every hour of every day. This is what unschooling is against.
You do end up with some odd results. My daughter didn't start reading until what I consider rather late (8-ish). OTOH, now that she IS reading, she reads at a very high rate with high comprehension & retention. Weirdly, she also INSISTS that we taught her to read, when we did no such thing. (Unless you count us reading to her or helping her learn the spelling and structures of words).
Socialization? C'mon be serious. She's been in about 10 plays, does science workshops, is getting ready to do a project where kids take on roles in the running of a small "city". She's done philosophy clubs, baseball and rocketry, nature studies, fencing and archery, goes to YMCA summer camps - she's dealt with many of the "social" issues folks have brought up & in a much more controlled environment than "and the teacher mentioned this has been going on for weeks."
Downsides? Nerve-making for the parents (at least for me). There's no one else to "blame" if anything goes south, although so far, so good. It's a little hectic sometimes, but when I really sit back and think about it - I'd have killed to have had this kind of opportunity when I was a kid. Which is definitely something that makes me think it's worth it.
Anyways, like I said, just some thoughts - I'm just one parent who unschools, and figured I'd throw in my $.02.
I was "unschooled". My family owned a bakery and we sold our baked goods at bi-weekly markets. I learned math by doing change in my head. Although, most of my day was spent either on the computer or watching the TV. When I finally decided to go to school (I was 15) it was a rough first semester. I eventually graduated with a 3.6 GPA with AP psychology under my belt. I got a 1200 on my SATs and a general score of 92 on my ASVAB. I don't think it was all bad. My social development did suffer and I'm not going to do it with my kids, but I think it can be very effective for children who don't learn well in a classroom environment.
I do have a few observations on the subject. My wife and I became disillusioned with public school after seeing the results our son was coming home with. We did not have the money for private education so we had to figure out something on our own. We called it homeschooling.
We discovered that there are 2 groups.
The first wants more structure in a child's life than school offers. These people tend to be religious types.
The other group wants less structure. These tend to be the unschoolers.
In the end, it does not seem to matter. Both groups get involved with the kids. The kids benefit.
When our friends reacted to the fact that we were homeschooling, a few things happened:
1.Is it legal?
2.You don't have a credential? How could you possibly be qualified?
3.How do you tolerate being with your kids all day?
4.My kids don't listen to me. You must be a saint.
5.What about the "socialization?"
6.And (mostly from teachers) If I had to raise my kids again, I would definitely homeschool.
Fifteen years later, we have our 2 sons (now 18 and 20):
1.Each of them has 2 black belts (Iaido and Jujutsu)
2.Both of them are Eagle Scouts
3.One of them started college at 15. The other started college at 13.
4.Both of them are straight 'A' students.
5.Both of them are employed.
I enjoy their company. We have great fun talking around the kitchen table. They bring their friends over and we enjoy them too.
We did make compromises. Homeschooling does take time. My software business would be more successful if I had devoted the same time to it.
My wife and I don't regret a single minute we spent homeschooling our sons. And, we could not be prouder.
At one end of the spectrum unschooling, at the other a top-down, here are the facts you must know system (which is roughly where we are now). Where do we want to be on the spectrum? Whatever your innate predisposition is, it's worth mentioning that this question is very complex and not completely understood question. In California in the 60s, there was a move by educators to replace grammar focused primary education with lots of book reading. The idea was that learning grammar rules was boring and it would be much more effective to read books and learn by doing. It failed miserably and the state quickly reverted back to the traditional approach. My take is, little kids are already pretty curious about how things work and they just want the structural content so they can get up to speed as quickly as possible. On the flip side of this, there have been quite a few studies showing that little kids engage in all kinds of problem solving and learning when they're playing. Trying to force facts into their heads (flash cards, etc.) isn't terribly useful. A mathematics professor I knew once mentioned the appalling low percentage (~10-20% from memory) of math phds who publish more than one paper. I suggested this was evidence of a structural failure in higher education. The authoritarian information transfer model we currently have doesn't produce people who are capable of independent, creative problem solving because they've never had to do it until the very end of their education. His counter was that you had to know a huge amount of information before you could engage in actual problem solving (ie, you can't read before you know grammar). My own personal opinion is that the 'illusion of self-discovery' model is best. That's where you have a teacher who gets you to ask the right questions and pushes/helps when you get stuck as well as paces you according to your ability. But here too, there are problems. Realistically, high schools can't even find enough teachers who have basic science/math skills, much less ones able to provide the 'illusion of self-discovery'. More subtly, as anyone who's ever had to teach at high school+ level, most teenagers are concerned with sex and social relationships. They don't want to learn stuff they don't think is useful and they're smart enough to game any system. How do you get someone who doesn't want to listen to ask the right questions? It might even be that there exist different learning styles in the same way that there seem to be distinct personality types. Perhaps some people learn well in information transfer environments and others in self-discovery ones. How do you build an education system around that?
Here's a successful group of schools who accomplish just what the OP talks about: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudbury_Valley_School
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
"No, the purpose of the educational system in the U.S. is to create dumbed down people that will vote for Democrats *and* Republicans that promise to "give them more stuff"!"
There; corrected for you.
"An informed electorate that would have been forced to understand just the basics of civics would never have elected our current President."
You are absolutly right. But an informed electorate that would have been forced to understand just the basics of civics would never have elected your former President either.
Start by reading John Holt. Your job as an unschooling parent is to introduce your child to as many things as possible. You are not an educator you are a facilitator. You aren't leaving your child alone to kill himself taking apart a TV. You are actively involved with the things your child is interested in, even if you aren't. You let go of the expectation that your child will be an Engineer like you are. Maybe your kid wants to be a doctor, or a balet dancer? That is what is meant by child-led learning. If your child really wants to be an Engineer and has your support they will do everything they need to become one, and excel at it. Colleges love accepting kids like that because that is a kid that is pursuing something that they are excited and passionate about, not just because their parents or high school guidance councilor told them it was a good career choice. Not everybody needs tons of money to be happy. Plenty of suicides happen on yachts. On the other hand, that's exactly what makes some people happy, and it's the job of a parent to recognize what really makes their child tick and encourage them and provide them with whatever they need to succeed in those pursuits. Your not teaching them subjects, your demonstrating for them how to learn.
Round this neighborhood of inner eastside PDX lots of folks are unschooling. The ones I know are middle and upper income, or at least highly educated and downwardly mobile. They bring a lot to the table for their kids.
Plenty of kids need to be rescued by public schools from their home environments, but many home environments are richer than the available public school or private school environment, particularly if you appreciate all the kinds of ladders that kids can use to grow.
The work of education is providing the ladders to climb on. Only the child can climb the ladders.
The guy that sells me my weed was "unschooled"...
You clearly missed "nmae" in the title of his post.
and after this I'm heading over to digg to step it up a bit.
Unschool, unsmool. Schooling is a continuous part of life, not some sit in a box and be taught at thing. We've homeschooled all of our kids. They are doing college level work. They had already mastered all the pre-collage stuff by 12. Traditional schooling is designed to turn out good workers, square pegs to fit in square holes, and wastes a tremendous amount of time doing so.
I'm shocked by the amount of ignorance in the comments here about schooling and the reason for alternatives. I can only think the "Stockholm Syndrome" is in play. With that said, I did not understand these issue when I was in school, either, and I resisted accepting them even when they were pointed out once or twice back then.
Some links:
"John Taylor Gatto - State Controlled Consciousness"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ogCc8ObiwQ
http://www.school-survival.net/
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/200909/why-don-t-students-school-well-duhhhh
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html
http://www.disciplined-minds.com/
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/18s.htm
http://homeschooling.gomilpitas.com/
http://www.greenmoneyjournal.com/article.mpl?articleid=195&newsletterid=1
http://web.archive.org/web/20071014123355/http://www.social-ecology.org/article.php?story=20031028151034651
http://www.chrismercogliano.com/freeschool.htm
http://www.holtgws.com/faqabouthomescho.html
My writings:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/towards-a-post-scarcity-new-york-state-of-mind.html
http://www.pdfernhout.net/the-war-play-dilemma.html
http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html
From:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeschooling
"""
During this time, the American educational professionals Raymond and Dorothy
Moore began to research the academic validity of the rapidly growing Early
Childhood Education movement. This research included independent studies by
other researchers and a review of over 8,000 studies bearing on Early
Childhood Education and the physical and mental development of children.
They asserted that formal schooling before ages 8-12 not only lacked the
anticipated effectiveness, but was actually harmful to children. The Moores
began to publish their view that formal schooling was damaging young
children academically, socially, mentally, and even physiologically. They
presented evidence that childhood problems such as juvenile delinquency,
nearsightedness, increased enrollment of students in special education
classes, and behavioral problems were the result of increasingly earlier
enrollment of students.[9] The Moores cited studies demonstrating that
orphans who were given surrogate mothers were measurably more intelligent,
with superior long term effects - even though the mothers were mentally
retarded teenagers - and that illiterate tribal mothers in Africa produced
children who were socially and emotionally more advanced than typical
western children, by western standards of measurement.[9]
Their primary assertion was that the bonds and emotional development made
at home with parents during these years produced critical long term results
that were cut short by enro
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
I usually encounter them at the grocery store or the local fast food place; I guess "unschooling" lesson #1 is "Would you like fries with that?" Lesson #2 followed quickly: "Paper or plastic?"
If everyone tried to home school it would be an utter disaster, imho... the school system does an OK job for the masses. Home schooling can probably very well for a few. Kind of like how a few people can make a living making balloon animals down at the beach; but if everyone tried...
From an essay I wrote almost three years ago: ... With all that technological success in other areas, why are schools still considered a problem area, see: ...
"Why Educational Technology Has Failed Schools"
http://patapata.sourceforge.net/WhyEducationalTechnologyHasFailedSchools.html
"""
"To fix US schools, [bipartisan] panel says, start over"
http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/1215/p01s01-ussc.html
Or in other words, why has technology failed in compulsory schools? Clearly something is wrong here -- technology is helping make these other places more productive and more flexible -- but in schools, there is not much change, despite a huge expenditure in technology and training.
Ultimately, educational technology's greatest value is in supporting "learning on demand" based on interest or need which is at the opposite end of the spectrum compared to "learning just in case" based on someone else's demand. Compulsory schools don't usually traffic in "learning on demand", for the most part leaving that kind of activity to libraries or museums or the home or business or the "real world". In order for compulsory schools to make use of the best of educational technology and what is has to offer, schools themselves must change.
But, history has shown schools extremely resistant to change. Consider for
example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Caldwell_Holt
From there: "After many years of working within the school system, Holt became disillusioned with it. He became convinced that reform of the school system was not possible because it was fundamentally flawed. Thus, he became an advocate of homeschooling. It was not helpful, however, to simply remove children from the school environment if parents simply re-created it at home. Holt believed that children did not need to be coerced into learning; they would do so naturally if given the freedom to follow their own interests and a rich assortment of resources. This line of thought became known as unschooling."
And it also turns out, based on psychological studies, that for creative work (as opposed to ditch digging), reward is often not a motivator, and creativity and intrinsic interest diminish if a task is done for gain:
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/motivation.html
This finding calls into question the entire notion of a scarcity-based ideology oriented around exchanging ration-units for creative goods, as opposed to a "gift economy", such as drives GNU/Linux.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gift_economy
So, if most of what people do is not related to growing food or making things, then a system based around material rewards doesn't make much sense. And it turns out, a lot of difficult work is quite interesting, if you are not forced to do it -- where the work (and success at a challenging task) is its own reward.
But then is compulsory schooling really needed when people live in such a way? In a gift economy, driven by the power of imagination, backed by automation like matter replicators and flexible robotics to do the drudgery, isn't there plenty of time and opportunity to learn everything you need to know? Do people still need to be forced to learn how to sit in one place for hours at a time? When people actually want to learn something like reading or basic arithmetic, it only takes around 50 contact hours or less to give them the basics, and then they can bootstrap themselves as far as they want to go. Why are the other 10000 hours or so of a child's time needed in "school"? Especially when even poorest kids in Ind
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Ohmygosh...unschooling is so NOT NOT NOT new! It's been around for years and years..it's just another flavor of homeschooling. It's been around as a recognized style of homeschooling since *at least* the 70s, when it was widely written about by educator John Holt.
Nice that the mainstream media, and Slashdot, have discovered it 'suddenly' 30 years later.
I was unschooled past 4th grade.
I own a small ISP and computer repair shop.
I was working at 13, doing tech support for the company I now own.
I spent time in the theater. I explored Canada. I biked the west coast of the USA.
All in all, it was a rocking way to live. It still is.
I learned calculus last year. Finally had a use for it. Made perfect sense, since I had a reason to.
Learned trigonometry engineering the house my parents built. Dad learned with me, since he'd forgotten what he learned in school.
Unleash the kids on slashdot, show them how to post a comment, and tell them to have as much fun as possible.
Buy them books from the GNAA's reading list (or whatever that org / its successors are called nowadays).
Tomorrow's lesson is how to pwn newbs in world of warcraft, sell off their gear for real-$$$ profit.
And on Friday... all about Linux boxen and how to root them....
Just please don't teach them how to send e-mail spam.
For some subjects, absolutely. I'm still wishing, however, that our local schools' science departments would emphasize the observation/experience connection to wonderment and hypotheses. Instead, we have a (very well ranked) system that focuses heavily on standardized tests (which is probably why they are ranked so high).
Your monitor is staring at you.
I know a good number of people who unschooled and came out just fine, some even excelling in whatever they put their mind to. Same thing with homeschoolers. Same thing with kids who went to a normal school. On the flipside, there've been quite a few people who've come out of all of those systems maladjusted. It isn't really the systems themselves that are good/bad, it's what actually happens during one's education.
Traditional schooling sucks because the teachers can't help every single person individually, you have to go at the pace of the slowest student to avoid losing them, and the rigid scheduling prevents students from exploring in greater depth things which interest them. Homeschooling sucks because it depends upon the teaching ability and education of the parent. Unschooling sucks because if you don't have the self-discipline and resources to go about it, you'll never get anywhere.
Personally, I'm a Senior in HS right now. I make pretty good grades, get all my shit done right and on time, etc. However, in my Junior year, my chem class spent half a month learning the basics of polyatomic ions. I just skipped ahead in the textbook, but still, sitting there for two weeks doing nothing but worksheets until everyone got it and reading ahead once you got done was draining. In addition, being a student in a public school is very impersonal and dehumanizing. Feels like you're just a political pawn for the local school board, the administration, the teacher's union, etc. to argue about. There's so many examples of stupid decisions that hurt the actual education going on in the school because the "adults" up top are too busy playing politics.
Unschooling isn't the end-all-be-all of education. Neither is homeschooling or traditional schooling. Quite simply, different people learn in different ways, and I think the schooling system should change to recognize that. If I cannot learn from traditional classroom instruction, there should be alternatives.
In before "Well, it'll prepare you for the real world." I'm quite used to the real world and most everyone can work within a structured environment by the end of 3rd grade. Furthermore, such arguments have no place in an institution that is supposed to be educating the next generation.
... and it certainly won't be "unschooling."
We are going to home-school our children because the education system simply isn't equipped to teach them what we can. I have two graduate degrees in Electrical and Chemical Engineering. My significant other will soon be finishing her degrees in English, Chemistry, and Veterinary Medicine.
We each have fluency five languages. I speak English, Spanish, Portuguese (both Brazilian and Portuguese), Mandarin Chinese, and Russian. She speaks English, French, Italian, Hebrew, and Arabic.
Our plan is for each of them to graduate college by the time they are 16. Our 3 year old already speaks three languages fluently, and our 7 year old just aced her placement tests for AP calculus. She won't need the entire school year to learn the tiny amount actual calculus needed to score perfectly on the AP exam, so it will be quite inconvenient that she will have to wait until May to take the exam. Anyway, our youngest just spoke her first word this week. She said, "cachorrinho," which is what we call our dog when we do not use his proper name (It's Portuguese for "puppy"). I didn't think her first word would be in Portuguese. We were betting on French since she likes so much to hear her mom speak in that language. Oh well.
I think the idea of allowing just anyone to home-school their children is quite abhorrent. "Un-schooling" sounds as barbaric as it does foolish. Children left to learn at their own pace will neither feel challenged, nor take any opportunity to rise to the occasion. Our children seek out new challenges all the time, and sometimes I find it difficult to keep up with their curiosities.
"Classrooms of the Heart - John Gatto (1991)"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=26DvPQ7EIQ4
He was New York State Teacher of the Year for 1991.
Essentially, he did a lot of unschooling in the context of a classroom, often by breaking the rules in various ways.
He says there something like: "I don't teach the kid that education is bad; I teach them that schooling is bad... Confining people in rooms and monitoring everything they do all the time could not fit in any definition of education through the ages..."
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
I have my suspicions that this initiative is being supported by boost mobile. only idiots would fall for it. /i fucking hate boost for those phrases.
unoverag'd uncontract'd unwrong'd unschool'd.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uexMYBkfCic
See also a longer written history that goes back farther (to Plato): ... Resistance"
"The Emergence of Compulsory Schooling and
http://web.archive.org/web/20071014123355/http://www.social-ecology.org/article.php?story=20031028151034651
However, redistributing wealth towards families with kids is still a good idea IMHO, or in more general, a basic income:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/towards-a-post-scarcity-new-york-state-of-mind.html
So, I part company with Propertarian-libertarians on that (many of whom would just eliminate schools as well as the wealth redistribution aspects, leaving families with children with no formal social support in an industrialized society now in the midst of "The Two Income Trap").
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2004/11/two-income-trap
The makers of that video:
http://www.freedomofeducation.net/
The more general issue:
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Is that those poor kids just getting dumped at school with no support from the parents at least have a CHANCE at learning. They may not choose to, but they CAN. Should the decide they want to learn, there is an environment there where they can. At least some (probalby most) of the teachers will care enough to provide extra help if asked and so on.
Now, suppose they were "unschooled." Well, doubtless their parents, being lazy and uncaring, would take that to mean "let the kid do whatever they want." They'd have no chance, because they'd have no support. Their parents would, at most, buy them some books in what they asked for but would they even know what to ask for? More than likely they'd just be left up to their own devices and thus learn very little.
So basically what it comes down to is that if the parents care and spend time, a kid will probably do well no matter what. I'd argue that they'll still get a better education with public school since there are teachers there that know things the parents don't, but all in all the kid will get a good education regardless of the method because the parents will put forth the effort to make it so. However for the kids with parents that don't care, well their ONLY hope is to go to a school of some kind. Home/unschooling guarantees failure because it relies on parents that don't care. Public school can't make them succeed, but it can give them a chance.
Sandra Dodd http://sandradodd.com/ is on the "radical" side (where the philosophy extends to all aspects of parenting). There are others who are less extreme. One can contrast her points with, say, "Christian Unschooling" for another perspective:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=christian+unschooling
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
As John Taylor Gatto suggests, if you can only keep your kids out of school for a few years, the early years are most important to avoid. ...
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/18s.htm
"""
What to do?
Take Melville's insight "I would prefer not to," from Bartleby, the Scrivener and make it your own watchword. Read Tolstoy's Death of Ivan Ilych for a shock of inspiration about what really matters. Breaking the hold of fear on your life is the necessary first step. If you can keep your kid out of any part of the school sequence at all, keep him or her out of kindergarten, then first, second, and maybe third grade. Homeschool them at least that far through the zone where most of the damage is done. If you can manage that, they'll be okay.
Don't let a world of funny animals, dancing alphabet letters, pastel colors, and treacly music suffocate your little boy or girl's consciousness at exactly the moment when big questions about the world beckon. Funny animals were invented by North German social engineers; they knew something important about fantasy and social engineering that you should teach yourself.
Your four-year-old wants to play? Let him help you cook dinner for real, fix the toilet, clean the house, build a wall, sing "Eine Feste Burg." Give her a map, a mirror, and a wristwatch, let her chart the world in which she really lives. You will be able to tell from the joy she displays that becoming strong and useful is the best play of all. Pure games are okay, too, but not day in, day out. Not a prison of games. There isn't a single formula for breaking out of the trap, only a general one you tailor to your own specifications.
"""
So, by the time a kid is ten or so, they may be tough enough to survive in a prison-like environment as most schools without as much damage. Some might even thrive on it as long is they choose it themselves and know they can leave. Different kids have different needs and interests.
""Why Don't Students Like School?" Well, Duhhhh... "
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/200909/why-don-t-students-school-well-duhhhh
Unfortunately, for many kids, it is the opposite way usually, with school before homeschooling. The parents try school for a few years, when the most damage is done, and then homeschool the rest of the time after not liking the results of schooling. They may spend years trying to undo schooling and try to get kids to love learning again, and helping children unlearn a lot of consumerism, excessive stereotyped war-play, and a bad self-image that often comes from all that (of having your main role models be an authoritarian teacher and media-absorbed age-mates). A review of a related book I recommend to everyone that goes into some of these issues:
"The War Play Dilemma"
http://www.pdfernhout.net/the-war-play-dilemma.html
Just to be clear, I think many school teachers are wonderful people trying their hardest to make a broken system work as best as they can. It's the "abstraction that has escaped its handlers" (Gatto's phrase) that is evil, not most of the people who are trapped inside that system.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/prologue6.htm ... ...
"""
Old-fashioned dumbness used to be simple ignorance; now it is transformed from ignorance into permanent mathematical categories of relative stupidity like "gifted and talented," "mainstream," "special ed." Categories in which learning is rationed for the good of a system of order. Dumb people are no longer merely ignorant. Now they are indoctrinated, their minds conditioned with substantial doses of commercially prepared disinformation dispensed for tranquilizing purposes.
The new dumbness is particularly deadly to middle- and upper-middle-class kids already made shallow by multiple pressures to conform imposed by the outside world on their usually lightly rooted parents. When they come of age, they are certain they must know something because their degrees and licenses say they do. They remain so convinced until an unexpectedly brutal divorce, a corporate downsizing in midlife, or panic attacks of meaninglessness upset the precarious balance of their incomplete humanity, their stillborn adult lives. Alan Bullock, the English historian, said Evil was a state of incompetence. If true, our school adventure has filled the twentieth century with evil.
Once the best children are broken to such a system, they disintegrate morally, becoming dependent on group approval. A National Merit Scholar in my own family once wrote that her dream was to be "a small part in a great machine." It broke my heart. What kids dumbed down by schooling can't do is to think for themselves or ever be at rest for very long without feeling crazy; stupefied boys and girls reveal dependence in many ways easily exploitable by their knowledgeable elders.
According to all official analysis, dumbness isn't taught (as I claim), but is innate in a great percentage of what has come to be called "the workforce." Workforce itself is a term that should tell you much about the mind that governs modern society. According to official reports, only a small fraction of the population is capable of what you and I call mental life: creative thought, analytical thought, judgmental thought, a trio occupying the three highest positions on Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives. Just how small a fraction would shock you. According to experts, the bulk of the mob is hopelessly dumb, even dangerously so. Perhaps you're a willing accomplice to this social coup which revived the English class system. Certainly you are if your own child has been rewarded with a "gifted and talented" label by your local school. This is what Dewey means by "proper" social order.
If you believe nothing can be done for the dumb except kindness, because it's biology (the bell-curve model); if you believe capitalist oppressors have ruined the dumb because they are bad people (the neo-Marxist model); if you believe dumbness reflects depraved moral fiber (the Calvinist model); or that it's nature's way of disqualifying boobies from the reproduction sweepstakes (the Darwinian model); or nature's way of providing someone to clean your toilet (the pragmatic elitist model); or that it's evidence of bad karma (the Buddhist model); if you believe any of the various explanations given for the position of the dumb in the social order we have, then you will be forced to concur that a vast bureaucracy is indeed necessary to address the dumb. Otherwise they would murder us in our beds.
The shocking possibility that dumb people don't exist in sufficient numbers to warrant the careers devoted to tending to them will seem incredible to you. Yet that is my proposition: Mass dumbness first had to be imagined; it isn't real.
Once the dumb are wished into existence, they serve valuable functions: as a danger to themselves and others they have to be watched, classified, disciplined, trained, medicated, sterilized, ghettoized, cajo
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
"When the child says "well none of that seems fun!" the school then beats the child emotionally, mentally and/or physically, to get rid of their curiosity, because it is a distraction from the work to be done."
Well, some of the kids are cultivated to have "assignable curiosity":
http://disciplinedminds.tripod.com/radical-teacher.htm
"""
A key to creating docile professionals is professional training. Through their training, budding professionals learn to orient their intellectual effort to tasks assigned to them. Schmidt has a wonderful expression for this: "assignable curiosity." Children are naturally curious about all sorts of things. Along the road to becoming a professional, they learn how to orient this curiosity to tasks assigned by others.
Consider, for example, a typical essay in a university class. The teacher sets the topic and the students write on it. To do really well, students need to figure out what will please the teacher. If the teacher had assigned a completely different topic, the conscientious student would have directed effort to that topic. Well-trained students do not even think about writing about topics that are not assigned. They wait to be told where to direct their curiosity.
Schmidt has a teaching credential and has taught junior high school math in Pasadena, California and in El Salvador. However, it is his experiences pursuing a PhD in physics that come through most strongly in Disciplined Minds. "Assignable curiosity" has a special significance for researchers. Military funding of science, for example, works well to direct research into military-relevant directions because scientists are willing to take up whatever project is offering. When scientists put in research proposals to military funders, they anticipate what will be most useful and attractive for military purposes, while maintaining the illusion that they are directing the research.
"""
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
http://sandradodd.com/socialization/
"""
But I try to explain that unschooling works because all kids, regardless of their so-called intelligence quotients, thrive when they get to pursue what matters to them. I know a lot of unschoolers, and they are all bright and amazing. Most of the time, I have no idea--literally NONE--where those kids would rank in a classroom setting or how they would score on a standardized test. Who cares?
WHO CARES?
What matters is that they are bright, happy, interesting, accomplished, engaged and engaging. Unschooling doesn't only work for kids of "above-average intelligence," or kids whose parents are teachers, or kids who can recite the alphabet while twirling a baton, or any other limiting factor.
Unschooling works because the unschooled individual has the time and support to follow the interesting byways that lead to real learning.
"""
Why subject children to more than a decade of imprisonment when they are guilty of no crime except youth?
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm
"The shocking possibility that dumb people don't exist in sufficient numbers to warrant the millions of careers devoted to tending them will seem incredible to you. Yet that is my central proposition: the mass dumbness which justifies official schooling first had to be dreamed of; it isn't real. "
"Our official assumptions about the nature of modern childhood are dead wrong. Children allowed to take responsibility and given a serious part in the larger world are always superior to those merely permitted to play and be passive. At the age of twelve, Admiral Farragut got his first command. I was in fifth grade when I learned of this. Had Farragut gone to my school he would have been in seventh."
"The secret of American schooling is that it doesn't teach the way children learn and it isn't supposed to. It took seven years of reading and reflection to finally figure out that mass schooling of the young by force was a creation of the four great coal powers of the nineteenth century. Nearly one hundred years later, on April 11, 1933, Max Mason, president of the Rockefeller Foundation, announced to insiders that a comprehensive national program was underway to allow, in Mason's words, "the control of human behavior.""
"Something strange has been going on in government schools, especially where the matter of reading is concerned. Abundant data exist to show that by 1840 the incidence of complex literacy in the United States was between 93 and 100 percent, wherever such a thing mattered. Yet compulsory schooling existed nowhere. Between the two world wars, schoolmen seem to have been assigned the task of terminating our universal reading proficiency."
And so on...
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
This misses the point. While we all would like to believe that one guy with a great idea can change the world, the fact is that more often than not a million guys without a great idea can easily undo what the greatest minds have accomplished. That's the problem facing humanity, not that there are not good ideas out there or that new ideas aren't needed, its that we need to educate for respect for good ideas among ALL students and respect for the collective actions of ALL people because of the effects collective action can have.
They want their uneducated underclass back to grind into the machinery of the economy.
"The first thing to do when you find yourself in a hole is stop digging."
Any Slashdotters who have experience with 'unschooling?'"
i woz raized wit dis concept nn spend my hourz on youtube educating ma self, look at me now i thinks me is ok for a jobs ? lulz
It brings a smile to my face reading comments commending the inadequacy of the system for separating the grain from the sheaf, those who always felt smart enough for most tasks, and those who eventually succeeded in spite of everything. You see, you have 2 specially unprepared individuals, except for their respective pathologies, whereby the idolatry perpetuated by pathologically successful effectively creates the cesspool seen as required for the creation of more pathologically driven individuals. Perpetuation of the species?
Anyways, if we, as a society, can't agree upon on what is actually important, Practical Knowledge or Erudition, street smarts and books smarts, populism or elitism, perhaps it would be worthwhile to forgo both and invest in improving artistic, logical and semantical(or as defined by psychology, such as logical, linguistic, spatial, musical, kinesthetic, naturalist, intrapersonal and interpersonal) skills in the young, when they first went the education system. Replace kindergarten and first to fourth grade teachers with only the well spoken, unprejudiced, and emotionally mature. Perhaps a rotational system were teachers are forced out of their comfort level, and all teachers are at least high school level.
La Morte e il Nulla. E vecchia fola il Ciel.
"a major component of schooling is in fact /just being in school/ so you'll be, hopefully, a vaguely functional human being who can navigate all the various and sundry organizations of life and put up with all the other dysfunctional members of the species with a minimum quantity of blood spilling."
Its not surprising to find so many "geniuses" on Slashdot, but in the end, eduction is not simply a function of the individual. It is also a function of society and humanity, particularly in its effect. There have been many great geniuses, but if you could ask Archimedes, Hepatia, Galois, Landau, or Hausdorff they might suggest that if only the masses had been better educated, their world might have turned out differently. It would be a profound mistake to think otherwise, regardless of your opinion of your peers.
Can't believe a bunch of you tagged this 'idiocracy'. Ignorant assholes.
Most of you probably don't even know many home/unschoolers. I do. The kids are incredible.
in the "School of Hard Knocks".
Regardless of what kind of political advice you are selling, the sad reality is that only a very small percentage of humanity will become critical thinkers, experts, or good at much of anything at all. The question is given that indisputable fact do we want the preponderant mass of humans in that category to learn perhaps something at all, or something about the cultural and social heritage that they share with others, or are we just content to be satisfied that since we personally are doing just fine, there's not really much of a need to care about the education of others and they can just get it wherever they can find it, if they can find it at all.
More often than not history teaches us that it is the uneducated, the stupid, the masses, and the "great minds" who were in charge but got it totally wrong, that determine the course of events. Oh yes, good ideas do come along and no doubt we try to take as much credit for them as we can, but the shear magnitude of the effects imposed by the behavior of the "vast majority" is what limits the direction of history and often the fates of the best and brightest as well, since its not always in their hands no matter what their intelligence or how wonderful their parents.
"In America, at least, I believe we still subscribe to the idea that regular human beings are fit to guide their own destinies. For me, that is the appeal of homeschool."
In principle this is great, but we no longer live in the era of Thomas Jefferson. Instead we live in a highly technological world, where even the most backward use machine guns and construct bombs and on a planet that contains about 6 billion inhabitants that probably can't sustainably support half that number. Just look around and ask yourself, is the environment I will leave to my offspring improving and is this totally unrelated to our present economic situation?
Without a VERY SERIOUS effort at improving COLLECTIVE educational systems, its going to be a hard slog to escape the "school of hard knocks", even for the home schooled, who tip the scales with IQs well above 300, who have a mother with the patience of Mother Theresa and the insight of Emmy Noether, and who have a father with the prowess of Alexander the Great and the financial resources of Abdullah Bin Abdul Aziz. Even they will be hard pressed to escape the effects of the other 6 billion, particularly when they are a poorly educated 6 billion with little knowledge of how to get out of their increasingly dire predicament. To put it bluntly, everyone's future depends on improving the COLLECTIVE education, including those who are presently fortunate enough to have multiple options.
I teach physics and computer science at a large high school. I have taught several homeschooled kids whose parents sent them to regular high school for whatever reason. They usually do quite well and I have never had any problems. This is to be expected - students who do well typically have parents who are engaged in their children's educations. This helps to explain the constantly above average test scores of homeschooled kids. If you norm out all the kids of unengaged parents from the general school population then homeschooled kids would be about average. I wonder how many unschooled kids grow up to be doctors, engineers, managers, executives, lawyers, teachers, nurses, researchers, pilots, biochemists, etc.?? My guess is not many. Finally, for those who are philosophically opposed to formal schooling, I have this question: Think of all the countries in the world that are wealthy, have high standards of living and high quality of life for the overwhelming majorities of their citizens, economic mobility, and in short are places people want to live. How many of them do NOT have compulsory, public education?
Those who can't do, can't teach.
(IANAL)
The problem I have with compulsory education is that it forces families to participate in something that may not be good for the child. In the USA, we have a lot of leftist educators who have abandoned academics and are using their classrooms as a platform for spreading political beliefs. We also have a lot of private Christian schools that push religion on the kids. I want my kids to be educated in academics, art, sports, and social skills - without the brainwashing. I also want them to be safe and to not be exposed to nymph teachers and drugged out kids. Leave sex, politics, and religion to the family. BTW, I know an "unschooled" kid who just got her pilot's license so maybe the numbers are growing.
Unschooling seems to me to be the home schooling equivalent of an educational theory known as "Free Market Education". In Free Market Education, students aren't restricted by compulsory learning units, and are instead encouraged to pursue whatever interests them. I make it sound pretty wishy-washy, but when I was at uni we did some extensive reading on the matter in my Futures class (a class specifically meant to study possible future trends in education and technology so we'd walk out of uni with relevant knowledge instead of skills and knowledge that were useful four years ago). Generally I think it's a nice ideal, but idealism seldom functions well in reality.
Every learner is different, and some people just aren't well suited toward math, for example. They'd benefit from a more linguistic or artistic education, and in a Free Market system, they'd not only be able to choose that from an early age, but they'd also be free to go back on that choice at any time. Within subjects this would mean that a student who struggles with arithmetic could jump ahead to algebra - I myself had a lot of trouble with math in primary school, but in high school, as soon as the math became more about concepts and problem solving than pure number crunching, I did quite well.
Admit it. You post strawman arguments as AC so you get modded Insightful for refuting them, rather than Troll
I remember being told about this girl who was "unschooled". Her parents didn't force her to learn anything she wasn't interested in.
The result?
At the age of 10 years, she was an avid botanist, both intellectually and practically.
She was also quite well-versed in U.S. Law, being able to cite many supreme court decisions, etc.
Here's the clincher -- she could not read!
I'm not sure what to think of that, but it's certainly interesting. The average college grad doesn't know much botany OR law, and both have enormous practical use.
Assumably her parents were quite devoted to her "education", as they would have had to spend considerable time explaining, and later researching things, which she could have read herself if she'd been inclined to learn that skill. Actually, IIRC, she had decided at that age that she'd better learn to read so that she could absorb knowledge better without requiring her parents' time. A responsible decision, I suppose, for a 10-y/o.
It's also just a story I heard, so one can take it with the obligatory grain of salt.
At the same time, even if I haven't remembered correctly, or if the story as related to me so many years ago was less-than-accurate, I must say that I think it is plausible. Kids have a remarkable ability to memorize stuff. The skills to use the knowledge she'd absorbed in a meaningful way are learned later in life. It's nice to have a body of knowledge well-memorized, though, and that's what kids are good at!
~D.
The basic premise of letting children learn at their own pace sounds a lot like Montessori schools, which can work out well. Of course, Montessori schools are a lot better organized than a random (even self-selected) parent would be, and the teachers still pay attention as to whether some kids may completely slack off or fail in an important area.
However just you try asking your local public education authority for their 'syllabus' for the 12 Rs. (Reading / wRiting / aRithmetic / Relationships / Reviewing / Responsibility / Reflecting / Researching / Reporting / Reasoning / Remembering / Resolve) of essential basic education.
While you're at it ask about their understanding of the 12 Maturities (Ambition / Sociable personality / Fitness and good health / Curiosity, enthusiasm for learning and knowledge / Confidence / Stand up for principles / Develop and defend own opinions. / Artistic appreciation and accomplishment / Empathy / Excellence of Rs / Imagination and abstract thought / Temptation [ie. Awareness and resistance. Self discipline] ) Read more
Traditional schooling might cover many of the Rs by chance or incidentally won't assess all the Rs and won't have formal methods for remediation. At least home-schoolers can set up their own system that is explicit. Of course having a formal framework for education doesn't mean there has to be a formal structure to learning. (Education is the end-point, learning is the journey.)
Why is it that every argument for alternatives to school focus on the single aspect of public schools needing to teach to the average student. A lot more than memorizing the times table happens in schools. Also, since most schools in America have barely a 6 hour day, what's preventing all the anti-public-schoolites from "unschooling" or "home schooling" their kids at some point during the other 18 hours each day? Just once I'd like to see someone with an alternative to public schools show me how their idea will scale, because that's what is required for public schools to function. Home schooling works because only those for whom it works do it. I assume the only reason "unschooling" is demonstrating any level of success is because there is a similar bias based on those using it. Take any of these methods and roll them out across the city of Detroit. Show me those numbers and then I'll tell you whether your idea is better or worse than public schools.
Finally! An article I can tag "Billy Jack". What?? You guys haven't seen BILLY JACK?!
It's so awful it's really good, just trust me on this, think MST3K with hippies instead of aliens.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
i mean we are learning all the time
It's about time this sort of thing hit the news. My wife and I made the decision 25 years ago in favor of "unschooling," a term already then in use, when our oldest child was about five years old and it was time to start thinking about schools. He is now 30, the youngest of our four is 21, all were unschooled exactly in keeping with the principles outlined in this article: that all of life is learning. All of these four, by the way, have gone on to higher education (their first real "school" experiences) and three of the four now have good jobs in information technology, while the other continues his further education. The same three, by the way, have worked in IT in our local public school system, and one now does the same kind of work for a community college.
Hey, as long as you don't have to go to unschool on your unbirthday, I'm all for it. /sarcasm
Software developers that learned coding through tutorials and playing around are "unschooled" they are the bane of anyone with a formal software engineering training who has had to fix, replace, or worse, work with the developer's code. What's the difference between a SW Engineer and a Developer? A Developer is not done until he/sh has added everything they can think of - an Engineer is not done until he/she has removed everything not absolutely necessary.
Lots of jobs don't require much literacy, which is one reason schools are getting worse and worse at teaching basic literacy, even as they still stamp out initiative and creativity in many cases. :-( From John Taylor Gatto:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm
"""
I'll bring this down to earth. Try to see that an intricately subordinated industrial/commercial system has only limited use for hundreds of millions of self-reliant, resourceful readers and critical thinkers. In an egalitarian, entrepreneurially based economy of confederated families like the one the Amish have or the Mondragon folk in the Basque region of Spain, any number of self-reliant people can be accommodated usefully, but not in a concentrated command-type economy like our own. Where on earth would they fit? In a great fanfare of moral fervor some years back, the Ford Motor Company opened the world's most productive auto engine plant in Chihuahua, Mexico. It insisted on hiring employees with 50 percent more school training than the Mexican norm of six years, but as time passed Ford removed its requirements and began to hire school dropouts, training them quite well in four to twelve weeks. The hype that education is essential to robot-like work was quietly abandoned. Our economy has no adequate outlet of expression for its artists, dancers, poets, painters, farmers, filmmakers, wildcat business people, handcraft workers, whiskey makers, intellectuals, or a thousand other useful human enterprises--no outlet except corporate work or fringe slots on the periphery of things. Unless you do "creative" work the company way, you run afoul of a host of laws and regulations put on the books to control the dangerous products of imagination which can never be safely tolerated by a centralized command system.
"""
This robot is not very literate, but it will probably eventually take many jobs away:
http://www.hizook.com/blog/2009/08/03/high-speed-robot-hand-demonstrates-dexterity-and-skillful-manipulation
"A few blogs are passing around videos of the Ishikawa Komuro Lab's high-speed robot hand performing impressive acts of dexterity and skillful manipulation. However, the video being passed around is slight on details. Meanwhile, their video presentation at ICRA 2009 (which took place in May in Kobe, Japan) has an informative narration and demonstrates additional capabilities. I have included this video below, which shows the manipulator dribbling a ping-pong ball, spinning a pen, throwing a ball, tying knots, grasping a grain of rice with tweezers, and tossing / re-grasping a cellphone!"
We need to rethink many things about our society and economy -- and compulsory schooling is interwoven with the notion of a command economy based on rationing and a scarcity-mindset. We need post-scarcity education to go with a post-scarcity economy. A related sci-fi story by Marshall Brain:
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Sounds like montessori
"Any Slashdotters who have experience with 'unschooling?'""
Its called summer vacation.
Except that right now a very vocal section of my local population is basically brainwashed from birth into believing a rather extreme variation on Christianity.
Part of how they accomplish this is by home schooling the children.
Ever tried listening to a political debate between two democrats? Or a religious debate between 2 church members?
Preaching to the choir is silly, but social exclusion is a great way to prevent dissenting opinions and/or honest debate and/or independent thought.
If you can keep your children from ever hearing the other side of a debate, you can prevent them from ever questioning whether or not you are right. This is not a good thin in my opinion.
And school is a great place to learn new things.
My diatribe is a bit too long for this blog so I posted here: http://www.rhmarlowe.com/Homeschooling.htm
I homeschooled my daughters. No, I unschooled them. No, I homeschooled them. Sheesh. "Unschooling" is a term that (principally) secular homeschoolers use to distinguish what they do from the "correspondence-course" style curricula that tends to be more common in the non-secular homeschooling community (yes, they are two related but distinct groups). That didn't mean "playing video games all day". It meant finding areas of relevance and interest, and crossing a lot of boundaries: history, literature, philosophy, foundations of science aren't separate 'subjects'. Example at random: people used leeches (yech) medically, for centuries: why? That kind of question, and everything you unearth by following it up, is an unschooling "subject". Unschooling my girls also meant the education for myself that I had missed out on in school.
I was unschooled (although it was supposed to be homeschooling) from about halfway through 3rd grade, until 8th grade when I went back to public schools. In retrospect, I probably should have gone back earlier, but it's too late now.
In elementary school, I was one of, if not the, smartest kids there. Most of the classes were boring or uninteresting for me. In my group reading class, everyone else read at about 1 word per second (and then got stuck on every other word longer than four letters) and I couldn't even read that slow if I tried. But if you read ahead to yourself instead of reading along with the others, you would get yelled at. My mom wanted to get me moved up a grade, but the principal (or whoever is in charge of those things) refused because he said that it would be detrimental to my social life or something like that. I did get moved into a third grade reading class (this was in first grade), but that wasn't that much better (even now in 10th grade, I rage when someone can't pronounce relatively simple words). I also went into an enrichment program after school once a week and that was one of the few things I enjoyed.
I don't remember much of second grade or third grade until I had to take a certain standardized test. I had to read a short story (about an immature talking pig named PigPig) named PigPig Grows Up that ended, if I recall correctly, with PigPig saving a baby carriage from rolling down some stairs or something. One of the questions asked how PigPig grew up. I didn't answer it because I didn't think he did. I said that there was 'no good answer'. So, I ended up getting sent to the principal, who is a disciplinarian and a huge asshole. I don't remember what happened there, but the next day I was so pissed at school that I just refused to go. She tried to drag me there a few times but eventually she gave up and homeschooled me.
So, I started homeschooling and it went fine for a while. After a while, I pretty much just played video games and watched the discovery/science channel. And I still learned a lot. The summary is surprisingly accurate; I actually got most of my knowledge of grammar and spelling from playing WoW (there were a lot of grammar nazis in trade chat).
But straight unschooling is probably a bad idea if you're not a very motivated person like I'm not. I almost failed English in 9th grade because I've never really written an essay (plus my teacher was a bitch and had no teaching experience). I didn't learn any math while I was unschooled, so I ended up going into Algebra 1A with a 3rd grade math education. I actually did well in that class and understood it better than most of my classmates. I'm surprised that I still have a better knowledge of science than the kids in my honors science classes, even though they have 5 years of school on me. But I still lack in some areas because I just never took certain classes. Unschooling is great, but if the kid only learns the things that they're interested in, they're going to have a hard time because they won't know about everything else. Also social skills are important. I hope this post was somehow helpful to someone.
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tl;dr, lazy people shouldn't unschool because they probably won't learn certain things
Also, has anybody else noticed that it's impossible to click on the right side of the reply box?
It is stupid. ... nature ... ... the more they have it, right in their eyes, the more they'll NOT LEARN.
I mean...
I'm a portuguese guy, for about 30 years ago, we had the best school in Europe, today, we have the worst. Something strange? indeed, just because politiciens thought it would be better for little kids to feel more free in school.
You guys, who didn't ever though "I don't want to go today" throw the first stone. but, really, would you ever leared something if you never, ever went to there???
Take a look to some people (eg. gypsies) you guys know it, these people may know a lot about nature, but we (today's society) are much more than
Today, Internet, video games, chat etc. are everyday subject in newspappers and TV shows, you know it, children are getting addicted to these tecnologies, school is getting for behind day after day
personaly: I haven't ever been a good student, I passed 12 years in school, getting to the next step suddenly, today I still don't know... Once I finished I start working outhtere, I did some programming and installed small networks. One day I decided to go back to school. I'm going to the last year now, and I have the highest mark in my course. Indeed I learned a lot out from school, but seriously, nothing, nothing is directly nedded today in everyday lessons. It has a odd. I felt I needed to be good, so I putted a mark on my eyes. Today I spend all the day long looking to a computer, doing several things, such as programming, studing, reading to the Slashdot :D .... but ... no chat, no communication, it passes days, sometimes, weeks I don't go out with friends. I became so .... something, that simply I don't want to get out of home ...
Do we want this for our future sons??? I don't!!
Guilherme
http://xkcd.com/519/ I think this pretty much sums it up for me.
"Higher education" is really a medieval style guild system, and it has no place in modern society.
I don't see what is wrong with it. College is nice. They have computers, and you can go into people's offices and talk to them.
The only problem with higher education is the worship it receives from the semi-literate Boomer generation. People over 50 think that getting into Duke or Cornell is 'hard', and will pay $BB_LIFE_SAVINGS to send their kids to what is essentially a day camp full of vomiting, loveless intercourse, and FPS shooters.
The Boomers are essentially a spoiled generation that grew up with $0.75/gal gas, but never threw more than one concert. They had so much free land, money, and resources that it made them soft in the head. Like insects, they are experts at consuming. Thus, the average Boomer, doomed to making a measly $175/hr installing electrical boxes, thinks to himself, 'Man, these kids today are so lucky. If only I had access to Quake Team Fortress on a college lan, I could be making $25/hr sitting at a desk right now. It's a good thing I make $175/hr, because that's the only goddamn way anyone can save up $600,000 to send three kids to college.'
Then the Boomer drives his Hummer to Sports Authority, where he buys an UnderArmor shirt that says, 'Tort Reform' on it, and considers that in his entire life, he has never spent a dime on anything different than what his neighbors already have.
My wife was unschooled.
She got a BA in Philosophy with a 3.97 GPA (she got a C in public health... I still can't figure that one out..), along with a ton of awards. She is currently working on a PHD in Philosophy at a public ivy university on a full scholarship.
Her two siblings were also unschooled, and also graduated with honors, though not nearly as high as she did.
What it comes down to, though, is the people who are going to home or unschool are a self selected lot who are probably going to do a better job than a random idiot off the street, so YMMV.
________
Magnus frater spectat te
I Wuz hume un skoolled and tink it very good me ma let me learn by self - no big fat yella skool bus for me. Now I is ready for work as a goood edukaetd Amerikan.
Homeschooling gets a bad rap in general because of parents who shouldn't be doing it or are doing it for the wrong reasons (kid doesn't get along with other kids, developmental issues, etc). I'm talking about the parents who buy a curriculum on tape and shove it in the TV and hope it will all work out. I was mostly unschooled K-10 by my stay-at-home Mom. She tended to my development very closely and instilled a desire to discover and learn. Of course I learned how to read and do math with a curriculum in the early years, but after the basics-- I found school everywhere. I was ebaying things in middle school, and I actually went out and figured out how to calculate percentages out of my own desire. Hands on projects like building a shed with my Dad desired me to work on knowing my measurement units-- algebra was sneaked in. Mom would inspire me to analyze plots in movies and tv shows to study writing. I had an interest in HTML and was blogging before it got mainstream, and that pretty much taught me how to write. Luckily I had an interest in discovery and history channel-- so I had my bases covered there. I went into high school junior year and that was rough. But I was there-- I hadn't been with any structured curriculum for years and I was virtually up to spec. All it really did was polish what I already knew.
There are definitely some flaws though. I really hate the pace of the world- I can do it sometimes, but dammit that's too fast for me. And then I am intelligent, but sometimes not so knowledgeable. That gap is decreasing every day.
And you know, most of my fellow homeschoolers didn't go this way. They were given a tape to watch and a worksheet to do. Pretty much all of them are scared of college (and life for some) because they're not used to it. Hell, sometimes I just want to forget college and just settle down with a job, but that passion to learn is still going strong and will be with me until I die.
While plenty of "reasoning and Critical Thinking" folk out there dont have the slightest clue.. big numbers dont seem to mean anything.. Millions, Billions, Trillions, Quadrillions, 10 ^ 40 th it all seems to get mashed together. How many joules of kinetic energy does it take to total a car? How much gas would it take to melt a ton of snow. Meanwhile these people are still struggling with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem of which the solution should seem obvious.
Storm
Having just read through the comments posted against this article I thought those involved might be interested in this :
The Absorbent Mind by Maria Montessori. ( curiously available on google books ) I believe that many of the same issues that the "unschool" phenomenon attempts to address have been explored with significant academic rigor in the past. I would recommend this title to anyone interested in early childhood education.
See Emile by Rousseau. Although very popular around when it was published I'm assuming there's a good reason why it never went mainstream.
or "underachievement"