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?'"
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/prologue6.htm ... ...
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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.
I'll give a more specific answer to your question:
You said,
If you've ever seen someone mis-punch a number into a calculator and blithely accept the result you know why you still need to be able to multiply
1. The person uses a logical fallacy here called a non sequitur. He is bringing up a completely irrelevant statement. I will obviously have to point out why it is irrelevant because of the extremely poor logic and comprehension skills that most people on Slashdot have (or at least the people who post on Slashdot). It is irrelevent because I never said that a person does not need to know how to multiply. In fact I never even stated that a person should not learn their multiplication tables.
2. Also his logic is faulty here as well because "mis-punching a number" has nothing to do with and is not related to "blithely accept[ing] the result".
Have some idea of what's a reasonable answer without just blindly accepting what comes out of a machine is a critical part of being educated.
Again, he is replying to my post but not to anything that I've said in the post. His statements, outside of his own fantasy world, makes no sense and has no relevance to what I said. I have never stated or implied that "blindly accepting what comes out of a machine" is good or that it should be condoned. Very poor reasoning here.
My wife told me about how, many years ago, her son's 2nd grade teacher got upset because her son was actually doing multiplication to figure out problems. Apparently they were supposed to guess, so he was "doing it wrong".
Once again this is very poor communication skills because it is a reply to my post, but it is not a reply to anything I said, and does not refute anything I said. It is a non sequitur. To elaborate, I never said that bad teaching was good, or that guessing was better than comprehending.
A lot of school can be pretty mind-numbingly boring, but the alternative of hoping that kids somehow fumble their way to knowing something useful seems like it's throwing about about 100,000 years of human progress.
Here his reasoning and communication skills are faulty because he is implying that I am in favour of ignorance and stupidity, and (he is implying) that "unschooling" is supporting this faulty premise.
In fact, and I even specifically pointed this out (for the third time now) that People need to question their assumptions. It is ironic that not only did the poster not question his assumptions, but he even makes more apparent assumptions in his replies.
This is the type of illogic and stupidity that I observe too often from math fan-boys. If they took less time memorizing math tables and spent more time learning how to reason then I would be more impressed.