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!"
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.
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.
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.
Learning should be fun whenever possible, but not all things are pleasant, and children need to learn that some things require work and discipline.
Even work and discipline can be made fun. It just takes a little imagination. The trick is to make them want to, not force them to. My ex-wife hates reading, and that's because her parents forced her to. I love reading, and that's because my parents read to me and stimulated my imagination. I wanted to learn to read, and that made the learning fun.
No child fails, the teacher fails the child.
Free Martian Whores!
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
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The trouble is "guidance". I agree that a committed, competent, organized parent could probably pull this off, and end up with a very well-rounded and well-educated child. After all, the parent-teacher ratio is fantastic, and there are no discipline problems with "you're not my Mom, I don't have to do what you tell me to".
But, to succeed (at either college admissions or finding a desirable non-college job), a student has to have a balance of useful skills. If the parent lacks those skills, lacks the tools, or lacks the commitment to teach and promote those skills within their child, this could turn out really badly for the child.
There are lots of parents who are smart and organized enough to do this. There are a bunch who are ambitious enough to do it. There are some that are even committed enough to see it through. There are a few that have the time to do it. Unfortunately, there are just a small number with all four traits. We pay for Waldorf school for our daughter because I feel the method of education is worth the cost. I don't think we could take on this kind of task ourselves, though, which is why we chose what we feel is the best method then "hired experts" to do the heavy lifting.
I'm not saying home/non-schooling should be disallowed, but it's in society's best interests to educate as many kids as we can to the highest level we can reasonably achieve. So if a parent wants to do this, I'd say they should have to demonstrate the skills and commitment, then they can receive support, assistance, and above all constructive progress monitoring and feedback.
After all, if a parent succeeds, they've saved the school district a significant amount of money. It's well worth taking the parents who are willing and able to do this and supporting them as a volunteer force to take care of their own kids.
But if they fail, they cost society an even more significant sum. So the overarching priority is - is the parent accomplishing the task they have taken on? If they start faltering, intervene with assistance and constructive advice. If they start having real trouble, then the child should go to school.
But, I guess if there is a state-established guideline and monitoring, it becomes "home schooling" again, doesn't it?
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
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.
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
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
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.
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.
From a cynical point of view, it sounds an awful lot like the people I know whose parents had them home schooled but then didn't actually spend any time teaching them anything. They didn't end up learning anything and now aren't really prepared to get a job that pays the rent.
I don't think it's impossible to make it work well, and for a certain kind of kid I think it would be fantastic. Unschooling would require a lot of involvement from parents, though, probably a lot more than public school would, and I expect that some portion of parents aren't willing to provide that involvement. I'd worry that those parents will latch onto unschooling as a way to justify letting their kids do whatever they want without any supervision.
You forgot that most of high school teachers cannot answer these questions either. Outside of the things there were taught, they tend to be like your average slightly more educated person on general knowledge
Don't you know it is now both immoral and criminal to think beyond the next quarterly report?
As other threads have stated, it depends on the kid.
My whole family went through the Montessori program from 3-year-old kindergarten to 5-8th grade. Some did really well and others, well, not so good.
The structure part of Montessori is really important - if a student is allowed to skate through without honing skills, they can leave really academically unbalanced.
I didn't like biology, so I kept doing the same vertibrate/invertibrate flash cards. I didn't like reading, so I read the same book on greek mythology during reading time.
I really like the idea of Montessori so long as it's implemented properly (I know Montessori teachers have to go through an extensive training period before getting certified), but it also takes parent involvement to get things done. Even then, a kid or two will figure out how to skate through the system and not learn what they were supposed to. By that point, you're in an area where a conventional school can pick them up and get them back to speed in a remedial program.
Arguing with an engineer is like wrestling a pig in the mud. After a while, you realize the engineer enjoys it.
No child fails, the teacher fails the child.
As someone who worked in "alternative education" for a while, that's not entirely true. There are stupid kids out there. There are kids who don't want to learn anything at all (usually in my experience these are kids who grew up in a really privileged environment and never had to work for anything in their lives).
It is partially true. If you drone on about sines, cosines, and tangents for 15 minutes, kids will get bored. If you tell them you're going to show them how to design and build a set of steps that people won't trip on (which actually can use quite a bit of trig and geometry), they'll pay a lot more attention.
I am officially gone from
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.
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.
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?
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
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.