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?'"
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.
No, but it might be great for actually learning something. I don't know about the majority of people here, but I learned despite my school, not because of it - every skill I now use professionally is a skill that my school took great effort to teach glacially, incorrectly, and uselessly.
On the other hand, the year in which I basically dropped out of high school, I learned a huge amount.
I don't know if this will be better than conventional education, but, honestly? It'd be hard for it to be worse.
Breaking Into the Industry - A development log about starting a game studio.
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)
I know plenty of dishwashers who graduated high school and several, in this economy, have college degrees. At what point do we say that no matter how you progress through school, there may come a time when you are at the bottom rung for one reason or another?
I should have added the disclaimer that I was a dishwasher for years in my teens. I was also damned good at it, and I think that part of the reason was the learned discipline to focus on a boring and unpleasant task. And while that's a backhanded compliment at formal education, it's a real and tangible benefit.
>> "What would the robut do? Frame someone!"
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 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.
"Higher education" is really a medieval style guild system, and it has no place in modern society. With ubiquitous internet access anyone with sufficient talent and motivation can teach themself any subject to any level. The only remaining step is to decouple the certification from the training.
It's true that some people will learn better with a teacher and fellow students, but there's no reason this has to be within academia. Students could save a lot of money by cutting out the middle-men and hiring teachers directly.
http://www.lewrockwell.com/north/north748.html
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.
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 think those 6 hours, even if the hard academia is lacking at times, are not wasted. At the very least children learn how to keep a schedule, deal with people outside their familiarity zone, and process mundane tasks. It's not very sexy, but these skills are are very large part of even the egalitarian among us. I have personally known homeschooled adults that were completely unprepared to do things like deal with workplace bullies, keeping track of their time for work, or see the value in something that wasn't 'fun' for them.
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I reject your hypothetical situation for the same reasons that others have. Both children need to learn their multiplication tables. You're also making the assumption that Child B isn't curious about the world around them. What if Child A isn't curious or doesn't spend their time productively? Video games and TV make awful good temptations.
In my case, we sent my daughter to a Montessori preschool and she just started first grade in public school a few days ago. She has a day off later in September, so instead of spending the day goofing off or learning multiplication tables, she and I are flying to Washington DC for the day and I'll be sure to get her full of museums and other sights in the city. She probably won't understand it all (she's only 6), but I guarantee it's not the last trip of its kind she and I will make.
Hmm, odd. I don't remember it being like that at all. If anything, I had a lot more time to learn things than I do now at college.
As a kid, my mom read all sorts of great books to me, and when I was older she could literally just leave library books on the kitchen table. I had learned that books are interesting, so of course I read them. Besides fiction, I loved books about science and history. I even tried to read some Platonic dialogues in 4th grade. I was really into spy stuff for a while, so we also did a lot of codes and ciphers, which quickly translated into the fun parts of math. I knew I wanted to go to college, so we did some formal curriculum for a couple hours every morning in middle school. It was mostly lame, but it was helpful with math at least. I also joined the "Homeschool Film Club". I learned Adobe After Effects and did a lot of camera work for the local public access channel.
In ninth grade I decided to try a fairly rigorous Christian private school in the area. It was fine, I got straight As, but it was boring. The kids had no motivation to learn, and I could progress in most subjects on my own faster than at the school. (Math was again the exception, I had a fantastic math teacher.) So I went back to unschooling in tenth grade. I was really into popular science books at this point, and I read a lot about theoretical physics and evolutionary biology. I was also reconsidering a lot of the religious ideas I had, so I was reading a lot of hardcore theology.
I discovered UC Berkeley's online lectures around this time, and listened to a bunch of college-level psychology. Eventually I became interested in the philosophical side of psychology, and started investigating philosophy. Fortuitously, UC Berkeley has a philosophy professor who likes podcasting, so I listened to a few of his series of lectures. I went through the first half of Heidegger's "Being and Time" this way. It's a hideously difficult book, even for philosophy, but I had a lot of free time!
During this same period I was working with a professional theatre in a neighboring town, as well as a couple local community theatres. Since I didn't have set hours for school, I was able to be there whenever they needed me. I acted in several shows, and worked on lighting and general tech work.
Oh, almost forgot. I also took a couple community college classes, in physics and writing. They were both absurdly easy and I didn't learn anything, but it looked good on my transcript to have some formal classes at the college level.
I decided I wanted to go to the University of Chicago, if I could. It's ranked 8th in the country, but in my opinion it's academically better than the Ivies and other colleges ranked above it. (MIT and Caltech are the exceptions, but they are also more narrowly focused.) I applied, got in, and am currently attending. It's awesome being around other academically engaged people, but I kinda miss the chance to learn on my own. Luckily, I have the summer to do that!
I admit I'm a bit of an outlier, and I probably would have done fine in the public schools. Not everyone who is unschooled will have a natural passion for academics. However, if anything, unschooling is even better for people who don't want to become academics. My younger sister has some minor learning disabilities, and is far more into the arts than the sciences. She spent her high school years learning about theatre and music, and has become a fantastic actress. She spent the summer working with the professional theatre company I mentioned, but in a much more intensive way than I ever did. However, while it's not her focus, she still loves learning intellectual things as well. She's currently doing some pretty substantial research into psychology and counseling. She's trying to decide between theatre and counseling as possible careers. Either way, I'm convinced she's in a better position than she would be at the public schools, where she'd likely be forced into special LD classes and not allowed to explore the things that actually interest her.
It's entirely possible to do unschooling badly, but that doesn't mean it's inherently a bad idea.
Power corrupts. Knowledge is power. Study hard. Be evil.
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.
Quite frankly, I would have killed to have been in high school for 4 years. I only got to spend 6 months in high school before I was forced to quite and take my GED.
I'd submit that the vast majority of us never live up to our potential. I certainly didn't. That doesn't mean that I am not happy and successful. Your friends were given the same opportunities that the rest of us were to learn those skills. They only have themselves to blame if they did not.
But of course, that's not the purpose of the educational system in the US. The purpose is to create a functional workforce that is conditioned to structured systems.
And what is wrong with that? I sit in my cube, every day, largely bored, but enjoying a standard of living my great-great-grandfather could never have imagined. Our system works pretty damn well.
I was Child "D",
That's the one that took every thing apart to see how it worked, and figured out how to stop getting in trouble for it when I learned how to put it all back together so that it worked properly.
Then when I figured out how to make it work better, started saying "I Fixed it".
It's a lifelong avocation now.
I was also bored out of my mind in school, even in the advanced classes they had me in.
Absolutely correct. Studies consistently show that homeschoolers are ridiculously better prepared than students who have been through the public school system. A study in 1997 (admittedly 12 years ago) showed that students who have been homeschooled for two years or more usually score between the 86th and 92nd percentile in every subject.
linky
Homeschooling has its problems, usually social ones, but academically, homeschooling nearly always produces vastly better educated children.
Well, clearly those state universities must have sucked because you apparently never learned that correlation does not equal causation. I went to an accelerated program for high school that compresses 5 years into 2. About 25% of the people in my class were previously homeschooled - and it was easy to see why.
Being gifted academically is often correlated with being socially maladjusted. I don't think any parent chooses for their kids to be bored or bullied in school but this is often what happens to these kids. Bottom line is - public education does a very poor job of satisfying the emotional needs of smart kids. Home-schooling is a solution, but let's be clear here - that does not make home-schooling an ideal educational path.
If you left high IQ kids alone (after about age 12) to play videogames for 5 years, their IQs would still be high. This does not mean videogames create smart kids.
Compound that with the fact that a parent who homeschools kids is a parent who isn't working. Which means that either the other parent is making enough money for two, or they are already financially well-off for other reasons. So the average socioeconomic status of a homeschooled family is going to be much higher than the average socioeconomic status of a public education family... and surprise-surprise, income levels also correlates with educational attainment, IQ, health, and pretty much every other "good" thing!
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.