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!
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.
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.
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
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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)
And my sister! And our daughter!
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.
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.]
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."
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.
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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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?
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.
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
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.
Apparently most parents who choose to homeschool(*) have those traits: http://www.hslda.org/docs/nche/000010/200410250.asp
Now "parents who choose to homeschool" is a self-selecting group. So maybe parents in general don't have those traits, but in that case the ones that don't at least have the good sense to recognize that homeschooling isn't for them.
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.
Depending on the state you live in, homeschools are held to the same standards as any private school. In fact where I'm from (Kansas), homeschools are private schools as far as the law is concerned.
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
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.
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.
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).
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.
Right here under my hat,
I keep Little Kid D,
Along with Little Kid E, Kid F, and Kid G.
I keep them about,
And when I need help
I just doff my headpiece
And let them right out.
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."
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?
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.
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.
"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://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.
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.