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Would You Unschool Your Child?

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Re: Would You Unschool Your Child?

#101

Post by SomeCallMeTim »

SandB0x wrote: post #20

Wait wait wait. I don't understand this. Unschooling simply seems to mean "being a good parent". Can someone explain the distinction? The Unschooling website doesn't help me either: "Unschooling is following your children's lead...Unschooling isn't a method of instruction, it's a different way of looking at learning..." Outside of school, my parents encouraged and helped me to learn interesting subjects, play musical…

You have great parents. Not all parents are so supportive, but many are.

The difference is that Unschooling parents do that without sending their kids off to school. I'm glad you had a good school experience, though mine was pretty poor, so for me Unschooling is tempting, at least in theory.

A metaphor I've read is that schools force-feed information into kids that they're not interested in, so they frequently come home feeling "stuffed." Not a lot of room is left over for natural, self-directed learning and creative exploration. It doesn't matter if it's the most interesting thing in the world--if school has been torturing you with trivia you don't care about, you aren't as likely to pursue it on your own.

Re: Would You Unschool Your Child?

#102

Post by forgottenpaswrd »

whyenot wrote: post #77
edanm wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the thing I'm most excited about for the future of the internet. Forget Amazon - anyone with an internet connection has access to audio and video lectures, notes and classwork from Harvard, MIT and others. Almost anything you want to learn can be picked up online, and (illegal though it is) any book you want to read can be found online. But the best part is, this hasn't sunk in yet . So few people understand…

But the best part is, this hasn't sunk in yet. So few people understand that the world has gotten to a stage where you can get a university-level education by yourself, based on what you feel like learning, from the comfort of your own home. But you can't, at least not in the biological sciences, unless your home has an autoclave, ultracentrifuge, laminar flow hood, etc. Same could be said for civil engineering, chem…

Exactly, or have robots, hydraulic presses, lathes, material, physics and chemical laboratories...

Books are ok, but you need practical experience too, and some things are too expensive to buy yourself, needs to be shared someway.

Re: Would You Unschool Your Child?

#103

Post by kchodorow »

reader5000 wrote: post #5
tommynazareth wrote: post #2

This page isn't loading for me, but to answer the question: absolutely. My whole goal of becoming financially independent is based on my desire for two things: the freedom to continue my own 'unschooling', and the ability to invest all of my time and energy into my family. Sending my children to a detention center five days a week is incompatible with the sort of family life I'd like to have. The biggest argument for…

Agreed, one of the ironies of school is that one of its sole conceivable benefits is socialization, which is heavily punished and restricted. I have no idea where it was agreed upon that sitting passively listening to middle-aged people lecture for six hours a day is in anyway helpful to a young person, but whatever.

Describing school as "sitting passively" is a huge generalization. If you have a half-decent school system (which you might not, I was lucky and had a great one) it should be very interactive.

School's benefit, I think, is that it exposes you to a ton of topics that aren't your primary interests (or your parents' primary interests). How many people have taken a class because it had a cool name or their friend was taking it or they needed the credit and it turned out they loved the subject?

Re: Would You Unschool Your Child?

#104

Post by bugsy »

mquander wrote: post #45

My contribution: If you're doing this, and you have a smart kid, for God's sake, buy a lot of books, buy every book you can think of and put it in your house. I can point at three quarters of my interests and trace them straight back to books I picked off the shelf when I was 10. My parents had a lot of books, but even so, I ended up having to re-read the ones that were interesting to me instead of pushing further an…

In unschooling circles, acquiring interesting books and materials and leaving them laying about for kids to find or ignore is called "strewing".

Re: Would You Unschool Your Child?

#105

Post by adbachman »

Alex3917 wrote: post #21

"The current K-12 educational system exists, generally speaking, for two primary reasons. First, its scalability makes it easy for the state to educate its citizens, and second, it gives children and teens a shared public space where they learn to interact with others and hopefully pick up some societal norms." This is completely wrong. The five functions of school are generally recognized to be Training, Sorting, So…

Deschooling Society is available online if you're interested in looking it up again. I highly recommend it. (http://www.preservenet.com/theory/Illich/Deschooling/chap1.h...)

He's wide ranging, but his whole point in writing the book is to discuss why the current institutions devoted to education are inappropriate and even destructive (http://adambachman.org/illich_03.html). He goes on to suggest what an appropriate, human centered replacement could look like. (http://www.preservenet.com/theory/Illich/Deschooling/chap6.h...)

I think you could reexamine your assumptions.

Re: Would You Unschool Your Child?

#106

Post by qohen »

edanm wrote: post #62
tommynazareth wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also think it is a fantastic plan. I like you're first point. If a teacher is resourceful enough, than any topic is worth exploring and there is no limit to the breadth or depth of the exploration. Also, any learning activity can be a valuable experience in developing transferable skills.

Steve Jobs made a similar point in a speech to a graduating university class. He mentioned how he popped into classes just because they looked interesting, even if they weren't part of his curriculum, and said it's a great thing to do. He gave one example: he went to a class on typography just cause it sounded fun. As he put it, the only reason Macs have decent typography is because of what he learned in that class.

FYI, it was actually a calligraphy class.

From the transcript of Jobs' speech (http://news.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html ):

"Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later."

Re: Would You Unschool Your Child?

#107

Post by helveticaman »

whyenot wrote: post #77
edanm wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the thing I'm most excited about for the future of the internet. Forget Amazon - anyone with an internet connection has access to audio and video lectures, notes and classwork from Harvard, MIT and others. Almost anything you want to learn can be picked up online, and (illegal though it is) any book you want to read can be found online. But the best part is, this hasn't sunk in yet . So few people understand…

But the best part is, this hasn't sunk in yet. So few people understand that the world has gotten to a stage where you can get a university-level education by yourself, based on what you feel like learning, from the comfort of your own home. But you can't, at least not in the biological sciences, unless your home has an autoclave, ultracentrifuge, laminar flow hood, etc. Same could be said for civil engineering, chem…

But everyone can afford a computer that is very powerful by historic standards.

Re: Would You Unschool Your Child?

#108

Post by bugsy »

notahacker wrote: post #92
jerf wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the absolute biggest hurdle that homeschooling faces is that people always compare it against the Platonic ideal of schooling. You know what? I'd send my kid to the Platonic ideal of a school, no problem. But no such thing exists. Instead we must compare real schools to homeschooling. Yes, the same real schools that feature in the news for their sinking curriculum, over medicating, lowering standards, increas…

The reverse also applies: a lot of parents won't consider homeschooling their kids because they're not remotely suited to educating their kids and unfortunately many parents that do homeschool their kids have some pretty funny ideas about education. Being placed into a group of peers (some of whom you wouldn't voluntarily associate with) in a structured environment with people telling you what do do sounds like a pre…

It is indeed a pretty realistic preparation for mechanical factory labor from the industrial age, which is when this model of institutionalized mandatory schooling took hold. Sit down, do your work, obey authority, don't ask questions. Factories and corporations both benefit from these sorts of workers. Follow the clock. Awareness of this connection between these two is a good part of what led John Holt to write his books.

Re: Would You Unschool Your Child?

#109

Post by bugsy »

dnsauve wrote: post #18

While I love the idea of homeschooling and unschooling, I can't quite figure out how people do this while still managing to pay their bills. Wouldn't this, in essence, take up a significant portion of your day, preventing you from working?

I do it and I am able to work from home most of the time as an engineer. To do a smash up classical education job teaching your 8 yr old to speak fluent Latin will take 4 hrs a day. Then you spend 8 hrs at work while they run around wild, work on projects, or whatever. Teach them how to cook at an early age and now you have freed up even more hours.

Some freelancers will take the kids with them as they travel about the world on assignment. That's an education in itself.

Re: Would You Unschool Your Child?

#110

Post by bugsy »

joshkaufman wrote: post #95
lotharbot wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "That means 51.1% of homeschooling parents in the US think their kids would get a better education at school" No, that's not what it means. It means 48.9% thinks "better education" is their main reason for homeschooling. For the other 51.1%, "better education" is not the main reason, but may still be on the list. It's true that a non-trivial percentage want to isolate their children from the mainstream, but please…

That was what I thought at first too, until I double-checked the study. If you look at the data here ( http://www.census.gov/population/www/documentation/twps0053/... ), the cumulative percentage is 214.2%. That means it wasn't a "multiple choice, pick one" question - it was a "mark one or more reasons" question. That means that 51.1% of parents surveyed did not mark "quality of education" as a reason they chose to h…

Parents can also believe that homeschooling does just as good a job as other schools.

Because they don't list that their motivation was that they can do better than a public school does not mean that they believe they will do worse.

Consider the case of someone sending their child to a French immersion school. Most would not say that the immersion school is better than all other schools, but that doesn't mean they believe they believe it is worse. Likely they are sending their children there because they want them to learn to speak French fluently, not because they believe other schools are worse.

Here's a more recent study from the US Department of Education:

http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2006/homeschool/TableDisplay.asp?Tabl...

This 2003 study is considered to be far superior to the 1999 one cited for reasons discussed in this article:

http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2006/homeschool/parentsreasons.asp

For example, on the 1999 study two flaws listed are "when faced with an open-ended question, parents may not have recalled or responded with all of the reasons for homeschooling that were applicable to their situation" and "parents were not specifically asked to report their primary reason for homeschooling".

As you can see the 2003 study addresses these procedural errors and breaks out factors cited at all separately from those cited as primary concern.

The most listed factor for both was environmental factors in other schools, meaning "safety, drugs, or negative peer pressure". This was a concern of 85.4% of families, and the most important factor for 31.2%.

Dissatisfaction with academic quality of other schools was a factor in 68.2% of families, but a primary reason in only 16.5%

Regarding the assumptions made previously that any included component of religious or moral instruction implies isolationism and a lack of socialization, that claim is not supported by studies.

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