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When You Get into Unschooling, It’s Almost Like a Religion

nytimes.com

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Re: When You Get into Unschooling, It’s Almost Like a Religion

#61

Post by abecedarius »

ksdale wrote: post #15
mathnovice wrote: post #5

Learning of (keyword of) concepts and ideas is fun but the reason schools exist is because most learning is a grind. Learning to draw well, learning a language, learning an instrument, and even learning math and logic require going through the grind of learning and repetition. The grind is only harder if you don't have a good book or teacher because the practice you do could potentially be actively harmful (or useles…

I think the question is how much of the grind is necessary. When our oldest kids were very little, we would work on the alphabet and numbers and track milestones carefully. At some point we realized that we could either grind hard at stuff they just didn't quite get, or we could wait a few months until they were older and just tell them stuff and they'd remember it. And obviously it wasn't quite that easy, but it fel…

Yeah! Bit of a tangent: in my experience even the times table isn't inherently a grind, though at a higher level maybe arithmetic might have to be. When I was in school faced with memorizing the times table conventionally, I decided "this is silly and boring, what I'm gonna do instead is keep the table visible while I do arithmetic problems, and it'll get memorized automatically along the way", and that worked fine.

It's the same principle as learning touch-typing with the keyboard layout visible on a card in your field of view (not the same as looking down at the keyboard, which I agree is a bad habit that slows you down).

Re: When You Get into Unschooling, It’s Almost Like a Religion

#62

Post by Foober223 »

mdorazio wrote: post #40
t0mbstone wrote: post #7

I was homeschooled until the age of around 10, and then my family adopted a new approach called "lifestyle of learning", which is just another way of saying "unschooling". Basically, I was allowed to skip schoolwork, as long as I was doing something productive. I hated schoolwork, so I started spending all my spare time tinkering with stuff on the computer. I wasn't allowed to play video games (since they aren't prod…

Note that missing from your assessment here is an honest analysis of the alternative. I.e. where would you and your brother have ended up if you had stayed in school and gone the traditional college path? You say you're making $150k now as a software engineer, but there's a damn good chance if you had stayed in school and gotten a CS degree in college you would be making a lot more than that now (and earlier in your…

> honest analysis

An honest comparison can't be made unless he gives up some details of what he's made throughout his life, and his geographic location for fair salary comparisons.

But... from a glance his outcome blows most college grads out of the water. Even compared to comp sci grads with good outcomes.

He was earning income at age 13 and full time income at age 16. The traditional school/college route will have you start work at maybe age 23. With debt.

For most geographic areas in the US, 150k is a serious salary, the apex. It would be hard to increase with paper/certs/degrees. Geography change may be the only reliable way to bump it, but then you'd have to subtract the increased housing costs (million dollar shacks) to compare.

Re: When You Get into Unschooling, It’s Almost Like a Religion

#63

Post by 908B64B197 »

mathnovice wrote: post #5

Learning of (keyword of) concepts and ideas is fun but the reason schools exist is because most learning is a grind. Learning to draw well, learning a language, learning an instrument, and even learning math and logic require going through the grind of learning and repetition. The grind is only harder if you don't have a good book or teacher because the practice you do could potentially be actively harmful (or useles…

The grind is interesting.

I think one of the things the pandemic exposed is how much time is wasted in class for discipline and "class management". Really, without it the quiet kids can pretty much get the regular curriculum in half the normal time.

Re: When You Get into Unschooling, It’s Almost Like a Religion

#64

Post by [deleted] »

t0mbstone wrote: post #7

I was homeschooled until the age of around 10, and then my family adopted a new approach called "lifestyle of learning", which is just another way of saying "unschooling". Basically, I was allowed to skip schoolwork, as long as I was doing something productive. I hated schoolwork, so I started spending all my spare time tinkering with stuff on the computer. I wasn't allowed to play video games (since they aren't prod…

[deleted]

Re: When You Get into Unschooling, It’s Almost Like a Religion

#65

Post by waterhouse »

lostcolony wrote: post #58
mdorazio wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a pretty horrible assumption to make and it's a bad idea to use yourself (or any HN commenter) as a good example of the general public with regard to learning curiosity. If you spend much time outside the tech bubble, I think you'll quickly find that the number of people who go out of their way to learn things in-depth instead of spending all their time on entertainment and social activities is a rather small…

Of course the plural of anecdote isn't data. Never claimed it was. "I think you'll quickly find (etc)" - I think you're thinking about this the wrong way. Who, exactly, are you evaluating? The average adult who grew up in the school system, who learned that 'learning' is all about being told stuff, and who now 'knows enough' to hold down their job and pursue whatever hobbies they have in what little spare time they h…

I've seen a bit of observational data that points at the hypothesis that one of the things that manifests as IQ is an increased need for intellectual stimulation. Googling for ""need for intellectual stimulation" iq" shows some authoritative people saying that they tend to coincide; I don't immediately see studies about it.

Now, I agree that school tends to squelch natural curiosity and such. I really can't say enough bad things about school.

Still, I can't shake the hypothesis that a decent amount of observational data connected to schooling and unschooling is done by smart people, looking at their social group (likely to also be smart) and at the kids of those in their social group (likely to have inherited smartness). John Holt formed some of his hypotheses teaching at a school with a minimum IQ cutoff (IIRC around 110-120) (researching, I think it was the Shady Hill school, the second one he taught at).

But at the very least, it seems to me that unschooling will work well with smart kids—the smarter, the better—and, furthermore, the smarter the kid is, the worse school will be adapted to them, so it seems pretty clear that, above some intelligence level, unschooling should be placed above school in the list of default recommendations (the specifics of the individual kid and the available schools would, of course, be used to tailor the default into the correct, but I am talking about the default). I don't know what level that should be, but I suspect it's something like 120-130 IQ.

Re: When You Get into Unschooling, It’s Almost Like a Religion

#66

Post by bigbubba »

klyrs wrote: post #30
bigbubba wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's only a 'grind' if you don't enjoy the process though, right? If you're getting good at doing something you love because you love doing it so much, I don't think 'grind' is a word you'd use to describe that time consuming process. I think 'grind' is caused by a disconnect between what the learner is being made to do and what they want to do. Grind can therefore be reduced by providing people with the opportunity…

I've gotten good at a few things in life that required a "grind." The violin is the clearest example. Getting decent requires an hour or so a week -- you can generally fart around and play whatever's accessible to your skill level. Good requires an hour or two per day, of deliberate and focused practice. People don't play études for fun. Excellence requires several hours per day. Even Itzhak Perlman describes his pra…

Surely the grind of learning to play a violin would be far worse if you disliked violins in the first place, right? If you force somebody who hates violins to practice playing one for hours a day, the grind would be intolerable and they'd probably hate their life. The people most likely to find the grind tolerable are the people who really want it.

Re: When You Get into Unschooling, It’s Almost Like a Religion

#67

Post by rvba »

t0mbstone wrote: post #7

I was homeschooled until the age of around 10, and then my family adopted a new approach called "lifestyle of learning", which is just another way of saying "unschooling". Basically, I was allowed to skip schoolwork, as long as I was doing something productive. I hated schoolwork, so I started spending all my spare time tinkering with stuff on the computer. I wasn't allowed to play video games (since they aren't prod…

In my opinion the conclusion is much different: "Unschooling" works as long as you can find a job in IT.

What is much harder now due to tons of people doing those bootcamps.

Re: When You Get into Unschooling, It’s Almost Like a Religion

#68

Post by cosmiccatnap »

In an age where people can't agree on if we should be doing a census or not, the idea of letting parents tell their children what is right and wrong just seems immoral. School is an opportunity for alot of these kids to learn about the world outside their parents worldview and as much as you might hate it it's useful to know the pythagorean theorem and the civil war in some detail

Re: When You Get into Unschooling, It’s Almost Like a Religion

#69

Post by TameAntelope »

zepto wrote: post #54
TameAntelope wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He might be of the opinion that IQ != intelligence, or that IQ is a bad measurement of intelligence.

It doesn’t really matter what he calls intelligence - it’s still mostly heritable: https://areomagazine.com/2020/09/02/the-nature-behind-human-... Skills, accurate self-image, and cultural competence. etc, are of course a different matter. Maybe he’s talking about these things, but they aren’t the same as intelligence.

"It's still mostly heritable" -- this statement is confusing to me. If we aren't sure what we're talking about in the first place, how are we sure "it" is heritable?

Re: When You Get into Unschooling, It’s Almost Like a Religion

#70

Post by Twisol »

wolfram74 wrote: post #56
saberdancer wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When is reading taught in the USA? In Europe, first grade is usually when you are 7 years old, so normally that's when it is taught. Sure, nowadays kids tend to learn it earlier but not through organized means.

I was a pretty rubbish reader until 3rd or 4th grade when Legend of the Seven Stars came out for SNES and my sister eventually got tired of reading the dialogue for me. So that would put me in the 10 year old range.

Sibling of someone like you here -- I absolutely got fed up with reading Animal Crossing dialogue for my sister, and I maintain that's the only reason she finally learned to read.

Motivation is one thing -- necessity is another. If you need it (not just want; literally need it for some reason), you'll have a pretty strong motivation to acquire it. (Or give up. But that's where parental guidance comes in.)

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