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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

#81

Post by screye »

lostcolony wrote: post #39
chrisBob wrote: post #28

I am sure unschooling works out well for some people. I appreciate giving students some flexibility, but I think there really is a standard core that most people should learn. I went to a good engineering school for college, but they also require everyone to take 3 years of history, 3 years of english, 2 semesters of a foreign language, a psychology course, ... If it was left up to me I would not have taken most of t…

A lot of unschooling is predicated on the idea that if you're not forced to learn things, you will be more open to wanting to learn them. Certainly, in my own life that has held true. I learned to read when I was a kid because I saw my parents doing it, and engaging in it taught me to love it. A lot of math I learned early on just as I was growing up (I figured out multiplication on my own, for instance). But by the…

In my experience you have to forced to learn most things until they 'click'.

Some things click instantly and others take longer. While I was good at highschool math, matrices never clicked for me until almost 3rd year of university, when a good prof took the efforts to make it 'click'. I never felt like cooking until I began staying alone, gave it an honest (an necessary) try due to monetary requirements, and now it is my main hobby that I can't live without.

I understand that this argument can be use like the great filter, where if you don't like something it hasn't clicked yet, so keep going and it will click. But, for most things, we know 'click' checkpoints. For musical instruments, it tends to be the first song. For programming, it is your first repository. For math, it tends to be your first moment when a group of seemingly unrelated things fall into place to give you a neat derivation or when you find a visualization that works as an analogy 100% of the time.

The first few weeks of a lot of things are straight up miserable. (new Musical instruments and new languages being major examples of it). It is only after you have understood the basics can you start enjoying them.

> The problem is school forces it on kids, without investing in showing the kid why they would want to learn it in the first place

Absolutely. That investment is key to making forced learning work. Much like training wheels, once they can balance the topic on their own, you can stop trying to make it click, and the student will sustain their interest on their own.

> having to follow the classroom's pace

This is incredibly annoying. I remember binging the whole English textbook in the summer before the year started, then impatiently fidgeting or reading fantasy fiction novels under the table because the class felt that it went too slowly.

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

#82

Post by eloff »

sharadov wrote: post #45
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…

I've noticed this with my son who has an ADHD diagnosis. Pre-covid I constantly heard from school, that he was not paying attention, getting distracted. But since Covid, his output has been phenomenal - his reading/math has improved, he does really well one on one, we have a nanny working with him,. And I've never seen him happier. I know homeschool would benefit him immensely in the long run from an intellectual sta…

Get him into sports or other after school group activities. Much healthier social environment than school anyway.

Lookup two sigma problem. Kids with a 1 on 1 tutor do two standard deviations better than school. That's an insane advantage if you can find a way to make it work.

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

#83

Post by xtagon »

hereme888 wrote: post #18
xtagon wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My story is similar to that of the parent comment and I would say the most important thing is to be supportive of the activities and interests that your future children are driven towards. If they're into computers, let them tinker with computers. If they like to take things apart, give them your old electrical components and teach them about electrical safety and soldering. If they like making things, show them some…

Thanks. May I ask what its like for job interviews?

Nerve-wracking because homeschooling teaches you nothing about career readiness without experience, but that's basically true whether or not you got to spend most of your childhood experimenting with things you actually end up enjoying. For me part of it was luck (lucky that someone took a chance on me and I grew into it from there), but looking back I think putting yourself into a position where you get to practice doing something you're actually passionate about will end up bleeding through into a natural progression/networking. For example, if programming is your hobby before it's your job, by the time you're wanting to interview for a job you will probably already be in some kind of club/group, local makerspace, have friends online who are into game mods, etc. to help get your foot in the door and that's all before you're even college-aged.

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

#84

Post by lazyasciiart »

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…

I'm not sure what you're describing by "a base of traditional education", because my definition would include learning to read pretty early. Do you mean taking the GED?

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

#85

Post by bart_spoon »

saberdancer wrote: post #43
walshemj wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of nordic countries don't teach reading until 7 or so

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.

My daughter started kindergarten this year and they are teaching reading. She’s 5, but she’s among the youngest in her grade, with the older kids having turned 6 already. Keep in mind this is all very simple books in the “See Spot Run” category of difficulty for the most part.

She actually had already started learning some reading at 4 when she was in preschool. It was mostly just sounding out letters but at that point kids can start to sound out simple words too. Preschool is elective though so plenty of kids won’t start that young.

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

#86

Post by tomjakubowski »

radu_floricica wrote: post #26
ramraj07 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intelligence is not hereditary for the most part, and there's a huge environmental component to it. Clearly this household had the right mix of freedom and strictness to encourage development of creative intelligent thinking. Probably rubs off of adults with same attitudes. Of course it's not 100% I'm pretty sure if OP had more siblings one of them would be bound to be dumb as a rock.

Source? I'm pretty sure intelligence is well over half hereditary. AFAIK, most of what we can do to increase people's intelligence is make sure they get proper nutrition as kids. Over that, we can at most spend lots of money on educational programs for really small increases in IQ (though of course education is not just about IQ).

"Heritability" is a funny concept which is easy to misunderstand. http://bactra.org/weblog/520.html

> Heritability is a technical measure of how much of the variance in a quantitative trait (such as IQ) is associated with genetic differences, in a population with a certain distribution of genotypes and environments. Under some very strong simplifying assumptions, quantitative geneticists use it to calculate the changes to be expected from artificial or natural selection in a statistically steady environment. It says nothing about how much the over-all level of the trait is under genetic control, and it says nothing about how much the trait can change under environmental interventions.

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

#87

Post by eloff »

My brother and I were homeschooled, but it was quite structured and we wrote the same provincial exams as every other grade 12 kid. My brother did the SAT as well. We had excellent scores. We both dropped out of college with near perfect GPAs. Today I'm a successful self-taught software engineer now starting a SaaS business. My brother is a famous sci fi author. He makes even more than I do. I think homeschooling let us learn whatever we wanted to learn without fear, and find our own path in life. Where I think it hurt was we didn't do any group social activities and lived in remote places. So socially we had a lot to learn. I don't think that was a permanent disadvantage, but it was not a necessary drawback of homeschooling. I would recommend sports and other after school activities to add the social dimension into homeschooling.

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

#88

Post by waterhouse »

mathnovice wrote: post #47
LanceH wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. This is neither an argument for or against traditional schools (or homeschools or unschooling).

From the article unschooling apparently eschews textbooks.

It doesn't make them go through textbooks. But it doesn't stop them either, and often a decent textbook is the best way to learn about a subject.

As someone who chose to learn some subjects outside of school (usually years before they would have been taught), I tended to read textbooks my older siblings had used—did this for algebra, physics, and calculus—although I didn't do that many problems from the textbooks. (I also read lots of what might be called popular science books.) The article does say "[The McQueen] parents spurn curriculums, textbooks, tests and grades", but I know some unschoolers, and I suspect if I asked them, I would find that they read several textbooks.

One unschooling mom's website quotes (seemingly with approval) another unschooling mom's email on the subject. Ultimately it seems to be saying that, while textbooks shouldn't be the primary tool, they are a tool that is sometimes appropriate. https://sandradodd.com/school/textbooks

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

#89

Post by baby »

walshemj wrote: post #36
ohazi wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can see homeschooling being potentially more interesting/engaging for a certain kind of student after the basics are out of the way, but this: > He didn't even learn how to read until he was around 10. to me, is fucking terrifying . All of the people I know who did better on their own than in a classroom were able to do so because they could gobble up half a library in a weekend. I think you need to be able to read…

A lot of nordic countries don't teach reading until 7 or so

Just want to say that 3 years difference at that age is not like 3 years difference when you are in your 20s or 30s.

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

#90

Post by dragonwriter »

grawprog wrote: post #22
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…

>It's only a 'grind' if you don't enjoy the process though, right? That's the thing though, even with something you enjoy you will, or should hopefully, hit 'the grind'. That point where it gets hard and you force yourself to keep going even through.the parts you don't enjoy. School forces you to do this, if you're teaching yourself something, you need to force yourself to do this. I can't count the number of times i…

> School forces you to do this

School often forces you to do a grind, but it's often an endless-treadmill grind, not a over-the-hump grind.

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