Unschooling: The Case for Setting Your Kids Into the Wild
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Unschooling: The Case for Setting Your Kids Into the Wild
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Re: Unschooling: The Case for Setting Your Kids Into the Wild
#2If you hunt them for sport from childhood, the survivors get wily indeed.
Re: Unschooling: The Case for Setting Your Kids Into the Wild
#3> At the time, my father—who earned his undergraduate degree at Cornell and his master’s at Johns Hopkins
Nothing cooler than rich kids taking all their advantages they were given and use them to live like paupers with zero concern for the the world around them.
> I can report that Fin and Rye both learned to read and write with essentially zero instruction, albeit when they were about eight years old, a year or so later than is expected.
I'm pretty sure that's closer to 4 or 5 for most kids who grow up in families from the Cornell / John Hopkins pedigree.
> I want them to remain free of social pressures to look, act, or think any way but that which feels most natural to them.
Awesome how the author takes his past issues of "social pressures" and maps them onto his kids. Wonder if he ever realized that "social pressures" are one of the most natural things a child learns.
This thing is full of gems. I shouldn't be so sarcastic about child abuse, but I just can't help it. I've met far too many of these clowns in my life.
Re: Unschooling: The Case for Setting Your Kids Into the Wild
#4There are a lot of things I like about this, but I am do see some issues.
I think the boys are learning a lot of very interesting skills, but I think they would struggle a lot with becoming lawyers and doctors like the author claims.
My biggest concern would be their reading skills, and later, their advanced math skills.
He says they read fine, but reading is something that must be done almost every day for years to get to a highly literate point. Literacy and reading comprehension are essential skills to navigating the modern world.
I am just not sure what kind of jobs or careers they will be prepared for later on.
I mean, it sounds great and I would love to have done a lot of this stuff as a kid, but I just see issues if the parents don't really stay on top of it.
If you grow up hunting, fishing and farming, you don't exactly prepare yourself to be a doctor, lawyer or engineer.
On the other hand, if you have the reading and maths skills, you can still be a hunter/fisher/farmer.
Re: Unschooling: The Case for Setting Your Kids Into the Wild
#5> Everything I learned felt abstract and standardized. It was a conditional knowledge that existed in separation from the richly textured world just beyond the school’s plate-glass windows, which, for all their transparency, felt like the bars of a prison cell.
Tell that story to a kid in Africa who has to walk miles to get to school and the school might not have electricity or water and so on. They would say "So, you're telling me, you have free transportation to school, teachers, computers in ever classroom, air conditioned rooms, and you choose let your children learn to carve 'beautiful long bows' instead?"
Sorry that is how I feel. I can't shake the feeling that this is elitist. Like the article puts (as if pre-emptively trying to defend against a counter argument) this is like living some "Jeffersonian fantasies" -- that is exactly what I see here.
At the end of the day they are dooming these children to live in an isolated sheltered bubble. Which would have worked great in early settler days. Not today. Today unless they keep in that bubble they will be controlled and owned by those that understand how compounding interest rate works, how computers works, how the legal system works, how lobbying works, how quarks work, how genes work and so on.
Now with that said, it is their right to do it and it is nice to have that choice. This is what makes it great to live in this country. I personally think they are a little bit crazy for doing what they are doing.
Re: Unschooling: The Case for Setting Your Kids Into the Wild
#6> Everything I learned felt abstract and standardized. It was a conditional knowledge that existed in separation from the richly textured world just beyond the school’s plate-glass windows, which, for all their transparency, felt like the bars of a prison cell. Tell that story to a kid in Africa who has to walk miles to get to school and the school might not have electricity or water and so on. They would say "So, yo…
>Tell that story to a kid in Africa who has to walk miles to get to school and the school might not have electricity or water and so on. They would say "So, you're telling me, you have free transportation to school, teachers, computers in ever classroom, air conditioned rooms, and you choose let your children learn to carve 'beautiful long bows' instead?"
This is a bit of a false dichotomy. You can learn pretty much whatever you want without being locked in a brutalist concrete box with no windows with dozens of other restless children.
Honestly, I think I would have learned way more (and way faster) if I had just avoided elementary school and was given the latitude to study at my own pace (and maybe do some outdoorsy stuff like that mentioned in the OP). It wasn't until middle school that "normal" schooling (being locked in a room for hour-long sessions) became even remotely useful to me.
Of course, a lot of this is about finding a learning style that works; there is no universal learning style that is good for everyone. Which is why I agree with
>it is their right to do it and it is nice to have that choice.
Re: Unschooling: The Case for Setting Your Kids Into the Wild
#7> At the time, my father—who earned his undergraduate degree at Cornell and his master’s at Johns Hopkins Nothing cooler than rich kids taking all their advantages they were given and use them to live like paupers with zero concern for the the world around them. > I can report that Fin and Rye both learned to read and write with essentially zero instruction, albeit when they were about eight years old, a year or so l…
>I'm pretty sure that's closer to 4 or 5 for most kids who grow up in families from the Cornell / John Hopkins pedigree
There's a lot of evidence that learning to read early can be detrimental in the long run. More and more of the educated parents I know are no longer focusing on teaching their preschoolers to read.
Edit: see my comment further down this reply chain for links to evidence.
Re: Unschooling: The Case for Setting Your Kids Into the Wild
#8> Everything I learned felt abstract and standardized. It was a conditional knowledge that existed in separation from the richly textured world just beyond the school’s plate-glass windows, which, for all their transparency, felt like the bars of a prison cell. Tell that story to a kid in Africa who has to walk miles to get to school and the school might not have electricity or water and so on. They would say "So, yo…
As a urban parent who plans to unschool our three kids, I think this article only gives a single perspective to the unschool movement - namely a rustic one, which happens to be very popular with this movement.
What is overshadowed in the article, largely because it is an outdoorsy magazine, is that the philosophy behind unschooling is the difference rather than the specific skills learned.
Case in point, my kids will be getting hands on experience with robotics and computing as early as they can read and form abstractions - which includes mathematics and physics education. The distinction is that we will teach at the pace of their understanding and curiosity rather than set milestones in the form of testing.
I think your metaphor generalizes too widely however I do agree that done right, unschooling truly is a rich mans school (time, effort and materiel) because it is so narrowly tailored.
Re: Unschooling: The Case for Setting Your Kids Into the Wild
#9There are a lot of things I like about this, but I am do see some issues. I think the boys are learning a lot of very interesting skills, but I think they would struggle a lot with becoming lawyers and doctors like the author claims. My biggest concern would be their reading skills, and later, their advanced math skills. He says they read fine, but reading is something that must be done almost every day for years to…
>He says they read fine, but reading is something that must be done almost every day for years to get to a highly literate point. Literacy and reading comprehension are essential skills to navigating the modern world.
Almost all of my reading was done on my own time. School work was a detriment to the reading ability of me and my siblings. I read for fun, and by forcing me to spend time reading things I didn't want to, I spent less time reading overall.
Re: Unschooling: The Case for Setting Your Kids Into the Wild
#10> At the time, my father—who earned his undergraduate degree at Cornell and his master’s at Johns Hopkins Nothing cooler than rich kids taking all their advantages they were given and use them to live like paupers with zero concern for the the world around them. > I can report that Fin and Rye both learned to read and write with essentially zero instruction, albeit when they were about eight years old, a year or so l…
>I'm pretty sure that's closer to 4 or 5 for most kids who grow up in families from the Cornell / John Hopkins pedigree There's a lot of evidence that learning to read early can be detrimental in the long run. More and more of the educated parents I know are no longer focusing on teaching their preschoolers to read. Edit: see my comment further down this reply chain for links to evidence.
> There's a lot of evidence that learning to read early can be detrimental in the long run. More and more of the educated parents I know are no longer focusing on teaching their preschoolers to read.
That's horrifying. Can't wait for the rest of us to have to clean up their experiment.