Isn't it better to keep your kid inside and teach him to code?
Unschooling: The Case for Setting Your Kids Into the Wild
41–50 of 202 posts
Re: Unschooling: The Case for Setting Your Kids Into the Wild
#42Seriously? If unschooling were so great 3rd world countries would be dominating the world. Creativity is domain specific. Walking around the woods won't help you be creative in solving math/engineering/science problems. You need a strong background in the subject, and to see how other people solved similar problems. I feel bad for these kids as their future is being pigeon-holed. Who's going to hire someone who's edu…
I would like to clarify that this article is not representative of all unschooling, I'm not an expert on the subject, but my best friend was essentially unschooled until eighth grade. His parents ran a biology lab and just took him with them to work and let him go. He quickly became interested in the computer system in the lab and developed a lifelong love of computing. At age 6 he installed Linux on a computer for the first time. By 14 he was employed by the lab as a sysadmin and also did some bioinformatics for them.
The kids in the article might go on to a life in agriculture like their parents, or they might develop an interest in carpentry, as per the structures in the forest. I know that to many people on HN such a lifestyle might be very foreign, but there's nothing wrong with it, and if one is happy in that lifestyle than they are much better off than the many people who were pigeonholed into engineering or medicine or law and find themselves unhappy.
Re: Unschooling: The Case for Setting Your Kids Into the Wild
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
What are you basing that on? There is evidence that not teaching children to read until age 6 or 7 has an overall net benefit. Many countries ranked very well for education, don't start formal education until age 7 (Finland and Sweden for instance). The children in these countries are taught to read later than in the US, but they do just as well or better on reading tests later in life. Children in the US weren't tau…
Care to cite some of this evidence? I was just reading about this and found zero evidence its somehow harmful and only anecdotal evidence that it is not beneficial and "evens out" later.
Children in New Zealand who began learning to read at age 7 had better reading comprehension than those that started at age 5 by the time they were 10.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0885200612...
Children in Germany who started school at age 7 performed better on standardized tests than those who started at age 6.
Re: Unschooling: The Case for Setting Your Kids Into the Wild
#44The fundamental problem with the elementary school system in the west is that kids are given no room for self-direction whatsoever; school for them is de facto a part-time prison or "labor" camp. As a result they are trained by association to dread to that which the system purports to champion: learning, culture, reading, knowledge, even any demonstration of intelligence. It takes a combination of luck, will and posi…
Perhaps I am clouded by my own positive experiences with school, but I disagree on two levels.
Firstly, your use of the phrase 'in the west' implies that outside of the 'west' there is some different, better elementary education system. This has not been my experience in India, where capacity for rote memorization is regarded as equivalent to intelligence from an early age. What countries fit your boundaries of 'the west'?
Secondly, school serves as a valuable social and educational center to most children. Even though elementary education is imperfect, it does not mean that a viable solution is to simply do away with it. In fact, I think the social interaction with other children of similar age is extremely important to developing social skills and friendships.
Re: Unschooling: The Case for Setting Your Kids Into the Wild
#45I don't understand how, on a site called "Hacker News," so many people seem oblivious to how damaging the primary educational system is to young peoples' minds and methods of thought. Unschooling doesn't mean not teaching children: that's what happens in schools.
Re: Unschooling: The Case for Setting Your Kids Into the Wild
#46This actually seems astoundingly misguided and dangerous. One of the unique, defining qualities of humanity is an ability to build on the knowledge and experiences of generations before us. Why throw all of the knowledge of the past 5,000 years of human civilization out? When will they learn math, or science, or history? How can you become a lawyer, doctor, or engineer without learning these subjects? Can they really…
No, you're fully missing the point of the article. The problem is people's one-to-one connection between schools and education. No such connection exists. A school is not the only place to get an education, and for many people no education occurs there. You can learn math, science or history on your own accord and in a way that is suited to how you learn.
Absolutely nothing in the article implies that this father is attempting to expose his children to books or other resources (the internet, perhaps?) about math, science, or history.
Re: Unschooling: The Case for Setting Your Kids Into the Wild
#47> 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…
>I can't shake the feeling that this is elitist
Hardly relevant. You have a better life on top of a society, it has always been so. Hence we should encourage people to move up in society.
Re: Unschooling: The Case for Setting Your Kids Into the Wild
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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.
My strong opinion is that educationally, THE most important thing you must do with your child is TALK to them. From the beginning. From year 0. Discuss things with them. Let them soak as much understandable speech as they can between years 0 and 2. This will have a far more profound effect in their life rather than did they learn to read at 4 or 8 years of age.
Could you specify what is horrifying about the previous post? Why would it be more important for a 5 year old to learn to read rather than, say, spend their time building Legos, practice crafts or climbing into trees? Like another poster stated, most kids in Finland do not start to formally learn to read until they are 6 (preschool, if the parents want so) and at the latest when they enter primary school (7). I would claim Finland has a pretty good public primary education system.
Pushing kids to do too much too soon has no advantages, imho. There are skills that are best started acquiring at a youngish age but you will have to convince me pretty hard that reading is one of them. Kids have this natural curiosity to an amazing variety of things. But what those things are can be quite random. The best way to have them learn something is to apply this natural curiosity - i.e. find what they are interested in - and the support them in this activity. This does not mean allowing them play videogames or watch cartoons whole the whole day.
I would say if the kids like it and want to then sure, teach them to read. But before 7, I would claim it is more valuable to find those things that they are really keen into and let them practice those. This creates a positive association to knowledge acquisition (the love of learning). And at that age they soak information and skills like sponges if they are motivated and have the mental capacity to grasp the concepts.
Re: Unschooling: The Case for Setting Your Kids Into the Wild
#49> 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 shouldn't be so sarcastic about child abuse What does it say about you if you feel that this is child abuse, but do nothing? Also, by claiming that this is child abuse, you are grouping it with things like sexual and physical abuse. Are you sure that you are attempting to make such a strong statement?
No, a fairer grouping would be with refusing to let your child attend a school, read books, or use the Internet.
Re: Unschooling: The Case for Setting Your Kids Into the Wild
#50I don't understand how, on a site called "Hacker News," so many people seem oblivious to how damaging the primary educational system is to young peoples' minds and methods of thought. Unschooling doesn't mean not teaching children: that's what happens in schools.
Is the elementary educational system truly "damaging" to young minds?
I think of my elementary education (which, mind you, was only 6 years ago) as perhaps boring or tedious in some areas (like math, for me), while also exciting and rewarding in others (science, learning to make friends, deal with gossip, etc). I certainly don't think I have a very 'damaged' method of thought now because of my elementary education.
I think that, on the whole, it was not at all damaging; in fact, it was important to my development as a child.