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I wonder whether maths really can be self-taught for more than about two generations. It has been known since the beginning of maths that it must be taught by teachers who understand the ideas to students who challenge the descriptions.
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…
Well stated.
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
If both parents have to work a regular day job, there's nobody at home to teach the kids so unschooling is not possible. And if only one parent stays at home, they will also yearn for some free time and push for getting the kids signed up for school.
The only situation where I can imagine the parents being enthusiastic about unschooling is if they are independently wealthy and can afford to spend lots of time with their kids, when other people would have to work. And obviously, plenty of personalized attention from the parents will make the kids learn a lot faster than your typical 1 teacher 30 students class.
Plus, once you assume that all unschooling parents are much wealthier than regular people, it kind of makes sense that they will have very different opinions about life in general, due to their very different experience of it. Regular folks will go to a public playground and complain about the dog shit there. Rich folks will just buy a playground for their backyard and hire a gardener to keep it tidy.
To outsiders, that wealth discrepancy would then look like a religion, because all of the unschoolers have a shared untypical worldview.
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 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…
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 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).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBc7qBS1Ujo
Right above my comment is another linking the wikipedia page on IQ heritability. That would be a good example of a source. Meta-studies are a good option. Longitudinal studies are a decent one. Single studies are usually useless, but they're at least a good starting point for a productive conversations.
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…
Also without you at a normal school some students might be worse off. Not your problem of course, but it is at a societal level.
I wonder whether maths really can be self-taught for more than about two generations. It has been known since the beginning of maths that it must be taught by teachers who understand the ideas to students who challenge the descriptions.
When you say self-taught do you mean even without using a really good text? Or do you mean that it actually can't be taught without a teacher? If you are saying that math can't be taught without a good teacher I don't really see how that is "known".
I'd -love- to go through some of my college level math classes; both the ones I took, and the ones i didn't need to take. They weren't especially relevant then. They're slightly more now, but more than that, I'm -interested- now. But self-learning takes too much of an investment of time (when I run into something I don't know I have to research -that-, and it becomes this infinite process of diving down rabbit holes, rather than having someone who has gone before who can give me a sufficient answer to unblock me on my original question).