"So what if they don’t learn fractions until they’re 12? The 'learning target' of conventional schools are designed to give taxpayers proof their tax dollars are 'working.' Unschooling eschews accountability of that kind and centers the child’s inner compass. This all holds limited appeal to me because its approach is generally individualistic, a horseshoe-theory meeting of radical progressive permissiveness and separatist libertarian self-determinism. People who make the case for unschooling, like the filmmaker Astra Taylor, who was unschooled until she was 13, are usually exceptional people with unconventional families. Most of us are ordinary people with jobs. We’re foot soldiers of conformity, and we’re imprisoned by our mortgages, student debts, limited skill sets, and sedentary habits. You can pity us and you can call us 'sheeple,' but unless you’re willing to forgive our debts, we’re going to keep working, and we won’t have the time to mind our kids while they unschool themselves...."
From "Would Unschooling Actually Make My Kids Any Happier?" by Kathryn Jezer-Morton (The Cut).
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I went to an Open Alternative school in Santa Barbara for a couple years in 4th and 5th grades. Same basic philosophy. Good experience, terrible way to learn. Stayed way ahead in reading but I got way behind in math and more behind in good study habits until college.
Learning needs structure especially when there are so many distractions and kids aren't really good about knowing what they should know.
Expose kids to lots of different subjects. Kid in music or art class finds they enjoy it and are good at it.
Kid forced to take algebra discovers math comes easy.
Forced to write book reports, might become a talented author.
On the other hand, could do like local high school with several thousand students did. Turn the auto shop class into a dance studio.
What if they never learn to read? Would we blame the kids?
Family. Family. Family.
These are the three key factors in education and...well... in wellbeing.
Ok, I'll buy. Immediately eliminate ALL public education and ALL compulsory schooling laws. Survival of the fittest!!!!
The primary goal of the teachers unions and our educational establishment is to eliminate all standards for students.
Because if there are standards then you can measure teacher effectiveness.
And without any academic standards you can focus on your CRT and grooming efforts.
Sounds a bit like Rousseau, although his actual treatment of his own children was a bit harsher.
"Unschooling" is what we have now. Will indoctrination in leftist ideology make my kid happy ? Is the question you should be asking now.
Meanwhile, Chinese kids are lapping the US in math and science.
You can't do serious work in social science, or even understand the work of others, without significant mathematical knowledge. Even a geeky kid like me doesn't really acquire the requisite technical knowledge from reading George Gamow and John Allen Paulos; you need homework and tests.
Similarly, unless you go to France or Spain and hang out with native speakers (who generally have fairly rigorous schooling themselves), you will not achieve fluency in those languages without rigorous classroom training. And I have no idea how you could learn Latin or Greek without formal training.
And if I didn't know Greek, I couldn't read Scripture in the original.
There is value both in regimented and free form education. As a home school family (not something available to all families) we are pretty laid back on structure during primary years, but start to require structure in the early teen years. The structure isn’t so much for raw learning as it is to build long term functionality in structured life. Still, there are basic skills that children need to develop in understanding language and presenting thoughts in coherent ways, as well as basic logic skills that come from math curriculum. We played it by ear for all of them, and each found his own equilibrium. Results are mostly good, but if we were more regimented, maybe we would have more drs and lawyers, less structured more entrepreneurs or artists. Hard to say. Got one working on dentist, one starting a business, one who likes physical work, and one linguist. Is this because or despite our approach?
"Unschooling argues that if you let kids do what they want, they’ll end up learning what they need to know in order to live happy, engaged lives."
"So what if they don’t learn fractions until they’re 12?
umm, i Realize, that Journalists are Profoundly STUPID; but don't even They realize, that
"if you let kids do what they want", they WON'T learn fractions, not when they're 12; not EVER.
Foreign Languages? By the time that they think that they MIGHT want to learn a foreign language..
They'll be Too Old.
But HEY! we don't need STEM people, or bilingual people.. China can provide US with plenty,
right?
I agree that the tedium and constant testing/evaluation of typical school attendance doesn't exactly engender a love of learning (and most of it is more to make things easier on the teachers and administration/system than for the students' benefit, anyway). But real learning does require a certain amount of concentrated focus over time, which kids aren't going to achieve on their own if they have other choice. I always thought I could have learned just as much, if not more, with an hour of daily one-on-one tutoring, plus a couple hours of self-directed reading, as I ever did in 7-hour classroom days. (Then I could have spent the rest of the day playing poker and flirting with girls, and eventually write a book about how my education was achieved through "creative recreation.")
Of course, the thing IS: public school serves Two functions; one main, one secondary.
The MAIN Function is: Provide good jobs for teachers, and GREAT jobs for admins and union bosses.
The Secondary Function is: Provide (expensive) day care for working moms.
Since those are The ONLY two functions a public school provides; this "don't teach them" idea makes sense
"Family. Family. Family." & "Survival of the fittest!!!!"
Absolutely. This is Darwinian as hell. Try to guess the race and income status of the kids that would be harmed by such an approach. Like Capital-L Libertarianism, a fantasy for the White middle-class.
On the other hand, could do like local high school with several thousand students did. Turn the auto shop class into a dance studio.
Fifteen years ago, my high school had an amazing vocational ed capability. We had two auto teachers, a masonry teacher, a public safety (police/fire) class, ROTC, a pre-nursing program and home ec. Today all of those are gone. We have two modern dance teachers, a woman's studies teacher, and an aviation mechanic program nobody is interested in.
Serious Question:
Since schools don't teach (even if they SAY they do: see Chicago), and;
Since gilbar has No Children..
WHY should gilbar be paying for good jobs for teachers, and great jobs for admins and union bosses?
On the plus side, no kid would read Woke propaganda on their own.
The Lord of the Flies kid society from 9-5 while parents work probably not as bad as Woke Indoctrination.
As an unschooler parent, it’s not that we don’t believe in “school,” it’s that we believe in individually directed learning. If your kid wants to learn higher-level math, then they are free to enroll in a math class. If they would prefer to learn it online, that’s fine, too. We find that we can accomplish far more in a few hours of focused work every week than in seven hours a day in public school.
"Unschooling eschews accountability of that kind and centers the child’s inner compass."
Montessori went some way in that direction. Not sure if it produced/es distinctly better results, in learning or lover thereof, over the long haul.
But as with all learning, outcomes will depend on IQ and a few basic personality factors more than on structure or its absence.
Certain structures, particularly if populated by actively destructive people, can be harmful; be sure to avoid those.
The Alternative School that was established in my Southern California High School allowed functional illiterates to "focus" on whatever interested them......and led to them "graduating" from high school still as functional illiterates.
Good guys of course, but functionally illiterate. Not figuratively, literally.
So yeah, lets do more of that. What could go wrong?
Well, for sure it'd be cheaper.
Will no one think of the teachers and their unions!
Quite like unweightlifting got Lou Ferigno his physique.
By now we've seen millions of feral black kids cruise through school without learning anything.
How's not "acting white" been working out for them?
My wife's a very cultured person on the Liberal Arts side, but I noticed early in our marriage that she always cooked according to recipe instructions, because (it turns out) she couldn't scale them up or down.
Thus, if cooking a cup of rice requires 1 1/2 cups of water, she can't calculate how much water it takes to prepare 3/4 cups or 1 1/2 cups of rice.
At best, she goes with multiples of the recipe, leading to cases where she's prepared enough rice for the Chinese Army on the Long March.
I still donate to my Catholic high school in Chicago. So do a lot of alumni. The school is now all black but the parents are up to date on tuition and the graduation rate is over 95% for years. This is in a blue collar neighborhood. I attended my 50th reunion and it was good to see a number of black alumni there. The white alumni are slowly dying off but it seems the school will survive.
We unschooled our four children their whole lives. They are now independent adults of whom I'm very proud.
I can't address every ignorant comment written above. Consider how deeply the teachers' union has indoctrinated everyone, even those who radically oppose the teachers' union.
Teachers all want to quit anyway.
Win-win.
Yancey Ward said...
Will no one think of the teachers and their unions!
Hello! gilbar, has been thinking, of NOTHING Else!
There's a great podcast called Sold a Story that very convincingly lays out how the education industry taught kids how to read through the unschooling method: look at the pictures, guess what word might fit that starts with the first letter, anything but phonics. Basically kids were supposed to learn to read through osmosis. It hasn't worked out well for kids who don't grow up in upper middle class families. Probably the same for unschooling.
Montessori schools have this very clever tricksiness where they tell the child she is choosing what she wants to do, but structure the possible choices, sometimes almost invisibly. Still, there is a great deal of choice and finding your own way. Many geniuses were autodidacts, but they usually had some formal lessons - reading and computation at least, then allowed to read what they liked. It works a treat for the curious like CS Lewis or Benoit Mandelbrot. During highschool I might have just watched TV all day myself.
"Kid forced to take algebra discovers math comes easy."
Not for me. But then, I was so disinterested in math that I really put forth minimal effort in trying to understand and apply the methods and principles of algebra or anything higher than that. (In fact, the last math class I took was Geometry, which was also a burdensome chore for me. I think if I took it now I might find it more graspable...but, who knows?)
"The 'learning target' of conventional schools are designed to give taxpayers proof their tax dollars are 'working'" or not.
Defund the schools!
My parents were fairly unrelenting. You take Math, and a foreign language.
I wasn't very good at either, but the lessons stuck. I became an engineer. Ich lese die Deutsche Zeitungen.
This article most definitely deserves the bullshit tag!
We find that we can accomplish far more in a few hours of focused work every week than in seven hours a day in public school.
Yes
I taught at a 6-12 'classical Christian' school (required Latin, optional Greek) that attracted a lot of kids (roughly half the student body) that had been home-schooled for 5, 6, or 8 years, and were over-represented among our top students. We had one 8th-grader that had been unschooled for 7 years, allowed to learn whatever whenever at her own pace. She was very mature emotionally and intellectually, and ready or more than ready for all the standard subjects, but there were two serious gaps in her education. 1. Her handwriting was abysmal - that was true of close to half the kids, but hers was among the very worst. 2. Her spelling was even worse. It's been 15 years, but I still recall one example: 'auphin'. If you're wondering, that's 'often' with every letter but one wrong. Maybe she had a touch of dyslexia, but I suspect spelling is one subject that kids need to be pushed to learn. Would need a larger sample to tell for sure.
Scaling is the problem. What works for one curious, math-oriented kid will not work for (for instance) Robert Cook (by his own admission), or me (I could do math but didn't love it, unlike my three kids, thank goodness), or the great mass of kids.
I heartily support individual families' decisions, based on knowledge of their kids' interests and abilities, to homeschool or "unschool" their kids. (Side note: I think "unschool" must be a term created by progressives to separate progressive parents who don't want their kids in public schools from those icky Mormon, mainstream Christian, and other alt-right ultra MAGA parents.)
But I am not so foolish as to think it can scale.
My academic career suffered from excessive control (Grades 1-12, Catholic school), and excessive freedom (undergrad at hippie college where I wasn't a hippie). Effective education requires both a motivated learner and a well designed, individually focused instructional environment. Good luck finding that.
When it comes to education, there are no do-overs, There are repair jobs. I recommend the instructional tools sold by the Great Courses company (Wondrium) and online courses available through MIT.
I let them unschool when they're done with all the stuff I assign. Heh.
Sudbury Valley School in Framingham. MA, is based on the philosophy of unschooling. Kids plan their own learning path based on their own interests and needs. Most kids there figure out they need to learn to read early on. There are no grade levels, and it's not unusual to find an 18 year old working on learning something with a 9 year old. To be a successful student there requires having curiosity and self-motivation. If you can't imagine how someone could be well-educated in that environment, then it's not the right school for you, but that doesn't make it a bad place for others. Public schools have to accept everybody. A great deal of effort there is spent on teaching the incurious and unmotivated. We need places where those kids are made to learn what they need to learn, but learning in the same environment often harms the curiosity and motivation of other kids. I don't know anyone who homeschools or chooses a place like Sudbury Valley who wants to close the public school option. They want public schools to be better than they are for sure, but mostly they want the freedom not to use them.
and no Feminist dare mention Maria Montessori and her Casa dei Bambini
to sum up then
UNSCHOOLING ===>>>!NO CLASS DISCIPLINE?
>>> is this not real reality in most schools?
+ floundering students
+ virtu[ous]al teacher enlightenment
+ anti-racism
No. Just no. Reading is a skill best learned and practiced from age 5 or before. And Math as well. Think of them as languages. The earlier you learn them, and the more you practice them, the better you will be at them, and I can think of nothing more important for a human being to be successful than reading and math. They rank at least as high as interpersonal skills and socialization.
I see unschooled kids every day on the streets of Philadelphia. Learning what they need to know.
I’d love to see more parents move out of public education and towards homeschooling pods of some kind. I’ve got a 12 year old and school is NOT what it was even 5 years ago. It’s all diversity equity and inclusion. They have parts of each day to discuss feelings. “Wokeness” has invaded even previously conservative areas. Parents for the most part are clueless about what their kids are doing in school. “Furries” in every class. Most kids aren’t learning much of anything of use these days except indoctrination into leftist views.
If one has a solid base, "unschooling" can work at higher grades. In grad school I took classes of course but also pursued advanced studies on my own in the library. But if you don't learn to read or do simple math in lower grades, you are not able to teach yourself.
My wife's sophomore and junior years in high school were exactly like what these unschoolers describe. Guess how long that program (this was '94-'95) survived? If you guessed even one more year after that, you would be wrong. It cratered and for good reason.
A great deal of effort there is spent on teaching the incurious and unmotivated. We need places where those kids are made to learn what they need to learn, but learning in the same environment often harms the curiosity and motivation of other kids.
This used to be accomplished by tracking. You put the uninterested, incurious and just slow kids in one class and the high level, curious and driven kids in another class. This is no longer allowed. I've been literally booed for using the T word in the wrong environment.
"People who make the case for unschooling, like the filmmaker Astra Taylor, who was unschooled until she was 13, are usually exceptional people with unconventional families."
Well, but. It used to be that if you wanted your kid to grow up dull and conventional, you could pretty much rely on the public schools to make that happen. But today's public schools are more likely to turn your kid into some kind of sexual and psychological cripple.
Auntie Mame of 1950s Broadway sent her young ward Patrick to a very progressive school where, for example, the kids learned about salmon by getting naked and pretending to migrate upstream to spawn. He turned out OK. And he could make a perfect martini, a skill hard to find today in mostcpreteens.
Homeschooling works.
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