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Made in us
[DCM]
The Main Man






Beast Coast

I read an interesting article today, about "unschooling," basically a less structured form of homeschooling. I'm curious as to what my fellow Dakkaites think, both American and otherwise. I know that in some countries, such as Germany, homeschooling isn't legal, and in some others it's severely restricted. It ought to make for interesting discussion!


Here's the link.

And the text if anyone is work blocked:

Spoiler:
OUTSIDE MAGAZINE, SEPTEMBER 2014
TUESDAY, AUGUST 12, 2014
We Don't Need No Education
At least not of the traditional, compulsory, watch-the-clock-until-the-bell-rings kind. As a growing movement of unschoolers believe, a steady diet of standardized testing and indoor inactivity is choking the creativity right out of our kids. The alternative: set 'em free.

By: BEN HEWITT


Rye Hewitt putting his pack basket, which he wove himself, to good use. He and his brother Fin learned how to make the wooden baskets from a friend of the family who also unschools her children. Photo: Penny Hewitt

In early September, in a clapboard house situated on 43 acres just outside a small town in northern Vermont, two boys awaken. They are brothers; the older is 12, the younger 9, and they rise to a day that has barely emerged from the clutches of dark. It is not yet autumn, but already the air has begun to change, the soft nights of late summer lengthening and chilling into the season to come. Outside the boys’ bedroom window, the leaves on the maples are just starting to turn.

School is back in session and has been for two weeks or more, but the boys are unhurried. They dress slowly, quietly. Faded and frayed thrift-store camo pants. Flannel shirts. Rubber barn boots. Around their waists, leather belts with knife sheaths. In each sheath, a fixed-blade knife.

By 6:30, with the first rays of sun burning through the ground-level fog, the boys are outside. At some point in the next hour, a yellow school bus will rumble past the end of the driveway that connects the farm to the town road. The bus will be full of children the boys’ age, their foreheads pressed against the glass, gazing at the unfurling landscape, the fields and hills and forests of the small working-class community they call home.

The boys will pay the bus no heed. This could be because they will be seated at the kitchen table, eating breakfast with their parents. Or it might be because they are already deep in the woods below the house, where a prolific brook trout stream sluices through a stand of balsam fir; there is an old stone bridge abutment at the stream’s edge, and the boys enjoy standing atop it, dangling fresh-dug worms into the water. Perhaps they won’t notice the bus because they are already immersed in some other project: tillering a longbow of black locust, or starting a fire over which to cook the quartet of brookies they’ve caught. They heat a flat rock at the fire’s edge, and the hot stone turns the fishes’ flesh milky white and flaky.

Or maybe the boys will pay the bus no heed because its passing is meaningless to them. Maybe they have never ridden in a school bus, and maybe this is because they’ve never been to school. Perhaps they have not passed even a single day of their short childhoods inside the four walls of a classroom, their gazes shifting between window and clock, window and clock, counting the restless hours and interminable minutes until release.

Maybe the boys are actually my sons, and maybe their names are Fin and Rye, and maybe, if my wife, Penny, and I get our way, they will never go to school.

Hey, a father can dream, can’t he?

There’s a name for the kind of education Fin and Rye are getting. It’s called unschooling, though Penny and I have never been fond of the term. But “self-directed, adult-facilitated life learning in the context of their own unique interests” doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, so unschooling it is.

It is already obvious that unschooling is radically different from institutionalized classroom learning, but how does it differ from more common homeschooling? Perhaps the best way to explain it is that all unschooling is homeschooling, but not all homeschooling is unschooling. While most homeschooled children follow a structured curriculum, unschoolers like Fin and Rye have almost total autonomy over their days. At ages that would likely see them in seventh and fourth grades, I generously estimate that my boys spend no more than two hours per month sitting and studying the subjects, such as science and math, that are universal to mainstream education. Not two hours per day or even per week. Two hours per month. Comparatively speaking, by now Fin would have spent approximately 5,600 hours in the classroom. Rye, nearly three years younger, would have clocked about half that time.


A stubborn calf. Fin and Rye also take care of their own dwarf goats. Photo: Penny Hewitt
If this sounds radical, it’s only because you’re not taking a long enough view, for the notion that children should spend the majority of their waking hours confined to a classroom enjoys scant historical precedent.


A stubborn calf. Fin and Rye also take care of their own dwarf goats. Photo: Penny Hewitt
The first incidence of compulsory schooling came in 1852, when Massachusetts required communities to offer free public education and demanded that every child between the ages of 8 and 14 attend school for at least 12 weeks per year. Over the next seven decades, the remaining states adopted similar laws, and by 1918, the transition to mandated public education was complete.

It was not long before some parents and even educators began to question the value of compulsory education. One of those was John Holt, a Yale graduate and teacher at the Colorado Rocky Mountain School who published his observations in How Children Fail in 1964. Ultimately selling more than a million copies, it was an indictment of the education system, asserting that children are born with deep curiosity and love of learning, both of which are diminished in school.

Holt became a passionate advocate for homeschooling, which existed in a legal gray area, but he quickly realized that some parents were simply replicating the classroom. So in 1977, in his magazine, Growing Without Schooling, he coined a new term: “GWS will say ‘unschooling’ when we mean taking children out of school, and ‘deschooling’ when we mean changing the laws to make schools noncompulsory and to take away from them their power to grade, rank, and label people, i.e. to make lasting, official, public judgments about them.”

Holt died in 1985, having authored 11 books on child development. But along with veteran teacher John Taylor Gatto, author of Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling, he popularized a movement. Well, maybe popularized is a tad generous; while it’s generally accepted that unschoolers comprise about 10 percent of the 1.8 million American children who learn at home, hard numbers are scarce.

In addition to fundamental curricular differences, there is also something of a cultural schism between the two styles. Home-schooling is popularly associated with strong religious views (in a 2007 survey by the National Center for Education Statistics, 83 percent of homeschooling parents said that providing “religious or moral instruction” was part of their choice), while unschooling seems to have no such association. “Unschooling has always been sort of code for being secular,” explains Patrick Farenga, who runs the unschooling website JohnHoltGWS.com. “It’s about understanding that learning is not a special skill that happens separate from everything else and only under a specialist’s gaze. It’s about raising children who are curious and engaged in the world alongside their families and communities.”

I can almost hear you thinking, Sure, but you live in the sticks, and you both work at home. What about the rest of us? And it’s true: Penny and I have made what most would consider an extreme choice. I write from home, and we both run our farm, selling produce and meat to help pay the bills. Everyone we know who unschools, in fact, has chosen autonomy over affluence. Hell, some years we’re barely above the poverty line. But the truth is, unschooling isn’t merely an educational choice. It’s a lifestyle choice.


And it can happen anywhere; these concepts are not the sole domain of rural Vermont hill farmers living out their Jeffersonian fantasies. Kerry McDonald left a career in corporate training to unschool two of her four children in Boston, though her husband, Brian, still works as a technology consultant. “The city is our curriculum,” says McDonald. “We believe that kids learn by living in the world around them, so we immerse them in that world.” Their “classrooms”—sidewalks, museums, city parks—may appear drastically different from those of my sons. But the ethos remains the same, that a child’s learning is as natural and easy as breathing.

Unschooling is also perfectly legal in all 50 states, so long as certain basic stipulations—from simple notification to professional evaluations, “curriculum” approval, and even home visits—are met. But many unschoolers have been reticent to stand up and be counted, perhaps because the movement tends to attract an independent-thinking, antiauthoritarian personality type.

To the extent that I hadn’t demonstrated these qualities previously, the arrival of my 16th birthday provided ample opportunity, rooted in two events of great and lasting importance. The first, of course, was the acquisition of my driver’s license. This came with a craptastic Volkswagen Rabbit that my mother had driven for the past half-dozen years and sold to me for $200.

The second was the quiet arrival of Vermont’s minimum dropout age. More than three million American teens leave school annually, a number that makes up about 8 percent of the nation’s 16-to-24-year-olds. Dropouts comprise 75 percent of state inmates and 59 percent of those in federal prison. They earn, on average, $260,000 less than graduates over their lifetimes.

My 16th birthday came on November 23, 1987; by the end of that day, my freshly minted driver’s license was cooling in my wallet. And by the midpoint of my junior year, I had pointed that little Rabbit, already bearing the scratch-and-dent evidence of my negligence, out of my high school’s parking lot for the last time.

The irony of my dropping out can hardly be overstated. At the time, my father—who earned his undergraduate degree at Cornell and his master’s at Johns Hopkins—was employed by none other than Vermont’s Department of Education. My mother graduated from Iowa’s Grinnell College and was a substitute teacher. My family’s immersion in structured education was total. It wasn’t merely the medium through which my parents made their way in the world: it provided the means to support their children, one of whom was now flipping the proverbial bird to the very hand that fed.

It might lend a degree of credibility to my role as my children’s primary educator if I could report that I dropped out of high school for reasons of virtue, perhaps to pursue a rigorous course of self-directed study in thermonuclear engineering or to dig wells in some impoverished sub-Saharan village. But the truth is, I left public school because I was bored to the point of anger. To the point of numbness. To the point of rebellion.


Fin and Rye drying foraged chokecherries. The boys know where to find wild mushrooms and berries, "and lord knows what else [they] are eating out there," Hewitt writes on his blog. Photo: Penny Hewitt
Day after day I sat, compelled to repeat and recite, and little of it seemed to have any bearing beyond the vacuum of the classroom. 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.

Peter Gray knows just how I felt. Gray, a Boston College psychology professor who wrote the 2013 book Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life, is unsparing in his criticism of compulsory education. “Children are forced to attend school, where they are stripped of most of their rights,” he says. “The debate shouldn’t be about whether school is prison, because unless you want to change the definition of prison, it is. School deliberately removes the environmental conditions that foster self-directed learning and natural curiosity. It’s like locking a child in a closet.”

What kids need instead, Gray contends, is exploration and play without supervision. It is this that allows them to develop self-determination and confidence. If he’s right, current educational trends are not promising: in 2012, five states voted to increase the length of the school year by no less than 300 hours.

Of course, unschooling is not the only choice. Increasingly, families are turning to options like Waldorf, the largest so-called alternative-education movement in the world. It was founded in Stuttgart, Germany, in 1919, based on the teachings of Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner, who believed that children learn best through creative play. In 1965, there were nine Waldorf schools in the U.S.; today there are 123.

Sending our children to a Waldorf school was never an option for us, if for no other reason than tuition, which can run as high as $30,000 a year. But when Fin turned five, the age at which we deemed it necessary to introduce some structure to his days, Penny and I sought to integrate aspects of the Waldorf curriculum into his learning. We purchased reams of thick craft paper, along with pastel crayons and watercolor paints. Penny arranged a small “schooling” station at our kitchen table, under the assumption that our firstborn would sit contentedly, expressing his innate creativity even as he learned the rote information necessary to navigate the modern world.


The Hewitt family (plus goat). They've lived and worked on their Vermont farm for over two decades. Photo: Penny Hewitt;
It was, to put it mildly, a flawed assumption. Fin chafed at every second of his perceived captivity. Crayons were broken and launched at innocent walls. Pages of extremely expensive paper were torn to flaky bits. Bitter tears were shed, even a few by our son. It was an unmitigated disaster.

It was also a watershed moment for our family. Because as soon as we liberated ourselves from a concept of what our son’s education should look like, we were able to observe how he learned best. And what we saw was that the moment we stopped compelling Fin to sit and draw or paint or write was the moment he began doing these things on his own. It was the moment he began carving staves of wood into beautiful bows and constructing complex toys from materials on hand: an excavator that not only rotated, but also featured an extendable boom; a popgun fashioned from copper pipe, shaved corks, and a whittled-down dowel; even a sawmill with a rotating wooden “blade.”

In other words, the moment we quit trying to teach our son anything was the moment he started really learning.

In my early twenties, having passed my General Educational Development test and endured two semesters in Vermont’s state college system, I lived for a time in a $75-per-month bungalow just outside the bucolic Vermont village of Warren. This was at the apex of my immersion into bicycle racing and backcountry skiing, and I worked infrequently in a bike and ski shop, subsisting on the time-honored action-sports diet of boxed noodles, canned tuna, and expired Clif Bars liberated from the shop’s dumpster.

The bungalow was attached to a rambling, ranchlike structure that looked out over the valley; it was one of those seventies-era, quasi-communal homesteads that carried the lingering scent of sandalwood incense and the fetid body odor unique to heavy tofu consumption. A sign by the door read Resurrection City. Resurrection from what? I had no idea, and no one seemed to know.


During my yearlong tenure at Camp RC, as it was affectionately known, the main house was occupied by a single thirtysomething fellow named Donald who homeschooled his two young sons, Crescent and Orion. Or maybe he unschooled them. I do have a vague recollection of them sitting at a table, studying… well, something. But, for the most part, the boys ran wild, exploring the surrounding woods. On weekends, Donald packed up his orange VW van and drove with Crescent and Orion to bike races and music festivals, where they hawked vegetarian burritos. By the ages of six and eight, the boys were prepping orders and making change.

I was blown away. And jealous. This was the childhood I wished I’d had, equal measures freedom, responsibility, and respect, with none of the rote soul-crushing memorization that had soured me on school. Sure, Crescent and Orion could be a bit wild—I once found the front bumper of my truck kissing a spruce tree that stood between the driveway and the house—but they were precocious and self-aware, brimming with confidence and curiosity. They looked you in the eye and spoke in full sentences. They were constantly running and laughing and playing. I’m not sure how else to put it except to say that never before had I known kids who so fully embodied childhood.

When Penny, then my girlfriend, came to visit, she noticed it, too. “Those kids are amazing,” she said. “I didn’t even know there were kids like that.”

Fin and Rye almost always wake up before dawn. We do not have an alarm clock, but early rising is our habit, ingrained over the decade and a half we’ve run our small farm. We tend to chores as a family: Penny heads to the barn to milk cows, I move the rest of the herd to fresh pasture and slop the pigs, and the boys feed and water their dwarf goats, Flora, Lupine, and Midnight.


The "cafeteria". The Hewitts run a diversified farm with gardens, an orchard and blueberry patch, and livestock—they also sell their produce. Photo: Penny Hewitt
By seven the chores are finished and we convene at the wide wooden table for breakfast—eggs, usually, and bacon from last year’s pigs. After breakfast, I repair to my desk to write and Penny heads to the fields or orchard. Fin and Rye generally follow their mother before disappearing into the woods. Sometimes they grab fishing poles, uncover a few worms, and head to the stream, returning with their pockets full of fish, fiddlehead ferns, and morel mushrooms. Occasionally I join them, and these journeys are always marked by frequent stops, with one boy or the other dropping to his knees to examine some small finding, something I would have blithely, blindly stumbled over.

“Papa, look, wild onions.” And they’ll dig with their young fingers, loosing the little bulbs from the soft forest soil. Later, we’ll fry them in butter and eat them straight from the pan, still hot enough that we hold them on the tips of our tongues before swallowing.

Other times, they work on one of the shelters that they always seem to be constructing; their voices carry across the land as they negotiate materials and design.

“Fin, let’s put the door on this side.”

“Did you say ten and three-eighths or ten and five-eighths?”

“Rye, we need another pole on this end.”

These shelters are so prolific that occasionally I come across one I hadn’t even known existed, and I can see the evolution of the boys’ learning in the growing soundness of these humble structures. Winter’s first big snowfall no longer spells collapse; the boys have learned to slope the roof and to support the ridgepole at its center. They face the openings southward and build on a piece of well-drained ground. They use rot-resistant cedar for anything that will contact the soil.


The boys cleaning the garlic crop. The Hewitts all tend to their farm as a family. Photo: Penny Hewitt
Fin and Rye are proficient with most of the hand and power tools that form the backbone of any working farm. By the time they were eight, both of them could operate the tractor and, in a pinch, drive the truck with a load of logs. They split firewood alongside us, swinging their mauls with remarkable accuracy. They are both licensed hunters and own .22 rifles and 20-gauge shotguns. They wear belt knives almost everywhere, oblivious to the stares of the adults around them, some concerned, some perplexed, and some, it often seems to me, nostalgic.

Our sons are not entirely self-taught; we understand the limits of the young mind and its still-developing capacity for judgment. None of these responsibilities were granted at an arbitrary, age-based marker, but rather as the natural outgrowth of their evolving skills and maturity. We have noticed, however, that the more responsibility we give our sons, the more they assume. The more we trust them, the more trustworthy they become. This may sound patronizingly obvious, yet I cannot help but notice the starring role that institutionalized education—with its inherent risk aversion—plays in expunging these qualities.

Our days do have structure: chores morning and evening, gardens to be turned and planted, berries to be picked and sold, all these things and so many more repeating in overlapping cycles. But even within these routines, Fin and Rye determine how their days will be spent. Often they disappear for hours at a time, their only deadline being whichever meal comes next. On their backs, they wear wooden pack baskets that they wove under the tutelage of a friend who also unschools her children. When they return, the baskets are heavy with the small treasures of their world and their heads are full of the small stories of their wandering: the moose tracks they saw, the grouse they flushed, the forked maple they sat beneath to eat snacks. “The bark felt thick,” Fin tells me. “It’s going to be a hard winter.”

Which brings us to the inevitable issue of what will become of my boys. Of course, I cannot answer in full, because their childhoods are still unfolding.

But not infrequently I field questions from parents who seem skeptical that my sons will be exposed to particular fields of study or potential career paths. The assumption seems to be that by educating our children at home and letting them pursue their own interests, we are limiting their choices and perhaps even depriving them. The only honest answer is, Of course we are. But then, that’s true of every choice a parent makes: no matter what we choose for our children, we are by default not choosing something else.

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. They can add and subtract and multiply and divide. I can report that they do indeed have friends, some who attend school and some who don’t, and their social skills are on par with their peers. In fact, Penny and I often hear from other adults that our sons seem better socialized than like-aged schoolchildren. Fin and Rye participate in a weekly gathering of homeschooled and unschooled kids, and Fin attends a weekly wilderness-skills program. In truth, few of their peers are as smitten with bushcraft as they are, and sometimes they wish for more friends who share their love of the wild. But even this is OK; the world is a place of wondrous diversity, and they must learn that theirs is not the only way.


What if they want to be doctors? They will be doctors. What if they want to be lawyers? They will be lawyers. Peter Gray, he of the 
belief that school is prison, has studied graduates of the Sudbury Valley School in Framingham, Massachusetts, where “students” as young as four enjoy complete autonomy to design their own course of study, even if that involves no studying at all, and found that they have no difficult gaining entry to elite colleges, nor in achieving high GPAs. A home-based education, even one as unstructured as my sons’, does not preclude acceptance into a university; in fact, many colleges have developed application processes geared specifically toward homeschooled students, and while there are no major studies of unschoolers exclusively, homeschoolers are significantly more likely to take college-level courses than the rest of us.

“I look back at unschooling as the best part of my life,” Chelsea Clark told me between classes at the University of South Carolina School of Law, where she was accepted on full scholarship after graduating Phi Beta Kappa from the university’s undergraduate program. “It was a huge advantage, actually. I had the confidence of knowing what I wanted to do, and I wasn’t burned out on classroom learning like most college kids.” Chelsea was unschooled throughout her high school years in the small town of Dorchester, South Carolina.

Still, perhaps the best answer I can give to the question of what price my children might pay is in the form of another question: What price do school-going children pay for their confinement? The physical toll is easy enough to quantify. Diabetes rates among school-age children are sky-high, and the percentage of 6-to-11-year-olds who qualify as obese has nearly tripled since 1980. And what do children do in school? Exactly. They sit.

Inactivity is also bad for the brain. A 2011 study by Georgia Health Sciences University found that cognitive function among kids improves with exercise. Their prefrontal cortex—the area associated with complex thinking, decision making, and social behavior—lights up. The kids in the study who exercised 40 minutes per day boosted their intelligence scores by an average of 3.8 points.

Yet the physical and cognitive implications of classroom learning have played minor roles in our decision to unschool Fin and Rye. It’s not that I don’t want them to be healthy and smart. Of course I do—I’m their father.

But, in truth, what I most want for my boys can’t be charted or graphed. It can’t be measured, at least not by common metrics. There is no standardized test that will tell me if it has been achieved, and there is no specific curriculum that will lead to its realization.

This is what I want for my sons: freedom. Not just physical freedom, but intellectual and emotional freedom from the formulaic learning that prevails in our schools. I want for them the freedom to immerse themselves in the fields and forest that surround our home, to wander aimlessly or with purpose. I want for them the freedom to develop at whatever pace is etched into their DNA, not the pace dictated by an institution looking to meet the benchmarks that will in part determine its funding. I want them to be free to love learning for its own sake, the way that all children love learning for its own sake when it is not forced on them or attached to reward. I want them to remain free of social pressures to look, act, or think any way but that which feels most natural to them.

I want for them the freedom to be children. And no one can teach them how to do that.



Ben Hewitt’s new book is Home Grown: Adventures in Parenting Off the Beaten Path, Unschooling, and Reconnecting with the Natural World. He blogs at benhewitt.net.

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2014/09/07 20:16:15


   
Made in gb
Highlord with a Blackstone Fortress






Adrift within the vortex of my imagination.

This isn't a good idea.

Homeschooling yes, unschooling, no.

n'oublie jamais - It appears I now have to highlight this again.

It is by tea alone I set my mind in motion. By the juice of the brew my thoughts aquire speed, my mind becomes strained, the strain becomes a warning. It is by tea alone I set my mind in motion. 
   
Made in us
[DCM]
The Main Man






Beast Coast

Would you care to elaborate a bit? Do you think it would be possible to find a healthy balance of the two?

   
Made in us
Beautiful and Deadly Keeper of Secrets





Having seen various forms of Unschooling, I find that you won't learn much beyond linear science if anything more advanced.

Also is it me or is that article really uh... Fin and Rye?

Just seems like New age "Everyone is special!" sort, when children have underdeveloped frontal cortex's and now are trying to dictate to themselves what they want to learn? That's a bad idea on so many levels.

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2014/09/07 20:30:56


 
   
Made in de
Decrepit Dakkanaut





Are you a farmer / craftsmen / etc.? Do you want your children to do the same? If yes, go for it.

If not, send them to school.

   
Made in gb
Highlord with a Blackstone Fortress






Adrift within the vortex of my imagination.

 Hordini wrote:
Would you care to elaborate a bit? Do you think it would be possible to find a healthy balance of the two?


Homeschooling may bypass the problems perceived in the conventional education system as would unschooling. However homeschooling gives the same grounding as conventional education, unschooling does not.

Unschooling may be preferable to much of the education received in the UK, but that doesn't make it a good thing. I cant pass comment on the US schools system and this is a US phenomena.

I can imagine UK social services doing their nut if they found unschooled kids, sorry not if, when. Even if they are subsequently placed in very substandard schools, and cauaing more damage than if the kids were left unschooled. So I cant see it happening here frankly.

n'oublie jamais - It appears I now have to highlight this again.

It is by tea alone I set my mind in motion. By the juice of the brew my thoughts aquire speed, my mind becomes strained, the strain becomes a warning. It is by tea alone I set my mind in motion. 
   
Made in us
[DCM]
The Main Man






Beast Coast

 ZebioLizard2 wrote:
Having seen various forms of Unschooling, I find that you won't learn much beyond linear science if anything more advanced.

Also is it me or is that article really uh... Fin and Rye?

Just seems like New age "Everyone is special!" sort, when children have underdeveloped frontal cortex's and now are trying to dictate to themselves what they want to learn? That's a bad idea on so many levels.



What would be an example of nonlinear science? Do you think it is important for everyone to go beyond linear science (whatever it is you mean by that)? What if the method of schooling allowed the children to delve deeper into other subjects instead?


Automatically Appended Next Post:
 Orlanth wrote:
 Hordini wrote:
Would you care to elaborate a bit? Do you think it would be possible to find a healthy balance of the two?


Homeschooling may bypass the problems perceived in the conventional education system as would unschooling. However homeschooling gives the same grounding as conventional education, unschooling does not.

Unschooling may be preferable to much of the education received in the UK, but that doesn't make it a good thing. I cant pass comment on the US schools system and this is a US phenomena.

I can imagine UK social services doing their nut if they found unschooled kids, sorry not if, when. Even if they are subsequently placed in very substandard schools, and cauaing more damage than if the kids were left unschooled. So I cant see it happening here frankly.



Okay. But do you think you could do both? That is, provide a certain amount of structured education in the home while also providing a significant amount of time for the kind of education that unschooling would provide?


Automatically Appended Next Post:
 Sigvatr wrote:
Are you a farmer / craftsmen / etc.? Do you want your children to do the same? If yes, go for it.

If not, send them to school.



Why do you think it would only work for farmers or craftsmen? Did you read the whole article? I'm not asking to be snarky - if you didn't that's okay. I just wanted to mention it because they have a specific example in there of a family who lives in Boston and unschools their children as well.

This message was edited 4 times. Last update was at 2014/09/07 20:44:40


   
Made in us
Longtime Dakkanaut





The average school does not teach the average student much.

Most teachers have the ability to play attention to 7 people, at one time. For a maximum of 45min. As found by peer reviewed study from UC Berkeley's psych department.

This means that on average at best 1/3rd to 1/5th of a high school level class, or lower tier, is being payed attention to by their instructor. This also means that they are not focused on that same number of kids for most of the day.

Given that the teachers do not truly know what they are teaching the students is getting through, or being memorized in a way that can be applied on the long term as opposed to being memorized on the short term to answer tests, and that most tests are "Standardized" meaning often guessing leads to test outcomes (multiple choice!) we really do not know what exactly most students retain.

Statistically chances are most students retain a small fraction of the information they are "told" in most of their classes, and in life they will use an even smaller fraction of that information in their work and careers.

I think unschooling can work, so can homeschooling, the problem is that just because it can work does not mean it will work. Many parents would probably make terrible instructors, and letting kids "figure stuff out on their own" although a good first step, needs to be supported with someone who understands that can then guide them. Also there are things people need to know, and need to understand, and they need someone to guide them to learn those things. The chance that most parents can fulfill all of these needs from early learning until late teen (18) is not good, at least from my perception of people in the U.S. there is also the issue of parents injecting their bias/ideals into the lessons which is bad, despite what the parents may think. Especially if said parents are overly religious etc.

IMO the public school system in the US is a daycare for kids aged 5-18. There is a loose amount of education at them that exists on the level of weather existing outside your house, the students can choose to pay attention and engage in it, or just sit back and move along and most likely will still graduate but with little gained. This means that the school system model is in of itself not really educating people, and from what I have seen from private school students entering the college level the areas outside of public school are pretty much the same. One of the things the public/private school system does do is allow for socialization of children, which is highly important. Kids need to be around other kids, and they need to be around "safe" strangers that are peers/teacher/mentor role so they can learn how to interact with each other. In many ways this is more important than anything they will learn in a particular subject, or all their subjects.

I think there are merits in "unschooling" often children/teens are more likely to engage in something if they feel they are the ones initiating the learning experience, as they have motivation and are focused on it at this point. They need someone that is good with them to help them when things get off track with learning about that thing they are focused on, and need someone that can lead them towards educational discovery of the activity. For example, a child might find rolling a toy car off a shelf is AMAZING!

Good. make it more amazing, help them build crazy ramps and tracks, and then measure how far it falls, or how far it goes when it hits the ground based on the angle and distance of the ramp its going down. Make the cars talk, they can talk about whats happening, how they feel when its happening, or give some history on who made cars, why they were constructed etc.

This message was edited 2 times. Last update was at 2014/09/07 22:06:31


 
   
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 Hordini wrote:


 Sigvatr wrote:
Are you a farmer / craftsmen / etc.? Do you want your children to do the same? If yes, go for it.

If not, send them to school.



Why do you think it would only work for farmers or craftsmen? Did you read the whole article? I'm not asking to be snarky - if you didn't that's okay. I just wanted to mention it because they have a specific example in there of a family who lives in Boston and unschools their children as well.


Problems that I could see arising with unschooling:

1) No-one is an expert on everything: Without some kind of support structure, I could see the education being very eratic. Kids might learn a lot about animal husbandry or craftsmanship, but have a sub-highschool math capability, because that's all their parents could teach, or because that is all that the kids wanted to learn. This could lock kids into a similar career path to their parents.

2) University will laugh when you say that "Timmy doesn't have math because we felt math would hinder his learning". They will laugh, chuck Timmy's application in the wastebin, and move on to someone who actually has some form of credentials. Without a university education, you are kinda limited nowadays to trades, farming, etc.

3) Assuming that the kids get into a post-secondary institution, the work will kill them. Undergraduate courses do not care about creativity, they are about learning the information for standardized tests. Creativity is for Grad School (which needs both an undergrad and evidence of work ethics; two things I expect that these kids will lack).

So while I agree that a more flexible learning environment would be helpful to kids, I do not believe that allowing them to "unlearn" would provide that environment.

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blaktoof wrote:
One of the things the public/private school system does do is allow for socialization of children, which is highly important. Kids need to be around other kids, and they need to be around "safe" strangers that are peers/teacher/mentor role so they can learn how to interact with each other. In many ways this is more important than anything they will learn in a particular subject, or all their subjects.


This. Absolutely, positively this. This is why I don't approve of Unschooling, or even Home-Schooling for that matter.

The true value of the required schooling (elementary <--> high school) isn't to teach academia to young people, but to teach them the bare minimum for how to function in society. Basic reading/comprehension and arithmetic are apart of that, but social skills are the most critically important thing you will (should) be learning in School, and that's something that you just can't learn from sitting around at home watching videos with your Mom, or whatever. Anecdotally, I've yet to meet a homeschooled person who wasn't at least a little socially awkward, including one of my sisters.

You can take your Kid and have him associate with a bunch of other simialrly-aged home school/unschooled kids daily to compensate... but at that point why not just them in School.

This message was edited 2 times. Last update was at 2014/09/07 22:00:41


 
   
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 Hordini wrote:

 Orlanth wrote:
 Hordini wrote:
Would you care to elaborate a bit? Do you think it would be possible to find a healthy balance of the two?


Homeschooling may bypass the problems perceived in the conventional education system as would unschooling. However homeschooling gives the same grounding as conventional education, unschooling does not.

Unschooling may be preferable to much of the education received in the UK, but that doesn't make it a good thing. I cant pass comment on the US schools system and this is a US phenomena.

I can imagine UK social services doing their nut if they found unschooled kids, sorry not if, when. Even if they are subsequently placed in very substandard schools, and cauaing more damage than if the kids were left unschooled. So I cant see it happening here frankly.



Okay. But do you think you could do both? That is, provide a certain amount of structured education in the home while also providing a significant amount of time for the kind of education that unschooling would provide?


You just describe homeschooling. Being at home provides the flexibility and the local environment of the home provides the stimulus. Most homeschoolers look at the environment they raise their children in.

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I don't approve of homeschooling because its 50-50 if the kid comes out smarter than public school students or ridiculously dumber.

I see no difference here

   
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blaktoof, I'd love to see the data that shows public school teachers are only able to care about and educate a fraction of their students. The push has been for randomized calling, group work, and many strategies geared specifically around keeping an entire class engaged. Most modern teacher evaluations pay very little attention to the teacher, and instead have the observers asking the students' metacognitive questions.

Each week, I attend a PLC with my team in which we discuss student performance, our observations of them and formative assessments with my team. This runs the gamut from discipline issues, to student personal information to trends or quirks in various classes. I do not contest that Berkeley study- but I can't remember the last time I spent more than two minutes focused on any one student. so let's say I keep my eye on my 2 worst troublemakers, and the 2 strudents I think are struggling the most with the concept for the whole 45. That leaves 3 slots to cycle through at 2 minute intervals- in a class of 25 or less. Teachers are dervishes, drifting about the classroom, checking comprehension, restating instructions, and probing with questions to informally assess student progress. I often won't sit down other than taking attendance throughout a class period.

Roughly once every nine weeks, we have a data day where we look at our data and compare it to other teachers at the school, looking for trends to adjust our instruction to student needs. The pay we get is affected by the ability of our students to display annual yearly progress, and this is weighted for our lowest performing students and highest performing students.

A public school teacher in America in this day and age is delivering data driven instruction, is evaluated by how well their students are engaged in the lesson, and if they value their pay, cares about the success of each and every student they have.

I'm a middle school teacher from one of the largest counties in Florida- a state which is only ranked in the middle of the pack for the country. I'm better at my job than I was last year (and worlds better than I was when I started 8 years ago), but I have no illusions that I am the best my profession has to offer- there's a reason a hoary veteran of 25 years is payed twice as much as me.

I don't want to argue too strongly against characterizing us as daycare workers- both my sons are in daycare, and those folks are as much teachers as I am. They simply operate without tests. Teachers aren't the callous automatons you characterize us as- we don't sit in front of the classroom and gently blow breezes of knowledge over our students.

Unschooling your kids is the educational equivalent of avoiding modern medicine in order to strengthen your immune system. I would really love to hear how well these unschooled kids perform in the working world or higher education.

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I think unschooling is fine, so long as there is a healthy amount of "real" learning (literature, math and science) mixed in there. Moderation is the key.

Hippy crap where none of that is ever taught (which sounds dangerously like the OP) is dangerous.

I was homeschooled from the last half on 2nd to 3rd grade. It was arguably the most informative education I received. We followed no set schedule (often not "starting" until after noon and running late into the evening) and the primary topics I was taught were literature, math, and science.

We would also visit zoos, go ice skating with other homeschooled kids, and various other extracurricular activities. I walked away from it being able to do long division before other kids my age could do multiplication, reading novels a lot of people would have trouble with as an adult, learning to solder, and having a very good understanding of first aid.

The worst part of it was going back to public school, really. Didn't take long to have an inflated ego and resentment of authority, the former I eventually actually got over.

I'd recommend it to about anyone, provided that you have someone dedicated enough to actually teach you and that person is willing to stick with it until you're at least in high school, if not graduated.

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Traditional schooling, alternative schooling, home schooling, unschooling: they all need to accomplish one thing. A minimum set of knowledge that actually needs to be learned and a minimum set of skills that need to be obtained.

I personally don't give a frack HOW that minimum set is obtained, but it needs to be obtained one way or the other.

I do think that kids today don't have the amount of unstructured play that they require. And unstructured play is how you actually learn problem solving and put skills to practical use. It is how you learn to take risks, how to push yourself, and how to trust yourself. Unstructured play is extremely important and that is something that kids need to have. I grew up in Germany and some of my best memories are still playing at the Aktivspielplatz (aka: activity playground) and that place would give raging boners to litigation lawyers in the US. A nice area in the woods that had a couple of adults on staff where I would go as a 10 year old and pick up hammer, nails, and a saw and then disappear into the woods to dig through giant piles of lumber to build myself a house. You will step on rusty nails, you will have pieces of lumber hit you everywhere, and maybe your house will fall down. But once a week we would camp out there and live in our cities build by kids between 10-14 years of age. You learn how to problem solve, you learn how to live in this community of kids and learn valuable social skills. That kind of play doesn't exist for a lot of kids anymore because we schedule everything they do from 8am to 8pm.

With that said kids also need to actually learn a distinct skill set and a distinct set of knowledge. Unstructured play is instrumental for the development of a child, but you won't get into college or a trade school because you build a rad house in the woods when you were 10 and had to get a tetanus shot when a rusty nail poked through your shoe.

Many kids might not learn best in the classroom. And it's fine for kids to figure out for themselves how they learn best. But parents need to step in and determine WHAT the child learns, at least to include the minimum set of knowledge and skills that they need to keep up with society.

Home schooling (including unschooling) runs the risk of shorting a child on two important things during their developmental years:

1) socialization. How to make friends, how to spend time with other people, how to problem solve with other people, how to have enemies, how to love, how to be polite, how to truly spend time with lots and lots of people. Now there are programs for home schooled kids to address this: church groups, scout groups, field trips organized by home school organizations, sports.

2) Learning how to be in school. And that is a big one. Kids need to know how to actually be in school. How to behave in class. How to be in that structured environment. How to follow assignments. How to do homework. How to make and read a class schedule. How to ask questions. How to take tests. They will need those skills f they want to participate in job training, college, vocational school. And those are skills that might not be easy to pick up via home schooling.

Just my $0.02.
   
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 Sigvatr wrote:
Are you a farmer / craftsmen / etc.? Do you want your children to do the same? If yes, go for it.

If not, send them to school.


Even then I disagree. Farms are now highly complex industries with massive amounts of money involved. Modern craftsmen need to either keep up with new technology (If you are talking about tradesmen) or know about marketing and media to sell their work (If artisans).

This is why I disagree with homeschooling. The world is changing far too fast. Up until about the age of 8-9, yes, most adults could home school kids, but at this age the priority is as much socialization as leaning. Once a child gets to their teens there is no way most parents can teach them the specialize, changing, knowledge taught at school, and to limit them to the knowledge of one, possibly two, adults is limiting the child's possibilities. This "unschooling" is even worse. As nice as the though is of kids running around building fires and making bows the reality of the world is that most of us will end up working in an office, where they need people who are literate, social, and have skills. Even those working in trades, who make up the bulk of well paid non office workers, need a good basis of skills.

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I've got cousins who grew up in alternative schools, where the kids picked their own learning activities. They all worked out pretty well.

Honestly, the idea of spending a lot less time in structured learning seems a good one. Sitting kids in a classroom for six hours everyday always seemed pretty silly to me - at least three quarters of that time the kids are paying no attention at all, and so the teachers repeat the same stuff over and over again. It still works and most of us get out the other end much more capable than we would have otherwise, but it seems really inefficient all the same. I'd think an approach with shorter bursts of active learning, coupled with longer periods in which kids are allowed to pick their own preferred kinds of learning activities would lead to even greater development and happier students.

The problem comes with trying to combine those kinds of ideas with homeschooling. Not that I have any particular problem with homeschooling, if that's what parents want to do, but the combination of minimal structured learning and the parent as an amateur teacher that leads me to suspect that this approach will produce a lot more hits and misses.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
 Steve steveson wrote:
This is why I disagree with homeschooling. The world is changing far too fast. Up until about the age of 8-9, yes, most adults could home school kids, but at this age the priority is as much socialization as leaning. Once a child gets to their teens there is no way most parents can teach them the specialize, changing, knowledge taught at school, and to limit them to the knowledge of one, possibly two, adults is limiting the child's possibilities.


I think that probably depends on how much the student is dependent on the teacher and not the text book. Personally I didn't get much out of teachers, or even lecturers at uni. Not because they were bad teachers but because I just don't retain information delivered by speech - but if I can sit down and read the concept and put it in my own words then I'll pick it up quick enough. In university I didn't attend lectures much and hated it when they made us go, simply because I knew by that point what teaching methods didn't work for me.

But I do agree with the dangers of thinking that two parents are good enough. Most people know a lot less than they think they do, and they're probably even worse at passing that knowledge. And then, as you point out, most of what they learnt is probably outdated (the half life of facts and all that). I guess my point is more that parents can minimise that impact by relying on good textbooks and on-line sources.

Well, and I guess my other point is that it depends on the child. Different learning styles and different personalities will mean some kids will flourish where other kids will flounder.

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2014/09/08 09:01:51


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Primary schools in the UK already have something called the Foundation Phase in which subject cross over more and activities are more active, creative and involve play. Primary education is a lot more interesting than it used to be. Teachers aren't supposed to hand out a worksheet as they did when I was young, it's a lot more demanding on teachers which is why there are now support staff in the room. When I was little, the teacher taught the whole class alone, sometimes 30+ children.

But 'unschooling' sounds like no education at all. Sure they learn about mushrooms and chopping wood, but what about things that are actually academic? Apparently they do a couple of hours of science and maths per month. That makes me sad, there's so many exciting things to learn their parents just won't expose them to because they think that the children doing what they want is best for them. It isn't, learning isn't always fun. But it often can be, there's this attitude that stuff learnt in school is useless and a waste of time compared to practical skills. But the idea of school is to give a rounded education in many aspects. On a brutally practical basis you don't need to know the Earth moves around the sun, and how the Earth's axis tilts, to understand the difference between the seasons, but surely you should know something so basic right?

A couple of weeks ago there was this programme on TV where children were competing to find the UK's cleverest child. There was a family distinctly like this though perhaps a little more directed in their learning. But she was allowed to work when she wanted and play when she wanted. But the result was she had no work discipline or ethic. When set tasks in the competition such as memorising certain things, the other children sat down and applied themselves, she lost interest and couldn't do it. And there lies the problem, the people writing this article say that trying to make their child do a task like colouring in resulted in them throwing their crayons across the room. That's just great, what happens when you ask them to do some actual hard work? You can't do an academic qualification or many forms of employment unless you are able to discipline yourself to do so. When the person writing the article says "What if they want to be doctors? They will be doctors. What if they want to be lawyers? They will be lawyers." No they won't, partly because they only have two hours a month science education but also because they have no capacity for applying themselves in academic work.

There are various comments about unfitness or lack of exercise in state schools, and poorly performing schools, which is likely true. But that doesn't make 'unschooling' the solution. It seems a way to limit your child's options significantly and in an unconventional manner. More so than normal homeschooling, you'll be very deficient in certain subject knowledge, you'll have less social experience with children your own age, and you'll not have work discipline. The parents think it's wonderful they can drive a tractor aged 5, well good because that's all they will be able to do the rest of their life.
   
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 daedalus wrote:
I think unschooling is fine, so long as there is a healthy amount of "real" learning (literature, math and science) mixed in there. Moderation is the key.

Hippy crap where none of that is ever taught (which sounds dangerously like the OP) is dangerous.

I was homeschooled from the last half on 2nd to 3rd grade. It was arguably the most informative education I received. We followed no set schedule (often not "starting" until after noon and running late into the evening) and the primary topics I was taught were literature, math, and science.

We would also visit zoos, go ice skating with other homeschooled kids, and various other extracurricular activities. I walked away from it being able to do long division before other kids my age could do multiplication, reading novels a lot of people would have trouble with as an adult, learning to solder, and having a very good understanding of first aid.

The worst part of it was going back to public school, really. Didn't take long to have an inflated ego and resentment of authority, the former I eventually actually got over.

I'd recommend it to about anyone, provided that you have someone dedicated enough to actually teach you and that person is willing to stick with it until you're at least in high school, if not graduated.




Agreed completely. I'm fine with these types of schooling as long as the parent is dedicated. My brother and I were home schooled for a couple years. The first year my parents were all about it, then after that I basically had to teach myself because they lost interest. But just because you're home schooling doesn't mean you're a shut in either. There are tons of programs and hell even schools that allow for home schooled children to participate with other children in the school, even gym class.

So you can only blame the parents in that situation for kids turning out dumb and being weird, because there are options.
   
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combination of two, Home schooling is fine but mainstream is also needed as some subjects need more specialist teaching or maybe they parent is less skilled in one area.

In other simple words a balence

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I support this initiative. There is more to life than math and grammar. Of course, this 'unschooling' won't get you to university, but is that really so important?
I think the best would be to find a balance. Three days of normal schools, two days of 'unschooling', or something like that. A lot of kids are really stressed out, overworked and hyperactive nowadays, and this 'back to nature' thing is the best remedy.
Too bad this would be highly illegal in the Netherlands. The government would snatch your kids away from you and force them into school

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2014/09/08 13:07:35


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The biggest danger with Homeschooling (and this happened to one of my cousins) is that the parent is simply using it as a method to teach their kids bs. The kind bs that people like holocaust deniers say is true but that schools won't teach because "they're controlled by the Zionist conspiracy." Yeah, they'll teach the kids math and stuff, and might even do a good job, but I've seen homeschooling used horribly as a means of teach ideology, not knowledge, and it doesn't sit well with me.

Beyond that, I've seen parents who just aren't qualified to teach thinking they know better. I know the schools suck in a lot of places, and it's not right, but it's still better than letting your own ego/fear/selfrighteousness ruin your child's future. It's a gamble people shouldn't be taking.

   
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 Iron_Captain wrote:
I support this initiative. There is more to life than math and grammar. Of course, this 'unschooling' won't get you to university, but is that really so important?
I think the best would be to find a balance. Three days of normal schools, two days of 'unschooling', or something like that. A lot of kids are really stressed out, overworked and hyperactive nowadays, and this 'back to nature' thing is the best remedy.
Too bad this would be highly illegal in the Netherlands. The government would snatch your kids away from you and force them into school
The ability to succeed in a university is. And kids already have unstructured plat, it's called the weekend and the summer.

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I don't know. My life in public school taught me a lot about how to deal with the same type of people in the "real world".

Everyone says High School ends and everything is different. In my experience, a couple decades removed from High School it is still pretty much the same dynamics at play in Corporate life.

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Automatically Appended Next Post:
 LordofHats wrote:
The biggest danger with Homeschooling (and this happened to one of my cousins) is that the parent is simply using it as a method to teach their kids bs. The kind bs that people like holocaust deniers say is true but that schools won't teach because "they're controlled by the Zionist conspiracy." Yeah, they'll teach the kids math and stuff, and might even do a good job, but I've seen homeschooling used horribly as a means of teach ideology, not knowledge, and it doesn't sit well with me.
.

I have seen it used to where they dot want their kind to get bullied or hurt, and they keep them from that.

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2014/09/08 17:33:56


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But the risk is then that they will never be able to learn how to deal with bullies.
   
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Yeah, the world is a harsh place, but hiding your kids from it ain't doing them any favors.

   
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 hotsauceman1 wrote:
 Iron_Captain wrote:
I support this initiative. There is more to life than math and grammar. Of course, this 'unschooling' won't get you to university, but is that really so important?
I think the best would be to find a balance. Three days of normal schools, two days of 'unschooling', or something like that. A lot of kids are really stressed out, overworked and hyperactive nowadays, and this 'back to nature' thing is the best remedy.
Too bad this would be highly illegal in the Netherlands. The government would snatch your kids away from you and force them into school
The ability to succeed in a university is. And kids already have unstructured plat, it's called the weekend and the summer.

And why would this ability be so important?
Weekend and summer vacations only are not enough, especially not considering they are crammed to the brink with homework.

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