First Impressions on 'Unschooling'

I think I already know this might not be for me, so maybe I shouldn't wax on about it, especially since I am so new to the ideas that I'm still surely ignorant of most of it. But I made this blog to wax on about all things homeschooling, so I guess it falls into that category. Maybe people expert at this will eventually find this blog and comment with more info.

First I have to say that I admire people willing to really do whatever it is they believe in, and not be constrained so much by all the expectations of culture.

But on the other hand, I think maybe 'unschooling' as they put it, is going a little too far in the other direction for me personally. I don't mean I think it's wrong, I mean I think my own psychology isn't right for it. This may be as much an issue with me as anything.

It seems less a schooling than a philosophy. Maybe this is a radical example, but I thought the philosophy was well summed up by this one woman's comments:

I'd rather have dentures than horrible memories of a parent forcing me to brush my teeth.

I have a hard time understanding why getting your kid to develop a few healthy habits, like teeth brushing and study skills, is going to ruin their life or something. I mean maybe in some rare extreme circumstance, but not in any halfway normal family, and certainly not in a tiny family like me and Ry that really love each other. I think failing to teach and instill in your kid a small, easy discipline that will have a great effect on their health (or lack) is a big deal.

This website http://joyfullyrejoycing.com/ has lots of responses to questions asked by people trying to unschool. I think it did more to convince me it wasn't for me than anything else I've read. The idea that you should let your kid watch TV and play videogames for months, because they've been "deprived" of that by being in school (hello? my kid spends nearly all her not-school time on WoW, Sims2 and so on, she is hardly deprived of them), and that there is really any argument in favor of letting your kid watch TV most of the time rather than do something deliberately educational -- because apparently they don't want to -- I guess I can't wrap my brain around that.

In the working world, there are all kinds of things where discipline and focus and doing things you do NOT want to do, is simply necessary. If you raise a kid to do nothing they don't find interesting at that moment, how do they learn the discipline to do what they must at times?

I was so good at things in school -- exceptional reading speed and memory -- that I seldom studied or needed to. My friends agonized over tests, and I breezed through them. But as a result, I never really learned the discipline of daily working on something hard, consistently, persistently. Let alone keeping-on keeping-on, when there is no positive feedback, when you're still bad at something, when it's so overwhelming you don't feel like dealing with it at all.

That I was able to do this in the working world was something of a miracle, and only due to other significant personality factors overriding my innate lackadaisical approach.

I did like one thing that someone said:

Kids want to learn. They just do. Get the hell out of the way, and leave an interesting trail behind you.

That part I somewhat agree with. Not to the degree that I would resist any deliberate 'edu' in favor of playing so your kid will be "happy," mind you. In part because I think a kid should be happy even if they have "deliberate academic edu". Public school is a nightmare, sure, but that isn't because of the materials (though many of their materials suck), that's for 101 other reasons. I think if a kid has to learn math, and it makes them "unhappy" or fundamentally repressed in some way, there's a problem larger than the math going on.

Even though I agree education is to be found everywhere, I don't really think that kids will learn geometry and geography without deliberately teaching them that. It's not the kind of thing that inspires one to learn it rather than play frankly. Or learn it really well.

And might she survive without geography and geometry? Certainly. But if merely 'surviving' was all I wanted for her, I'd have left her in public school. Wanting her to learn all the "classical educational" things really well, so she can have/afford higher education and a good living as an adult, are part of the goal of this.


Here is a page that has a much more intelligent discussion and example of "unschooling" than I could possibly give (6 page article): http://www.suite101.com/lesson.cfm/19413/2976/1


I'm not sure this has to be an "either/or" choice. If she has a good environment, a loving parent, creative time and personal time and so on, surely that helps at least some; better than the stupifyingly dull school room or socially traumatic hallway of public schools. If she can work at her own pace, and ask for what interests her to be included, that seems like a good thing.

Perhaps not as good for her "freedom of childhood" as "saving her from" actual academic-education in favor of computer games and running around the farm or something. And I totally agree that there are a million things to learn, that kids do it naturally, that interest is the primary driver of any real learning, and that 'running around the farm' can be a whole world of education in and of itself. And yet --

-- if it doesn't cover a foreign language and higher math and more, that kid is never going to get into a good college. I understand they may not care about that when the time comes, but how does a parent make that decision for them when they are little? "Sorry, I didn't bother educating you even like the rest of the world let alone more thoroughly, so you'll have to work as a proletarian your whole life. Hey, you might be slinging burgers or waittressing for a living and struggling for money 'till you die, but at least you had a happy childhood!"

And this might be my ignorance at work: maybe I'm assuming a lot about the future of kids-with-no-serious-academic-education. I've known a whole lot of them, not from homeschools, just from people who didn't get it in regular school, and it didn't bode well for their adult life. It just doesn't seem like a good situation. I definitely fail to see how anybody could become, let's say, an architect, engineer or whatever--at least at any decent college--without having a hefty, solid foundation in basic academic education.

Or maybe I'm assuming that they don't have enough serious academic education to matter, because of the presentation of unschooling as what seems like a whim-driven day of "whatever", ranging from not-much to computer-games to outings, which while fabulous on several levels, still aren't covering "serious academic" subjects in enough depth to matter. Is it possible that the presentation is causing me to misconstrue what's really going on?

Is it possible that most the unschooling info is associated with younger children? Where no formal academic edu and letting interest drive learning is a lot more reasonable to me, because kids will learn the basics like reading/writing/math because they WANT to at those young ages (usually).

I don't know any 12-17 year old that will deliberately seek out a sufficient amount of chemistry and history and maths to result in a 'good' academic education. They might do some. But a whole lot?

Maybe it is a choice between 'academic' vs. 'personal' education. I think there's a lot more to the latter, and it's a cradle to grave kind of thing. I agree it is critically under-appreciated in today's world, and nearly impossible within the context of forced schooling. But I feel concerned that the former happen, too, and I do want to make it as interesting and un-miserable as possible for my kid, but that doesn't mean telling her to forget it all if she doesn't feel like it.

A nice website with lots of links to other places too is Sandra Dodd's Unschooling page: http://sandradodd.com/help/ .

She actually knows something about it; I don't. Just waxing on.

PJ