Unschooling

I feel like I'm already sort of doing an "unschooling" approach with her at home during the days - just talking with her a lot about things she's interested in. She's been interested in numbers lately and actually asking questions about addition so we've been talking about that and she's gotten to the point now where she can do single digit addition and subtraction in her head, can count up to over a hundred (with a little help), and is learning to count backwards. This has all happened in a matter of weeks!

I'd say unschooling is ideal for parents who have the resources and the intelligence and who have laid the foundations of grammar and arithmetic

I sincerely don't think this is the point of collective learning.

I really don't think the importance of having a kid interacting with other kids on a regular basis can be overstated though.

Read, play, sing, dance, grow things, write. ... We do them because they interest us and bring us joy or because they help us accomplish our dreams. We do the things that have meaning in our lives and contained within those activities is real learning. ... Choosing to build a lego village will include the opportunity to learn math and culture, maybe even history depending on the type of village. We do chores, have a family life, and participate in the wider community. The children are actively engaged in living and learning during all of this. ... Geometry can be found in quilt making, algebra in painting a room.

I guess it's just funny to me to think of this stuff as a pedagogical method, since it's so very, very basic: this is how human children have learned things since time immemorial, and parents should be striving to facilitate exactly this kind of learning just as a basic, not as an interesting new pedagogical method! Frighteningly enough, I suppose it really is becoming something of a lost skill. A lot of American parents seem to imagine they have no real role in their children's intellectual development beyond reading to them when really young; after that, they just look at the discipline end, and imagine everything else will come from the school.

Still, it's funny/depressing to think we should need to have specialized jargon to point out that doing stuff with your children helps them learn. So I guess I'm not running down this "unschooling" concept, except to say that it seems scarily obvious. It's what parents should hope to do with their children even if their children attend traditional schools. And personally I think both of those ends are important.

for what i think is a far more constructive and engaging effort to help ALL kids, not just one's own, there is a fascinating project underway at M.S. 88 in brooklyn, one of the largest and most problematic middle schools in NY (90% of students are on some kind of financial assistance) to integrate all classes around an ecological curriculum, using prospect park as their field lab and then doing math problems, history, social studies, literature etc. in relation to the hands-on work they're doing - it really sounds revolutionary, the holy grail of integrated learning, etc, and every other borough wants to duplicate it, but they are concentrating on getting it right in that middle school first.

Agreed.

Ugh to clarify: not that you would NEVER MEET OTHER CHILDREN, certainly there are other kinds of socialization than school, just that why make a virtue of throwing kids into the hyena cage if it isn't necessary?

Not to dredge up anyone's bad memories from the bullying thread here, but: kids aren't that hellishly cruel!

and I think this is clearly demonstrably untrue if you think for just 5 seconds about all the horrible things adults do to each other. Like, y'know, war and stuff...

to be honest most home-schooled kids i've known turn out fine, social adjustment-wise.

But things aren't always "go at your own pace" at home either. Food needs to be cooked, the house needs to be cleaned, the yard kept up, etc. If we're going out somewhere, we often need to be there at a particular time. A lot of discipline can be learned at home. (And kids LIKE discipline to the extent that they can see its benefits - that we're able to eat, that it makes for a nicer environment, etc.)

"Go at your own pace" is, I think, a strategy that can and should be used to kids' advantage. It should not be a paradigm whereby they end up thinking that they can go through life doing whatever they want at their own pace!

I want my child to be well educated, but not necessarily according to some old school (no pun intended) curriculum. If she is going to college, she needs to be prepared for that.

Most homeschooled kids get fried once they get to university too. They're like deer in the headlights.

I totally agree with the points made above about that a lot of the stuff linked should be stuff that parents do anyway and that homeschooling a kid and keeping them out of the school environment robs a kid of their ability to read a group of people and interact with them.

I'm sure a really good, effective middle ground for homeschooling can be found, but I'm sure it would require one or both parents working from home most of the time.

Under Wash's Homeschool Law, the instructional activities must be provided by a parent who is instructing his or her children only and qualifies in one of these 4 ways:

1 - be supervised by a certificated teacher for one contact hour per week, OR...

2 - have earned 45 college-level credit hours or 1 year of college, OR...

3 -be deemed sufficiently qualified to homeschool by the superintendent of the school district in which you reside, OR...

4 - have completed a course in home-based instruction at a post-secondary institution or vocational-technical school.

Home-schooled kids also have to be tested or assessed annually, but the definition of assessment is very open. Because WA has the Running Start program, high school aged kids are able to attend community college courses at no cost, and all the home-schooled kids I know of HS age have done so, because they recognize that there are things they can not learn on their own and that their parents are not qualified (or able) to teach them. Most have gone to college and done well academically, but I will say that most have not done well socially. This doesn't seem to be due to lack of interaction with other kids - all these children have had a great deal of interaction with other home-schooled kids. I'm not sure what it is, exactly, but they all come across as exceptionally arrogant and entitled, moreso than most teenagers, enough that their peers don't want much to do with them. Don't get me wrong, they are all talented and intelligent individuals - but none of them was particularly well-rounded or that much more mentally gifted than anyone else, though they all believed they were far above the norm. I feel that I'm not expressing it well.

i'd like to see this better-defined for the purposes of this thread. anyone who's not the head cheerleader/captain of the football team can be deemed, in some circles, to have 'not done well socially'.

we're all posting on an internet message board. are we 'doing well socially'?

How different they might have been had they been traditionally schooled one can never know or even hazard a guess toward. They may have behaved exactly the same, though a comparison of these 3 to the 9 other interns would say otherwise, as none of the 9 traditionally schooled people, while occasionally belligerent, taciturn, moody, and odd, displayed the sort of arrogance and sense of entitlement that was fairly consistent in the home-schooled kids.

i know just enough about statistics to know that this isn't a large enough sample to prove anything! ; )

but seriously, i'd rather take my chances at the experiment that is homeschooling than the experiment that is 'traditional' education (whether in a public or private setting). i know my daughter and i think this is what's best for her now.

"the problem is you have to register w/ the state, submit lesson plans, etc."

uh, yeah, and we'd better find out more about this aspect pretty soon.

"we all eat bread. are we 'doing well socially'?"

i know a lady who thinks people shouldn't be eating any grain. i don't know, but i think she may have been homeschooled...

Socially it is not that much different. I know these kids. I know them because their parents have taken great pains to make sure ample opportunity for socialization has been made available. They do this thing because they love and care about their kids. And that extends to the rest of their lives. All have had chores, outside work opportunities, organized and not so organized play. All have been given, at least the option, of participating in community theatre, arts programs, music programs and sports teams. They have been as much a part of the kid culture in this neighborhood as they would have been had they attended one of the 6 or 7 public or private schools the rest of us attended.

It is easy enough to want to say – This can’t be right, kids need the structure and normality of regular schools. But that usually is a result of thinking that is flawed. People can and do replicate the basics of a structured school life everyday. The difference is that they do so within a much more effective and personal learning environment. In my own case, I attended a school – pre-K – 12 – where I never had a class (in the lower school) with more than 17 students. By the time I was in the Upper school, my class size was always closer to 12 students. I know how much individualized instruction I received, the benefits of that instruction and the quality as compared to even the best Public School where an Advanced Placement Course could easily have 25-30 students. As long as the teacher has the skills necessary to teach the class – the better the teacher/student ratio, the better the learning available. And there is no better ratio than 1/1.

That some people make this choice for religious reasons – not wanting their children exposed to some of the things out there – it is a choice they make for their family. As long as they provide the instruction that they are legally required to – I don’t see where it is anybody else’s business. In fact – as long as they come out the other end knowing how to read and write and add, subtract, multiply and divide – they could attend clown school. If it is the parents choice – that is all that matters in the end. Family trumps the State every time for me.

We homeschooled from grades 5-8, for the purposes of serious immersion in high school and early college curriculum, but if we'd homeschooled our daughter for the entirety of K-12, she'd be a twitching freak, same as a lot of other homeschooled twitching freaks. They don't all turn out as unpleasant to work with as Jaq described, but I believe a disproportionate number do.

("Twitching Freaks" — ®Tony Kornheiser)

My experiences with home-schooled students has been varied, but it seems that the well-adjusted ones (only a few) were the ones who were not home-schooled for reasons of contempt or serious dissatisfation of their public education system. In other words, for most of them, their parents view of the education system (and often, the world) is carried over to them, thus leading to an unhealthy snobbishness about the whole that really does hurt them as adults.

This is hardly surprising considering that most have probably been schooled by people who are arrogant enough to believe that they have superior all-round education skills to those of professionals. Some do. Most don't.