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Replies to '11/24 Great School Debate'
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November 19, 2006, 8:42 pm PST
 Quote From: julie1418 I am not looking for satisfaction, I really haven't heard much about "unschooling" so I am trying to understand it better. Honesty works just fine.
Let me ask you this, and again - just trying to figure this all out - what is it that you want them to be able to do when they are adults. Somebody posted earlier that they thought their kids would be self-employed and not have to ever worry about working for someone else. So I have to wonder, what if the child decides at some point that he would like to be a doctor, or a lawyer, or an astronaut - how can be sure, or at least reasonably assured, that "unschooling" is going to give him the skills he needs to enter those very tough, very specific, very competitive professions?
I know when I was a child, I wanted to work at my grandfather's gas station. Left to my own interest and self-direction, I would have been playing with the cash register and credit card machines all day. It's not that I didn't LEARN anything there (I'm GREAT with a credit card!), but I'm not convinced that would have given me the skills I needed once I matured and had different aspirations. Unschooling just means that you can decide what you want to learn. So if you have the aspiration to become a doctor, lawyer, astronaut or whatever, you learn what you need to do in order to follow that dream.
The main skill of unschooling is learning to learn. Once you understand that, you can go anywhere and do anything. Basically, the child leads the way, and parents are there to help guide hir toward the information the child seeks. At some point the child may choose formal education, and that could happen at the college level or before. For most, if not all career paths, formal education wouldn't be a requirement until the college level. It just would never be something mandatory for the child.
Hope that helps |
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November 19, 2006, 8:46 pm PST
Quote From: julie1418 I am not looking for satisfaction, I really haven't heard much about "unschooling" so I am trying to understand it better. Honesty works just fine.
Let me ask you this, and again - just trying to figure this all out - what is it that you want them to be able to do when they are adults. Somebody posted earlier that they thought their kids would be self-employed and not have to ever worry about working for someone else. So I have to wonder, what if the child decides at some point that he would like to be a doctor, or a lawyer, or an astronaut - how can be sure, or at least reasonably assured, that "unschooling" is going to give him the skills he needs to enter those very tough, very specific, very competitive professions?
I know when I was a child, I wanted to work at my grandfather's gas station. Left to my own interest and self-direction, I would have been playing with the cash register and credit card machines all day. It's not that I didn't LEARN anything there (I'm GREAT with a credit card!), but I'm not convinced that would have given me the skills I needed once I matured and had different aspirations. I want my kids to be able to do whatever will make them happy as adults, be that medicine, programming, styling hair or flipping burgers. By unschooling we are protecting their love of learning alive and their confidence in their own abilities. This will help them more than anything else when it comes time to acquire whatever skills are necessary for what they want to accomplish. |
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November 19, 2006, 10:45 pm PST
Quote From: julie1418 I am not looking for satisfaction, I really haven't heard much about "unschooling" so I am trying to understand it better. Honesty works just fine.
Let me ask you this, and again - just trying to figure this all out - what is it that you want them to be able to do when they are adults. Somebody posted earlier that they thought their kids would be self-employed and not have to ever worry about working for someone else. So I have to wonder, what if the child decides at some point that he would like to be a doctor, or a lawyer, or an astronaut - how can be sure, or at least reasonably assured, that "unschooling" is going to give him the skills he needs to enter those very tough, very specific, very competitive professions?
I know when I was a child, I wanted to work at my grandfather's gas station. Left to my own interest and self-direction, I would have been playing with the cash register and credit card machines all day. It's not that I didn't LEARN anything there (I'm GREAT with a credit card!), but I'm not convinced that would have given me the skills I needed once I matured and had different aspirations. My wife may have already replied as me. This is the original bobbybill. "What is it that you want them to be able to do when they are adults." I want them to think for themselves about what they really want out of life and what is the best way to get it. I want them to have a love of real excellence and real achievement. I want them to have a sense of right and wrong, and the courage to do what is right even when a friend or an employer is pressuring them to do otherwise. I could go on, but it is getting late. [How can you be sure that unschooling will let your kid become a doctor, lawyer, astronaut?] You can't ever be 100% sure, but I would put my bets on unschooling over sending my kids to public schools. Unschooling lets kids pursue the things that they are interested in, and teaches them how to learn on their own and take responsibility for their learning. If my daughter is interested in medicine as she's growing up, I would expect her to know more anatomy, biology, biochemistry, etc than a comparable kid going to an ordinary public school. If she decides later on that she wants to be a doctor, she'll be better prepared for figuring out how to make the switch and doing the necessary catchup than if her education had been all about following a fixed course that someone else had made up for her. Left to my own interest and self-direction, I would have been playing with the cash register and credit card machines all day. Really. All day, every day, for the rest of your childhood? Somehow I doubt it. You don't have to type it here unless you want to, but take some time and really think about what would have happened if your parents had kept you out of school, and let you spend time doing things that interested you and were reasonably good for you instead, such as spending time working at your grandfather's gas station. That sounds great, by the way. What other things might you have done and learned about? You don't think you'd have learned some skills you need to do what you're doing now--well, maybe--but if not, you would have had a lot of different skills instead. What might you have done with those skills? Could any of them have been useful as you matured and your aspirations changed? You get the idea. |
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November 19, 2006, 11:17 pm PST
Quote From: julie1418 I am not looking for satisfaction, I really haven't heard much about "unschooling" so I am trying to understand it better. Honesty works just fine.
Let me ask you this, and again - just trying to figure this all out - what is it that you want them to be able to do when they are adults. Somebody posted earlier that they thought their kids would be self-employed and not have to ever worry about working for someone else. So I have to wonder, what if the child decides at some point that he would like to be a doctor, or a lawyer, or an astronaut - how can be sure, or at least reasonably assured, that "unschooling" is going to give him the skills he needs to enter those very tough, very specific, very competitive professions?
I know when I was a child, I wanted to work at my grandfather's gas station. Left to my own interest and self-direction, I would have been playing with the cash register and credit card machines all day. It's not that I didn't LEARN anything there (I'm GREAT with a credit card!), but I'm not convinced that would have given me the skills I needed once I matured and had different aspirations.
I think these are great questions, and I'm sure ones that all parents ponder. For me, as an unschooler, the answer to "what is it that you want them to be able to do when they are adults?" is exactly the same answer I'd give for them now as children: I want them to have the resources and skills to accomplish whatever it is that they are interested in doing. I've seen first-hand that they are capable of working toward goals that they set for themselves, and learning the stuff that they need to know in order to achieve those goals. I know that these skills will be strengthened over the remaining years of their childhood.
If one of my kids wants to be a doctor or an astronaut, I'll assume that they will take the necessary steps to achieve that. My son thinks he may want to be an engineer some day. His uncle is an engineer, so he knows quite a bit about what will be required. He'll need to get into an engineering school, which means he'll need to eventually learn what these schools require for entrance. He'll probably need a fair bit of higher mathematics skills. There are several ways he could aquire those. Having a background in software engineering and computer graphics, I'm no math slouch, so he can always ask me for help. There's also a former math teacher on our street who now only tutors small groups of homeschooling children (he says that he likes the fact that homeschooled kids are always willing and eager to learn and do the necessary work, that's why he loves to work with them). The community college is another option, as is our local high school. Some homeschoolers either enter regular high school, or attend part-time the classes that they are interested in or need to take. There's also the possibility that he will need none of this and will just teach himself. That's mostly how he's aquired all of his math skills so far, and he's testing several grade levels above his current age, so I'm just not all that worried about it. He has a lot of options available for learning the things that would be necessary if he decides to pursue that one career path. There are many other paths he might take. He has a love of plants and has talked about opening his own greenhouse some day. That would require an entirely different set of skills. He already has a relationship with a man who owns a local greenhouse and plant store, and this man has told him he can come and hang out with him and ask questions any time he wants to. My son is also a wonderful writer, has been invited to read at my adult's writer's group and would have a choice of mentors there I'm sure if he chose to pursue writing. These opportunities are all around us, and our unschooled kids have plenty of time to take full advantage of them.
We have so much time with our children, and when they talk about possible futures we are always here to offer any of our own experiences, or help and guidance in finding mentors in specific fields or areas of interest. The kids are used to talking with adults, finding people who have experience in things that they are interested in learning about, and getting the assistance they need to learn or achieve something.
As far as your experience at your grandfather's gas station, if that was something that stayed as a long-term goal or interest for you, I have no doubt that you would've been driven to learn everything about that business that you needed to know. If not, your life would not have been comprised of that one experience. Playing with the cash register and credit cards would've been one bit of your life, but not the only bit. You would've done other things with your time, met other people, experienced other possibilities or other roads that you might want to go down. In time, you would learn what you needed to know to do what most interested you. As adults, we do this all the time. It's just hard for us to have faith that children will do it too, because most of us never got that opportunity to fully follow our own paths in childhood. I can speak from my own experience, and the dozens of unschooled kids and teenagers that I know personally: they *do* learn what they need to know to follow their passions. For every kid, this looks different, the paths to that learning and the goals themselves are different.
You might be interested in this book: _Real Lives: Eleven Teenagers Who Don't Go to School Tell Their Own Stories_ by Grace Llewellyn . In their own words, these teens describe their goals, their dreams, their day-to-day activities, and how they are working toward their futures. I read this when my firstborn was an infant, and now that he's closing in on teenagerhood I can see these opportunities occuring for him like they did for the kids profiled in this book. |
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November 25, 2006, 10:13 am PST
Quote From: julie1418 I am not looking for satisfaction, I really haven't heard much about "unschooling" so I am trying to understand it better. Honesty works just fine.
Let me ask you this, and again - just trying to figure this all out - what is it that you want them to be able to do when they are adults. Somebody posted earlier that they thought their kids would be self-employed and not have to ever worry about working for someone else. So I have to wonder, what if the child decides at some point that he would like to be a doctor, or a lawyer, or an astronaut - how can be sure, or at least reasonably assured, that "unschooling" is going to give him the skills he needs to enter those very tough, very specific, very competitive professions?
I know when I was a child, I wanted to work at my grandfather's gas station. Left to my own interest and self-direction, I would have been playing with the cash register and credit card machines all day. It's not that I didn't LEARN anything there (I'm GREAT with a credit card!), but I'm not convinced that would have given me the skills I needed once I matured and had different aspirations. Not the original unschooler getting this question, but let me see if I can answer.
What I want for my children when they are adults is for them to have the tools to pursue their interests in a way that leaves them happy with their life. What that means for them is something they have to decide. It could be getting lots of money, it could be making enough to get by and having a lot of time with their family, it could be developing new treatments for some disease. I don't know what it will be, and even when they are adults, it could change.
For me, now, it means letting them explore their interests, helping them to learn to learn and allowing them the chance to learn about themselves rather than about fitting into someone else's box.
Those tough professions are really no different. You see them as tough, but someone with a passion would simply see the requirements as steps on the way. The only one of those careers with a time limitation is astronaut, and even that has a wide window. I know a woman who went to vet school at 40.
I mentioned in an earlier post that my son is interested in going to the Coast Guard academy. Even that has a bigger age window that I would have thought. The only thing more competitive on your list would be astronaut, but astronaut has more paths in so it might balance out. We've looked into what it would take for him to pursue the CGA as a future option. Choosing to do so is up to him.
Maybe some of how I see this comes from KNOWING that I can't prepare them for every particular thing they might want to do. I can only prepare them to find their way. There will be careers that don't even exist now, or are so speciality that they aren't even a consideration.
My husband is a sucessful computer programmer/ language developer. He's self taught. What he does didn't exist to any great extent when he was in school. It certainly wasn't a career path his school was preparing him for. He failed out of college.
When I was in school, the schools taught me nothing about what I wanted to do, dismissing it outright as a viable option, yet it is a field that plenty of people make a living in. It just wasn't a high profile college program (college was optional and rare at that point in it) and for the school it was about pushing me to get into a big name college and into an "important" field.
I can't be assured that ANY method of education will leave me reasonably assured that it is going to give my kids the skills needed to enter the professions you named or others that are generally considered competitive.
The only thing that can assure preparation for any path is the desire of the person with an interest intersecting with certain inate skills. If the desire and minimal levels of skills for the field(intelligence, dexterity, physical ability, etc.) aren't there, then desire can't make the rest happen. If they're there but need to be improved, desire can make the difference. Sometimes technology can change the physical limitations.
If the desire isn't there, the rest doesn't matter.
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