Topic : 11/24 Great School Debate

with unschooling kids learn all the things they need to know and make friends too

This wasn't addressed to me, but I'm jumping in anyway.

"a lot of people" isn't "everyone"  This is at least the 2nd time in this thread this has happened.  Complaining to someone about something they didn't write is being assumptive and generally not productive. 

I can't answer for the OP, but there are a lot of ways my children are assessed, including annually by a state certified teacher.

Unschooling occurs in the world, so there are of course, deadlines and unpleasant experiences.  Not sure about unpleasant expectations, is that a glass half empty thing?

Unschooling is basically about learning to learn, in the sense that once you know how to learn something, you can learn whatever it is you want to learn.  And sometimes you want to learn something merely to jump through a hoop of something else you want.  Because that is how life is.  I

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

George Washington
Thomas Jefferson
John Quincy Adams
James Madison
William Henry Harrison
John Tyler
Abraham Lincoln
Theordore Roosevelt
Woodrow Wilson
Franklin Delano Roosevelt

All these presidents were unschooled and voted into office.

And when was the last time any politician touted their elementary school or highschool education.  I would doubt that you would even know if someone had been unschooled, unless they told you. 

Seems like you don't really understand what unschooling is...

My overall job will be making sure they're learning, while not overworking them and letting them be kids.  I'm sure it's not easy, but that's my goal  :).

that's what most homeschooling parents say as well

It's important for every kid (rich or poor) to get a good education because they'll be running everything someday.

I agree and I think that unschooling is the best way to get an education. 

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.

It makes me a bit sad when people have so little faith in their children's intrinsic abilities and desire to learn. Why would children not be interested in the world about them? Why would they not want to read good stories, or think philosophically, or not be interested in the historical events that went before them? I can't imagine my kids not engaging in these things.

U.S. History is simply the events that shaped our nation. My kids are definitely interested in that. They are also interested in current events, which leads to a lot of world history as well. They've traveled to different countries, and visited historical sites in those countries and read about them (and many others). They also know people from different parts of the world, and have learned lots of history and current culture from talking with them. Geometry and Algebra are all around us in the world, and not everyone wants or needs to know Trig and Calculus. But if my kids were interested in a field where advanced mathematics were a necessity, I'm sure they'd learn them. Unschooled kids aren't averse to even cracking a textbook or a workbook if it's something that interests them. Both of my kids thought that the standardized test booklets I bought for practice (they're required by law to test every other year) were a hoot, and kept begging to do more "bubble tests", which kind of made me laugh, because I can't imagine asking to do more tests when I was a schoolkid.

Becoming a doctor or becoming a lawyer are both professions that unschoolers can and have achieved. Unschooling simply means autodidactic, or self-taught learning. If a kid wants to get into law school, they just find out what they need to know for law school and go to town learning it.

From Wikipedia:

"Some universities consider unschoolers to be an asset because they tend to love learning, be self-motivated, and know what they want to get out of their college experience. According to Johnathan Reider, an admissions officer at Stanford university, "The distinguishing factor is intellectual vitality. These kids have it, and everything they do is responding to it."

As for the SATs, plenty of unschoolers who wanted to take them to get into a 4 year university have done just fine on them. They're not all that horrifying. Myself, I left highschool in my junior year and took the SATs early. I hadn't had a lot of the material in classes because I didn't take those last terms of high school, so I simply bought a SAT prep book and did just fine. I'm sure my kids can do the same if and when they want to.

Mostly, I have faith in my kids that they can and will learn everything they need to know, when they need or want to know it. That is the essence of unschooling for me.

Thing is, always-unschooled children are already enrolled in colleges around the country and are doing well.  Some are enrolled in advanced degree programs.  One of the unschooler moms on a list I'm on just announced her son's SAT score of 1410, and he'd never been to school.  Unschoolers are succeeding in life.  

Unschooling not just a flimsy idea that parents of young children are trying as an unproven experiment and we're all doomed to failure and dumping our ignorant children on the overburdened school system when we realize that education is better left to the 'professionals'.

Unschooling works.  Unfortunately, there is no way to define it, or quantify it, and explanations don't quite cut it.  And when you look at it from a schoolish frame of mind, it seems silly, insane even.  But basically our children and families live as if school didn't exist.  And when you step outside of the box, there's a whole wide world waiting to be explored.

Check the links I posted earlier.  A wealth of information there, far more than can be explained on a simple message board.  Especially one with a bias such as this.