Topic : 11/24 Great School Debate

 I'm sorry you were offended by my calling you hon. In Kentucky we call people hon, it's a friendly name and I in no way meant for it to offend you.

My message was to discuss the issue of homeschoolers being defensive and trying to give an explanation.

I didn't want to bump your entire post, so I am just copying the portion I would like to respond to....

Show me a child who is "not motivated to learn anything" who has not yet been to school! If children were not born to be learning machines, they would never learn to walk and talk, would never point out the wonder in a leaf or butterfly, or ask all of those "Why?" and "How?" questions that four and five year olds are famous for.

No, sad to say, children become unmotivated, they are not born that way. They become unmotivated when their personality style doesn't match the teaching style of their classroom (perhaps they are fidgety and physical, while their classroom requires deskwork), or when their particular abilities do not match the current level of instruction  (perhaps they are not yet ready to read when the school system insists that they have to, then they self-identify as "stupid" or "slow" and begin a process of telling themselves they can not learn, so why bother, or perhaps they are so far ahead of the class that they are bored silly. They begin to classify learning as "a waste of time").

As a former educator, let me assure you this is a HUGE myth. I have seen TOO many children who walk into Kindergarten completely unmotivated to learn. Research shows over and over again that the bulk of emotional development is in place by the age of three. That's either parent time or daycare time.

Many children are not being nurtured in the quest for learning before they hit school. Their questions to What and Why  are often answered with Not Now, Sit Down and Shut Up.  Their development is not only neglected but trampled before they ever walk through the school doors.

I am never going to argue that schools are without problems, but I am SICK of schools being blamed for social problems. If EVERY parent did nurture their child's love of learning in those crucial years, schools would be able to function better. I know there are exceptions, but for the most part, parents who have engaged with their children and helped them get excited about learning do not usually have problems in school settings. They may have some complaints, but their kids are usually not floundering. I have very little concern about putting my children in a traditional school because I KNOW what I am doing at home to make the difference.

While I can agree that governments are subject to error.  I don't not feel that the laws are "silly" at all.  Certainly there is a need for revaluation and improvement within the public school system.

I didn't realize that Private Schools are excluded from govt. intervention.  Again, that is a mistake IMO.

The government likely doesn't know whats best for any child.......yet they must protect all children and their rights is what I'm saying.

What if the government began monitoring all parental activity for the "best interests of the child" would you agree?

I would agree.

As far as the whole Foster Care scenario you implied about, I can't see that happening.  Yet I am grateful that there are laws and agencies in place (albeit not perfect ) in order to protect children.

I do not feel that there is a poster on this board that isn't fully competent in raising their children in an extraordinary fashion.   My point is that I feel strongly that there must be some form of accountability and standards that access the quality of education every child receives.

In a democracy it is up to the government to ensure the highest quality of education for our children.  Particularly ensuring that *some* parents that do not have the children's best interests at heart aren't able to abuse a child.

I hope that you can better understand my point of view.  I am not against homeschooling, I am only concerned for the rights of the children.

Fredi

First, I would like to ask you how old your children are.

I have absolute FAITH in my kids ability to intrinsically learn...however, they are afterall KIDS.  And normal ones at that.  Sometimes...I need to nudge them to do what they need to...truly...given the choice...my son would watch football all day...and my daughter would spend her entire time on a beam.

My kids are 10 and 7. I'm sure your kids would spend some time completely immersing themselves in their interests for awhile, should you suddenly change to unschooling. That's actually very common and even expected, a period of time known as "deschooling". Your concerns are expressed by almost every parent who comes to unschooling boards, so I wanted to let you know that you are not alone in thinking that your kids would "just do X all day". What these parents find is that after a period of time where their kids might indeed "do X all day" (similar to what many kids go through when they first move out or go to college), they find that they are interested in other things, and life spirals out from there.

When children are in school and their main passions are relegated to a back burner, something they don't have time for, of course they will want to do these things "all the time" when they are not in school or activities or doing homework. But when kids finally realize that they have all the time in the world, they branch out and explore other things that interest them. I've seen it happen with so many families that come to the 2000+ member unschooling list. Somewhere in their first post is "I'm worried that my kids will only do X all day." And people reassure the parent and tell them to give their kids time. Sure enough, 2 or 4 or 6 months later, the parent comes back and posts "You were right. At first they just did X, but then one day they did Y and figured out they liked it. And then they explored A, B, and C and they are doing something new and cool all the time now." So this is a common concern, but so far it seems to be unfounded. I have yet to see someone come back and post "It's a year later and they're still only doing X"

The other thing I'd mention is that concentrating on one's passion, even if it seems like a silly or wasteful thing, is how most great people become great. I'm sure Tony Hawk's mother may have despaired that he "only wants to skateboard". I met him decades ago when he was a young and enthusiastic skareboarder who spent hour after hour perfecting his moves. Now he's a virtual one-man skateboarding empire and a very successful businessman. All from "just doing X". And I'm pretty darn sure it pays the bills!!!

If unschooling works for you and yours...that's GREAT...I never heard of it before prior to these boards...I, personally, am not qualified to teach my children certain advanced subjects (my son is currently taking anthropology, criminal justice and other classes...my daughter is taking psychology and trig among others...I've taken trig...and passed with flying colors...doesn't mean I can teach it.)

The wonderful thing about the big huge world though is that we parents don't have to be the experts on everything. There are lots of wonderful experienced people out there who love to share their expertise with young people. My neighbor teaches calculus and trig to homeschooled students. Another neighbor has a passion for mechanics and restoring old motorcycles. Another is a master gardener and master canner. Another is a microbiologist and yet another teaches Mandarin. And that's just within two blocks of my house! Whenever my kids have gotten interested in passionate about something, we have had no problem finding adult mentors to further their knowledge. I know from my friends with older teenaged homeschoolers that this process continues and intensifies as their need for more advanced or specialized knowledge increases.

But for me and mine...nupe...no can do...and my kids are the sort that need a nudge...otherwise they would go for instant gratification...and that which wouldn't necessarily teach them anything...but rather...that which makes them feel good.

I think that's great that your kids are so motivated to learn...if it works for you...then AWESOME!

That's my feeling - what works for each individual family is what they should choose. Frankly, in reading these threads, it is disturbing how many people think the government should be so intrusive into parental choices. Yes, there will always be a few bad apples, and those people exist whether their kids are in school or out of school. But I think centuries of experience has shown that you can't legislate those people away. I am always grateful for our freedom to educate our kids in the way that works best for them.

Some common arguments against unschooling are given below.

These are interesting and worthy of discussion. Thanks for posting them. Because most people have never experienced unschooling in their lives, it can be very hard to understand how it would work. If one has always equated schooling with learning, it can be difficult to envision learning as occurring for its own sake.

• Some children lack the foresight to learn the things they will need to know in their adult lives.

Don't we all? The great thing about being humans is that we are non-stop learning machines!! When I was a kid, I had no idea I'd want to be a computer scientist. Heck, personal computers weren't even invented yet! I remember my mom strongly urging me to take typing, and me telling her "I don't need to, I'm never going to be a secretary!" So I didn't. Years later, in a job as a software engineer, I needed to type all day. Ha ha, the joke's on me! Fortunately, as a non-stop learning machine, I was able to quickly pick up the skill of typing and now type at 65+ WPM, plenty adequate.

My husband (though he graduated from public school!) never learned to do fractions or decimals. At the age of 30, he wanted to play the stock market. So he sat down in two evenings and learned all about fractions and decimals. Now he converts them much faster than I do, and he's a stock market whiz. Why didn't he learn them in school? I'm guessing because he saw no reason to. Learning that is divorced from real life does not make enough sense to many kids to motivate them to pursue it. Once he had a vested interest in learning fractions and decimals, he learned it quickly and easily.

These two examples of (schooled) people who lacked the foresight to learn the things we would need to know in our adult lives also highlights the fact that anything can be learned at any time. I just learned to play the violin a couple of years ago. I learned to write fiction five years ago. I'm learning all the time, just like my kids. And if my kids reach adulthood and find they need some crucial skill that they somehow missed picking up, I have no doubt that they will quickly and easily acquire it. For one thing, they know the most important thing: how to learn and how to teach themselves or find the resources that they need to learn.

• There may be gaps in a child's education unless an educational professional controls what material is covered.

Judging by the state of many high school graduates out there (ever watch that late night guy - is it Jay Leno?? who asks people questions in the streets), there are huge gaps in most children's education in this country. A recent National Geographic survey found that only 13 percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 could find Iraq on a map!!! And that's a country that we're engaged in a war in, a country that is in the headlines constantly. I remember a high school acquaintance telling a friend of mine that after she graduated she was moving to Florida. "What part of Florida?" he asked her. "The part that's next to Colorado." she replied. Just this week, I was getting a coffee at a local shop when the cash register malfunctioned. The high school graduate behind the counter could not for the life of her figure out how to subtract 17 from 100 and give me the correct change.

We have spent over 100 years with "educational professionals" controlling what, when, and how the children of this nation learn, and we are less educated than ever.

The fact is that every child will reach adulthood with gaps in their education. The sheer amount of information available in this global age is staggering. Four years ago, I embarked on a quest to read all of the "classics", because I had only read about 5% or less of them in school and remembered almost nothing of those. I had to realize how very little of even our cultural literacy I had acquired.

The bottom line is that with so much information, and with technology changing so fast, the best thing that our kids can learn (in my opinion) is how to learn. How to acquire knowledge and skills that they need, how to network and find mentors for things that they don't know, how to research, use the library, use their community resources. And my kids already know these things at ages 7 and 10.

• Because schools provide a ready-made source of peers, it may be more difficult for children who are not in school to make friends and develop social skills than it is for their schooled peers.

I think there's some truth to this. If you truly wanted to isolate your kids, homeschooling would be one avenue for that. However, I haven't found that unschoolers tend to be the types of homeschoolers who are isolationists (that tends to be more in the realm of survivalists or religious zealots). Other than that, one has to ask the question of whether the "socialization" that occurs in schools where dozens or hundreds of same-aged children interact for the bulk of their day is optimal. Personally, I feel that it doesn't serve as the best basis for socialization. One benefit of homeschooling for me is that my kids interact with people of all ages on a daily basis. They do have lots of activities and playdates that are just kids, although it's rarely just kids of exactly their age (my 10 y.o. son's friends range in age from 8 to 13, and my 7 y.o. daughter's best buddies are 6 to 12). But they also interact with teenagers, young adults, middle-aged adults, and elderly people. I can almost always spot a homeschooler by the way they talk to adults.

My husband and I first noticed this phenomenon long before having kids. We were youth group leaders for our church's junior high group. There were three homeschooled kids out of about 25 in our group, our first experience with homeschoolers. The differences were immediately apparent. While the middle-school kids largely tended to regard us with distrust as the obvious Agents of Authority that we represented to them, the homeschooled kids just seemed to treat us as people. It took a long time to win the trust of the schooled kids. That really opened our eyes to the positive socialization aspects of homeschooling. A group of homeschooled kids in our neighborhood also positively influenced our eventual decision to homeschool our own kids.

Nowhere in your life, once leaving school, will you be required to only socialize with a massive group of people your own age. I'm not sure it's really practice for the real world out there. I like that my kids already know how to interact on a peer basis with a wide variety of people. And regardless of that, they spend plenty of time with other kids. Maybe more than plenty, LOL!

• Children have a vast capacity for learning new things, so it is the responsibility of adults to ensure that they learn a number of essential things, as it could be more difficult to learn those things as an adult (what these essential things are varies from critic to critic).

Well, I don't believe that it's any harder to learn things as an adult, if you have kept your mind open to learning and believe that you can do it. The biggest barrier to learning anything at any stage of life is the belief that you can't do it.  As an adult, I've learned to fly an airplane, to scuba dive, to speak Spanish, to write a novel, to mountain climb, to give CPR, to program in C++ and Javascript, to do calligraphy, and dozens of other complex things.

I think it's our biggest responsibility as adults to preserve the absolutely joy and love of learning that children are born with. Instead of seeing them as buckets to pour knowledge into, we can just get out of their way and assist them with the instinctive knowledge-gathering that every child participates in. The biggest detriment I see in our current methods of education is that they remove that joy of learning from many children's lives. I hear it all the time on email lists "My child hates to read now.", "My child says he's terrible at math.", "My child won't learn a thing unless I make him sit down and do it." Unschooling removes all of those barriers to joy in learning, all unschooled kids know is that learning is fun and a natural part of everyday life.

If love of learning is there in a person, if a person truly believes that they are capable of learning whatever they need to know to succeed in their life, well then they will be able to do just that!

• Some children are not motivated to learn anything, and will spend all of their time in un-educational endeavors if not coerced into doing otherwise.

Show me a child who is "not motivated to learn anything" who has not yet been to school! If children were not born to be learning machines, they would never learn to walk and talk, would never point out the wonder in a leaf or butterfly, or ask all of those "Why?" and "How?" questions that four and five year olds are famous for.

No, sad to say, children become unmotivated, they are not born that way. They become unmotivated when their personality style doesn't match the teaching style of their classroom (perhaps they are fidgety and physical, while their classroom requires deskwork), or when their particular abilities do not match the current level of instruction  (perhaps they are not yet ready to read when the school system insists that they have to, then they self-identify as "stupid" or "slow" and begin a process of telling themselves they can not learn, so why bother, or perhaps they are so far ahead of the class that they are bored silly. They begin to classify learning as "a waste of time"). Some children may become unmotivated at younger ages, if their parents don't respond to their basic inquiries for input and knowledge. Even babies who are not smiled at, cooed at, and baby-talked to become less intrepid learners than their peers with interactive parents. Definitely, it would behoove us as a society to help parents and other adults interact with even small children in positive and affirming ways.

• Not all parents may be able to provide the stimulating environment or have the skills and patience required to encourage the student's curiousity.

I won't argue with that one! Not all parents are cut out to homeschool and especially to unschool. Unschooling requires a leap of faith and an ability to facilitate your child's curiousity and desire to learn. I don't think it takes as much in material resources as people might assume (remembering that Abraham Lincoln learned to write using coal and a shovel because they didn't have enough paper). But it does take a willingness to engage with one's chidren in loving and supportive interactions on a daily basis.

• Because they often lack a diploma from an accredited school, it may be more difficult for unschooled students to get into college or get a job.

I think this one is already being disproved on a daily basis. Colleges and universities are now going out of their way to recruit homeschoolers. Most will take a portfolio and SAT scores. Personally, I got into University without graduating from high school, just based on SAT scores and a good essay. I have no worries on this one.

• If they are not made to do arbitrary and tedious schoolwork, children might not learn how to do difficult, uninteresting, and unpleasant work.

Ah, the old "life is full of boring drudgery, so we must prepare children for it by making their current existance full of boring drudgery" argument. I've just never bought into this one. Life is what you make it. If you have goals, you will sometimes meet a boring moment in the path of achieving those goals. This happens to all people, regardless of whether they are in school or not. If the goals are meaningful to you, you will work through the difficult, uninteresting, and unpleasant things to achieve those goals. Unschooled kids are not immune from this. For instance, my kids wanted to raise chickens. They made a pact with me that they would take care of the chickens, including the very unpleasant work of cleaning out the chicken coop, and the more fun tasks of handling the chickens, checking on them as baby chicks, and collecting the eggs each day.

Another example:: my daughter plays the violin. There are days when she doesn't feel like playing, and I don't make her practice. But she has discovered that if enough of those days go by, she suddenly can't play as well. Playing feels miserable and difficult instead of light, fun, and easy. She becomes motivated to play on the days that she doesn't feel like it. Instead of making her, I will offer to play duets with her, or play on the piano or recorder with her. I help her by taking her to Celtic jam sessions with other musicians (and she just got invited to play at a Bluegrass jam by a 65 year old bluegrass musician - remember what I said about mentors and multi-age experiences??), and also to play at our local Saturday market where she makes money (highly motivating for a 7 year old!)

Yes, I have no doubt that my kids will learn to work through whatever unpleasantness might lie between them and their goals. However, I won't purposefully subject them to years of unpleasantness just to make sure they have this capability in spades! I want them to retain their joy and their love of learning, their self-identification as lifelong learners and as people who have what it takes to accomplish their self-set goals.

Again, thanks for providing that list - it's a great opportunity to address some of the biggest misconceptions about unschooling.