Extreme Homeschooling: No Tests, No Books, No Classes, No Curriculums
Is this approach ahead of the curve in an information dense society where you can get almost any bit of knowledge you want with minimal effort, or is it crazy parenting?
It’s moronic and the parents should be arrested for child abuse. They are actively destroying their children’s adult livelihoods.
This is part of the reason why there should be state laws in every state governing what are the required standards for homeschooling. I’ve read accounts of teens who were “unschooled” and most of them were desperately trying to find colleges who’d take them. That’s doing them no favors.
This sounds like the ‘taking children seriously’ movement which states that parents shouldn’t force children to do anything against their will, because the kids never asked to be born.
It’s moronic, irresponsible and flushing your child’s future down the toilet.
Hey! I knew a couple 15 years ago that was doing this! They must have been ahead of the curve. How cool! How progressive!
They had a 12-year-old who couldn’t read.
It’s child abuse, plain and simple. I know there are plenty of home schoolers out there whose parents take it seriously and the kids get good education, but until they figure out a way to make sure ALL home-schooled kids get at least a basic education, I think it should be illegal.
A difficult and controversial standard to apply to home schooling - hopeless if applied to public schools.
Ah yes, the salt of the Earth, the common clay. You know…MORONS.
I look forward to the future when some of these kids hit 25 and 30 and some of them start to wake up to the fact that they are uneducated and unemployable and it is entirely their parent’s faults for being lazy idiots. Hopefully they’ll sue the fuck out of them and use the money to go to a real school.
I blame the Republicans and Sarah Palin 
for establishing the anti-knowledge Idiotocracy we see coming to the fore. Pander to the base, belittle learning and wisdom, mock scientific method and promote fear of truth. Sprinkle [del]liberally[/del] conservatively over the morons and watch what happens.
I’d be shocked as hell if I found out that any of these parents voted Republican.
T’was a bit tongue in cheek, elfkin477.
A basic education is controversial?
Difficult… I’ll give you that. But I still think that it’s better to send a kid to a school where maybe over the course of the twelve years he/she attends, there might be a few teachers who are motivated and able to teach than it is to say it’s OK to keep the child at home with a parent who is neither.
And just to reiterate - I know many parents who are doing excellent jobs home schooling their kids. Unfortunately I also know many who are doing nothing, including people in my own family. Which sucks incredibly. What it comes down to is I think that the kids with the motivated parents would end up getting a decent education, home-schooled or not, because their parents wouldn’t allow it any other way. The unmotivated parents are depriving their kids of an education. Given the realities of the situation, I can’t help but think that if we can’t put more regulations on home-schooling then it should not be an option.
The ‘taking children seriously’ folks even take it to the extreme of throwing up their hands if there is medicine a child needs to take, but doesn’t want to. You have to respect their opinion and not give them the medicine. It is ‘disrespectful’ to even hide the medicine in their food so they don’t know they are taking it.
I have clear memories of sitting on my son with my husband holding his arms so I could put pink-eye medicine in his eye. He didn’t want it at all, but then again he was 2 or 3 and didn’t understand the consequences of not taking the medicine. The ‘taking children seriously’ loons would just say to wait for him to come to an understanding of the illness and the wisdom of allowing me to put the medicine in his eye. But pink eye is extremely contagious and can cause iritis or corneal complications. No thanks, I’ll hold him down for his own good.
And I’ll make sure they get a good education too, for their own good.
Hey, this is a great idea! And while they’re at it, they can have the kids do their own dentistry on themselves, and their own medical care. 'Cause there are Doctors and Dentists out there who are quacks, y’know. So it’s best for the parents to decide that the kids can decide for themselves. yah? It’s the natural way, after all. :rolleyes::rolleyes::rolleyes::rolleyes::rolleyes::rolleyes::rolleyes::rolleyes:
The whole lot of them should be rounded up and euthanized before they breed another generation of idiots.
Is there a field trip to the top of Everest anytime soon? 
from article: "They allow their teen daughter and son to decide what they want to learn, and when they want to learn it "
This is called being self-taught, and people who are self-taught tend to be very knowledgeable at certain things they latch on to, but know nothing about things they don’t have interest in. Part of having teachers is to have things taught to you that you didn’t know you didn’t know.
An information-dense society only means you don’t have to stress certain kinds of memorization for real-world use. It’s one thing to have to look up the year of the Norman conquest of England was, it’s a another thing to have to look up, say, the order of the alphabet.
We already have young people who use “teh intertubes” as their brain. They’re called “YouTube commentators.”
Unwise? Yes. If nothing else, these kids aren’t going to be able to get college degrees, most likely, which closes a lot of doors in our society.
Child abuse? That might be pushing it. If, as the article suggests, these kids are part of other social organizations and are literate, I’ll bet the differences between an unschooled kid and a similarly-situated schooled kid aren’t as big as you might think.
The things that make kids get a lot out of school – curiosity, intelligence, diligence, self-discipline, self-motivation – are the same things that will cause them to learn plenty on their own. And kids who don’t have those qualities often aren’t getting that much out of school.
The schooled kid is probably better at some kinds of math, and if he’s lucky, might be a better writer (though even this proposition is dubious in contemporary schools). But the unschooled kid won’t be unemployable. The majority of jobs require very little that is learned in school past the third grade, virtually nothing a reasonably curious kid wouldn’t figure out on his own, and certainly nothing that can’t be learned in a short apprenticeship.
Oh good, because I have trouble imagining that they can gather enough wits about them to even make it to the polls.
I can’t tell whether it’s crazy parenting or the Houston Independent School District.
I think an unschooled kid actually would be unemployable in traditional employment - probably because of their lack of provable education, but also because of their lack of being able to fit within a rigidly-structured environment. I have had extremely few bosses that let me do only the tasks I felt like, whenever I felt like doing them.
Not at all.
What would be controversial is a standard that says that unless every child educated a certain way receives a basic education that meets certain standards, no one is allowed to educate a child that way. No school system of any size could hope to pass muster.
The Sudbury model has this as their modus operandi. I’ve poked around looking for job opportunities with one of them, but what you’ve said above has always been a big question mark for me vis a vis their model. Now they say, in their promotional literature, that colleges tend to fall over backwards for such students, and that they tend to be very successful in life (usually in an entreprenurial vein). For a kid like me, self taught to read and intensely curious as I was/am, it would have worked, tho even then I’d likely become an expert on birds and wildlife and an ignoramus on financial matters (well that happened in this timeline anyway…).