Wow, They are creating undisciplined monsters. In my state they have to by law follow home school curriculum and pass it in for review. If it is not up to level the kids have to go to school.
I think they are going to regret this decision down the road.
The month before I began teaching, I was at a party with a guy who advocated something like this. He initially started suggesting, quite genially, that I was inculcating children into a fascist system, but once he saw me getting my back up, he graciously allowed that maybe that’s not what I was consciously trying to do.
Eesh. Turns out he’s a nice guy, but my first impression of him was REALLY bad.
Just another reason why people should have to be licensed to have children.
I remember viewing the TCS e-mail group for a lark. One family kept getting re-infected with head lice because the youngest absolutely REFUSED to allow his mother to treat it. Another had a child who was still in diapers at age five. Ugh.
Home schooling doesn’t necessarily mean unschooling.
I don’t think I ever said I thought it did.
HOLY SHIT! NO COLLEGE?!?!? LIKE A COMMON POOR?!?!
Seriously, it’s not a method I would adopt because it’s not how I would want to raise my children. But I also don’t think there is or should be any one way to raise children. Indeed, it adds to the richness of our pluralistic society that people come from a variety of backgrounds–and I mean more than mere cosmetic differences (you know, I mean something beyond, “well, I’m Jewish and we call our Christmas ‘Hanukkah’ and it’s eight days long.”)
Kids are resilient and unschooling isn’t the same as locking your child in the basement for 12 years and never talking to her (a real case and real child abuse). These hippy-dippy spawn learn to read and write. And frankly, Harvard eats this shit up; so lighten up, schoolmarms.
This is what concerns me about unschooling (not so much homeschooling). People will naturally gravitate to that which interests them and/or that which is easy and fun for them, and will avoid that which bores them or with which they struggle.
Auto-didactism, therefore, tends to lead to someone who’s VERY knowledgeable - in their pet area. And usually unable to tell when they know nothing about any other area.
Moving thread from IMHO to Great Debates.
I smell a phony trend story.
The article makes it sound like the Bieglers don’t make any attempt to educate their kids at all and just leave them to their own devices with the assumption everything is going to work out fine. ("“If they need formal algebra understanding […] they’ll find that information.”) If they think google is going to educate their kids, it’s hard to see it working out very well in the end. On the other hand I can’t find fault with the general idea of teaching your kids without some of the unnecessary baggage that helped turn school into a chore. I think kids can learn without tests. In fact the ‘cram it all in and then forget it when you’re done’ model probably doesn’t promote learning. Scheduled periods? I think everybody knows that’s an artifact of the factory system. Those aren’t needed either.
Supposedly, this works well for the children motivated enough to go out and learn on their own. But a child who’s really that motivated is going to go down to the school board on es own and enroll emself in school. If you want to learn, hey, we have a whole extensive system set up to enable you to learn in great breadth and detail, filled with people who are experts on a wide array of topics. Why not use it?
Well…yeah. But as I understand it, a finer Mariocart player twas not to be found anywhere in the land!
Exactly.
My girlfriend was unschooled, and while she is an amazing pretty well rounded person, unschooling really doesn’t give you a well rounded education. I mean I kind of envy her b/c she escaped the crap that I did. (mainstreamed deaf kid from a ubersnotty and uberdysfunctional Stepford suburb) As a matter of fact, as a thirteen year old, she realized she was totally gay, and was totally out. Then she did some sort of outdoor wilderness thing and was very surprised to find herself falling in love with a GUY?!?! The Girl is actually finsihing up college, but she went to a really super alternative college.
I think unschooling can work well with the right dynamics. Again, The Girl is pretty smart and very mature…she even lives away from home on a commune, and has since she was seventeen.
Much like an unvaccinated child benefits from herd immunity, the Beigler’s children will benefit, to a degree, from socializing with normally educated children. Their curriculum will be directed by implicit peer pressure (“I’ll text you”->must learn to read) and norms that are external to the family (work a job with cash->must learn basic math). They’ll get the shallow end of the school board’s formal curriculum indirectly.
So it’s not really a valid experiment in radical unschooling, since the result will be heavily influenced by atmosphere of very unradical schooling in which the kids are raised. Really, the parents are just lazy or irrationally fearful, same as a parent who doesn’t vaccinate.
See, this is just the kind of utter horseshit that unschoolers keep their kids out of school for.
Plainly, you don’t understand the concept of herd immunity, but probably herd it on Mythbusters and thought it sounds sciencey. Herd immunity pertains to the inability of a communicable disease to propagate through a mostly-immunized population because mass incubation is not viable. The idea that the kids will learn to read and do math because it is helpful in society (and not just in the public schools) means that the acquisition of those skills is anything akin to herd immunity is beyond stupid and utterly without basis. It just shows that public schooling is not necessary to develop these skills, quite the point of the unschoolers’ argument.
And by the way, your colossal fail here implicitly makes the argument that, in addition to rudimentary scientific education, institutionalized schooling ain’t that great for critical thinking skills either.
Kimmy, dial it back–a lot, NOW.
[ /Moderating ]
This is my understanding of herd immunity too.
And off the rails you go. Plainly, your reading comprehension is no better than my science education. The analogy to herd immunity was that not doing something for the child that all the other parents are doing isn’t really avoiding it, just because all the other parents are doing it. The Beigler’s kids will receive something like the standard curriculum just because, as they grow up and interact more with peers and eventually with employers who have expectations based on the school curriculum, they’ll start to learn the same in order to be functional.
PROTIP: In an analogy, not every aspect of the analogized subjects need to match up perfectly. The analogy works by being illustrative, not a perfect correspondence.
With respect to the welfare of the children, the issue is whether or not they’ll be disadvantaged by their delayed acceptance of the most standardized parts of the curriculum. Time will tell. But as for the parents and their choices, I was observing that their philosophical adherence to an ideal of radical unschooling is undercut by remaining in (and raising their children in) a culture that doesn’t do the same. The results they get by raising their kids this way will be very different than if all parents did this.
Thanks for the protip. Here’s one for you: Contact immunity. Which is the more analogous phenomenon, alas, it doesn’t allow you to make the association with non-vaccinators and summon the moral disdain that clearly is motivating your very faulty analogy.
All you have in terms in similarities is a group of parents. Some do X and some don’t do X and some of the X-er kids with fraternize with the non-X-er kids … and isn’t that just like herd immunity!
You could just as easily argue that people who don’t own cars are freeriding on the herd immunity provided by car owners, because in an emergency they can maybe get a ride from one of the car owners. Actually, no, that’s a better analogy because yours is, in all its charm and wonder:
It’s just like herd immunity when unschooled kids in English-speaking communities learn English because they are exposed to kids who learn English in school.
Marvelous.
With that approach, who would learn to cook and clean before moving out? And, if nobody in a peer group knows how to cook and clean, who will teach the rest, as I’ve taught many classmates and flatmates?
There is a Doper here named BloodyL who was unschooled. She is my daughter. I am not a moron; I do not neglect my children. Her immunizations are up to date and she has all her teeth. She’s not a religious freak and neither am I. I’m atheist and she’s agnostic. She got me interested in Buddhism but she’s moved on.
My daughter is as well-adjusted as any other 20 year old and has a bright future ahead of her. The ONLY negative about her education was the socialization aspect. That has nothing to do with the method of home education I chose. Still, she has friends now and knows how to go about her business in public so I reckon she’ll be okay.
I didn’t want to homeschool her, but I realized not only was it for the best in our case and unschooling was the most effective way to go about it. It worked for her. I think if nothing else I helped her turn around from hating school to a great love of learning. She is fascinated with linguistics and plans to join the Air Force after some time in college. At least that’s her plan now. If she changes her mind that’s cool too. I just want her to have that same drive to learn no matter where she goes.
I think there’s a bit of confusion here about unschooling. There may not have been textbooks, but there were plenty books. I didn’t need a guide to ask questions; I didn’t need prepared tests at the end of every chapter. The objection to standardized testing is because at some points my daughter would have done really poorly. She attended public schools until sixth grade. When I decided to handle her education myself I took her back to the beginning with some subjects. She was finally learning how to ADD when she was supposed to be starting geometry, but I knew she was improving. A test given by the state would not have shown this improvement. Instead we’d have been told she was still behind and given extra help, IE worksheets with the same stuff she didn’t understand in the first place. I know because this is how it went for six years, and for six years I battled every night with homework, and tears and confusion. I tried a different approach and it worked.
It sounds fascinating to me. A somewhat Buddhist approach to parenting from what I read on their summary page.