The few auto-didacts I know are the most pompous, condescending, self-righteous jerks I’ve ever met, pretty much for this reason as well as the lack of proper socialization. Even in their pet area, they are completely unaware of any potential holes in their knowledge, but because they’ve had nobody to challenge their poor conclusions and fill in gaps in their education, they assume they’re perfect experts, and anyone who went to public school is a brainwashed idiot. These are the same people who read stupid lists like “10 Things They Don’t Teach You In School” and act like only they were smart enough to uncover this hidden knowledge about the world.
A public education isn’t everything, because it has to be many things to a broad spectrum of students. But homeschooling (or this “unschooling”) is just as bad in the opposite direction, because the student is sharply limited by the faculties and resources they and their parents have access to. A combination of public school and active involvement by the parents in the child’s education is going to have the most success, barring an actual mental disability in the child.
Yeah, really, I don’t understand the hate here. I mean, the parents clearly care more about their kids education than a lot of ‘pack-the-brats-off-to-school’ parents.
Is the violent criticism some kind of “I had to suffer, so everybody else should too?” kind of thing?
Really? You can claim you never sat bored in elementary or high school, knowing you were doing stupid busywork (or even just something you already knew) and wishing you could do something interesting? Really?
I mean, I had a really great public school system, geared up to deal with all the bright children-of-two-PhD-parents in it, and I would still have unenrolled from about half the classes in an instant if I had the choice.
I can’t speak to whether all auto-didacts are this way, since the ones that aren’t condescending and self-righteous would tend to not identify themselves However, I can relate to your experience. I run into these students in my classes, students who’ve read some Steven Pinker and maybe some Malcolm Gladwell or some other pop psychology and consider themselves more educated about my field than I am. I remind them that the CLEP tests (tests that provide credit for prior learning) are available if they don’t want to take the class.
And then inevitably they fail the first exam because the actual information in the field doesn’t fit with their preconceived notions or the very little bit of biased information they’ve read.
Again, I have no way of knowing which students of mine are self-taught and AREN’T this way, if they don’t identify themselves as such.
That would be me, and I’m well aware that although I am versed in my field, I know nothing about a lot of other fields (physics, for example). This is true for most of my colleagues as well.
But thanks for continuing the ongoing denigration of academics that’s so popular around here, and in America generally.
I guess my take on this would be what limits does it have. If they play videogames for 12 hours a day till 4am for 6 months, what happens? If they punch out dad after getting drunk what happens? Etc. If they dont eat for a week or only eat junk food, etc etc.
Do the parents help them make longer term goals and then reason through what might be needed to make that goal happen or not help at all, etc.
Basically its too vague to comment much, some nuts and bolts would make it clearer how much its radicalism vs parents saying its all too hard or whatever.
True enough, I admit it could be confirmation bias. It’s a feature of arrogance and not auto-didactism (which is a really fun word to type) itself to talk about how you’re so much smarter than the sheep. The two just seem to be natural allies.
But I think dealing with boredom and with doing uninteresting work is an important life skill. Just because a job is unpleasant or boring doesn’t mean it doesn’t need to be done.
Exactly - a lot of what you learn in school is how to do things you don’t want to do and get the hell on with your life. How to deal with petty bureaucracy. How to work with people you hate. How to manage from below. Even astronauts have to do dumb shit sometimes.
Perhaps I missed the part where someone mentioned that these “unschoolers” don’t take the SAT, but there are plenty of folks who have never set foot in a classroom who go to Harvard and other top-tier schools.
I’m sure that there have been “home-schoolers” that have done well on their SATs and gone on to the top-tier schools, but the OP is talking about “unschoolers”, which is totally different. Can “unschoolers” do well on the SAT, and have they been accepted at the top colleges?
I think boredom is something that happens in life, and you need to learn to deal with it in a constructive or at least non-disruptive way. That’s a life skill I think unschooled kids might not learn.
Unschooled kids also might not get experience with getting up and going to school, even if they really don’t feel like it. That’s an important skill for anybody who has a job that requires you to be there by a certain time every day (and most jobs do require this, at least to some extent).
Academic skills aren’t the only skills kids learn in school, or need to hold down a job.
It depends on the parents and the kids, that’s all. I’ve known some smart, motivated adults who were unschooled (and homeschooled by many other methods). Most have gone on to college and serious careers. I’ve also seen it go horribly wrong to the point where kids are incapaciated in life - but then I’ve seen many more kids be incapaciated in life by bad parenting (usually the permissive sort) or abuse/neglect who also went through a regular school system. I think there’s enough potential for unschooling to be actively damaging to a child that it should be discouraged, through tighter regulation of homeschooling. At the very least, I think there should be standardized testing of all homeschooled kids to make sure they are getting a basic education. Those who don’t learn how to read, etc are a minority but it does happen.
I have to wonder if people who foam at the mouth about how bad all homeschooling is for kids, even those methods which provide an enviroment quite similar to a conventional classroom, have known many homeschooled people. They are all around us, and most of them turned out fine.
If your kid is a real self starter intellectually, I can see how this free range learning scenario would work, but I believe that many people, including kids, are vaguely slothful intellectually, and leaving “ordinary” kids to their own devices would be problematic. If you’re rich enough to put kids in experience dense situations with family adventures and foreign travel this might pan out, but for average people I think there has to be some direction (and probably initial coercion) to learning.
I think you’re wrong about that, based on my experience with my niece, who I think is being “unschooled” in the manner described by this thread. She is 15 now and is actually pretty well-adjusted.
Boredom does happen in life outside of school. What you learn in school is how to deal with it in increments of 40 minutes or so while trying to avoid attention from an authority figure. I don’t think that has very many applications in the workplace. Quercus is right; there’s a lot of ‘I had to suffer, so they should too’ going on here.
However, I can relate to your experience. I run into these students in my classes, students who’ve read some Steven Pinker and maybe some Malcolm Gladwell or some other pop psychology and consider themselves more educated about my field than I am. I remind them that the CLEP tests (tests that provide credit for prior learning) are available if they don’t want to take the class.