Thanks. I thought it was some weird US thing I’d never heard of.
The wiki page on unschooling isn’t very helpful. It seems to be saying that it’s based on letting the kids do whatever the hell they want. I can’t see where it actually involves any education. The wiki isn’t specific, for instance, about how the kid is actually supposed to learn to read or do long division. There’s no testing either, apparently. You wouldn’t want the little angels to to feel “anxious.”
I hope there’s more to it, because from here it looks like a load of child-worshipping bullshit. Kids can’t “self guide.” Kids are stupid.
I do have to say that I think it takes a certain kind of family to unschool. It is basicly self directed learning. An education based on the child’s nautral interests and talents. My “almost sister in law” just finished a senoir year project where she traveled around the US, writing about permaculture and things like locovore movements. The Girl herself actually did an outward bound wilderness experiance for her senoir year. The Girl’s family is very hippie/New Age and very intellectucal (has tons and tons of books and fostered a love of learning in both The Girl and her sister…hahahhah when FSL posted a pic of books she had on Facebook all I saw were books I REALLY wanted! .)
The parents would of course have to intially build a foundation for future learning so that the kids would have a foundation of interests to chose from. It’s not just " oh we’ll let little Junior watch TV or play video games or spend all his time posting online for his “education.”
Yes, many kids are stupid and apathetic towards learning. That doesn’t mean every kid is… The Girl just graduated from Sterling College in VT
Ca, are your kids relatively young? One thing that I think parents of sped kids need to be careful of is expecting a relatively smooth educational ride in the public school system,( especially if the kids have something more then just a learning disabilty. Around fourth grade MANY kids with disabilites start having trouble.Not to mention the nightmare that jr high and high school are.
We never considered anything other than public school. We were never vain enough to think we could do what an entire school system with a variety of teachers and fellow students could do for them. We also never had a point of view of the world we wanted our kids immersed in.
Both of my kids went to international school for a while when they were younger. Then we moved back to the United States and they went to regular public school - my son did attend a Montessori kindergarten program for a year since he didn’t win the full day kindergarten lottery. In both cities we’ve lived since moving back to the US we “shopped” for better public school districts - in other words, we picked where we lived based on the quality of the schools.
My oldest just entered high school and chose the magnet IB program, not the high school for which we are zoned.
Which school district are you in? We lived in Blue Ash previously and so were in Sycamore district. Loved the schools there.
Here’s a recent article in the Calgary Herald about unschooling.
Unschooling, in a nutshell, is interest-led learning (like what grownups do on their own all the time). Done well, it’s actually a lot of work for the parent; you have to build an environment for the kids in which they have lots of opportunities to explore the world, and support what they want to do, but also not get in the way. So if your kid wants to spend 3 weeks building a trebuchet in the backyard, you let her do that and work out the math she’ll need, etc. and incidentally get a lot of history and physics in as well. Many unschoolers do, in practice, make their kids do a solid math course and so on as well.
Of course it can be done badly too, but generally the sort of people who want to take on a project like unschooling are very very dedicated parents. Unschool kids tend to grow up independent. They are frequently quite free-range. I think you probably need to be a certain kind of person with a certain kind of family, and I am not that kind–it’s too much work for me, for one thing–but the unschoolers I know are pretty great and successful kids.
The founding texts for unschoolers are by John Holt, and are in any library. Or there’s the Teenage Liberation Handbook.
How do you actually teach math and reading? If they never want to do it are you just supposed to not do it?
That would depend on the family. Everybody’s going to do it differently. (Even on my classical homeschooling board, it’s easy to see that everyone is doing something different, though most share the same philosophy.) I can tell you that Math-U-See is a popular program with unschoolers, and of course there’s always plenty of reading aloud. I think generally with reading you’ll have a lot of books around and read together a lot, and when the child shows interest in reading, you teach him how to do it. I don’t know if there are particular books for teaching reading that are favorites with unschoolers, though I can list about 8 different ones off the top of my head.
I’m not an unschooler, though, so I can’t really tell you.
Oh, I forgot about the ‘what if?’ question. I believe that the idea is that kids arrive in the world as curious beings who want to know how things work. Sooner or later almost any kid is going to realize that he has to know how to read if he wants to do the stuff he wants to do, and the same with math. But you’d have to ask an actual unschooler about it.
I did read a quite interesting article yesterday by a psychologist about his investigations into ADHD and home/unschooling. It was just a preliminary survey, but he’s thinking it’s worth a real study.
Our kids’ public school district has a magnet program for grades 1-5. You put in an application and names are drawn by lottery. They do the standard curriculum but have a particular focus; in my kids’ school, it’s “world cultures,” so they learn Spanish and do an international fair every year and that sort of thing.
I checked the box for “magnet/charter” schools but at least around here, the charter schools are a totally different thing, not really part of the public school district. My kids are definitely in their public school district, just at a magnet school for elementary.
Unschooling is really not that hard to understand.
Of all the things you learned in school (from kindergarten through high school) which things do you still use? The things you need for any given task/need, correct? Unschooling kids typically learn what they need when they need to know it. The key is teaching your child how to learn.
Kids are naturally very curious and to a certain extent very curious. Therefore, if you equip them with the desire to find the answers, they will do just that. And since they learn it hands-on when they need it to do something they want to do (e.g. math/geometry necessary for building a tree house, telling time to know what time a standing field trip occurs, etc.), they are much more likely to retain it than if they were forced to learn it in a sterile, disconnected classroom.