Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:The author Tara Westover of the autobiography "Educated" was unschooled and eventually went to college and got a Phd.
It's a fascinating book but also shows the problems of unschooling for the ideal student, a very smart, very motivated child. For a less motivated child, unschooling would be much worse.
I don't think it's really fair to use a family with a psychotic abuse parent, and forced child labor in dangerous circumstances as an example of unschooling. While there are reasons to be concerned about unschooling, the vast majority of unschooled kids are not being forced to work in a scrap heap at 9 years old, and are not living with stock piles of weapons hidden for the End Times. I do think that Tara's story is a good example of the unschooling idea that a motivated child can learn things quickly at a later age, that they would have learned more slowly at an earlier age if forced.
I homeschooled my kids last year due to the pandemic. For my youngest kid, semi-unschooling was a very good fit. He's a bright, very extroverted, very busy kid, who wants to be doing something with other people every minute of the day. At the start of the school year, I set up some structure and limits about what he couldn't do during the part of the day when his older siblings were doing school. So, no video games or watching youtube until dinner time. I invested some money into things I thought would interest him. I bought him lego robots, and snap circuits, and some science kids. I bought a subscription to a game like math program (Beast Academy). I made sure he had a constant supply of books (he's my youngest, so we already had a ton). I invited him to join the adults in our hobbies (cooking, woodworking). I did also let him choose some virtual classes -- he chose Spanish, and taekwondo, and I join him sit in on math, science and writing lessons that I or a tutor taught his older sibling, although I didn't force those things. Charitable giving is important to our family, so we challenged him to figure out a way to earn some money and then to research and decide where to donate it.
For him, it worked, because he's a kid who likes to be busy, and likes to be busy with people, so since we're a family that does a lot of things that are academic-adjacent, he ended up doing things that incorporated academic skills. So, he learned a lot, although not necessarily the same exact things or in the same sequence that he would have learned if he'd been in school. For example, when I documented things for his homeschool portfolio at the end of the year, I wrote things he'd chosen to do for each category. So, I documented all the cooking he did as a course on nutrition under health. I put that he studied physical science, because of the robots and electronics and experiments. Did he do exactly the same thing as his peers in school? No, he probably read less literature, and more cookbooks than the average 5th grader, and I don't think 5th grade is usually physical science. But he did learn a lot, and my guess is that if we kept doing it for 13 years from K-12, he would have come around to most things. In preparation for returning to school (he's too extroverted to stay home alone, and I'm back in the office), we did some testing, and his percentile rankings were all higher than they had been when he was in school, so I felt good about it.
So, for him it worked. But I only felt comfortable trying because I knew my kid, and he was in elementary school (so lower stakes), and started the year with really solid skills (so I wasn't afraid he'd fall too far behind) and I monitored pretty closely and would have done something different if need be. Some unschooling families do those things. Some don't. I made a different choice for my middle schooler. He has some LD's and his skills were more on grade level than advanced. So, I felt like he needed more direct instruction. I also was worried that that close to high school, if he fell behind he wouldn't have time to catch up. So, for him I provided more structure and direction.
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