Unschooling
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Anonymous
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I don't understand this concept. A friend of mine has been doing this for years. Every year when school starts she posts a picture of her kid(s) sleeping in. Then they will play video games.
Her oldest went to traditional public school. She started homeschooling her other two. Now her youngest is high school aged and she doesn't even pretend that he is getting an education. The oldest has a job. Middle one (20 yrs old) plays computer games all day. The youngest (15) does whatever he wants. What is the point? |
Anonymous
| Op here. I've read some online about this. I guess I'm wondering how unschooled kids function as adults. There would be gaps in learning. Especially the way she goes about it. Sleep until whenever and then play video games. |
Anonymous
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To me it feels like stage parenting: assuming your kid will thrive in the very unique niche you're putting them it. I assume there are unschoolers who go to be very successful artists, entrepreneurs, other careers that don't rely on a complete and standard education but I would worry that there are just fewer ways for a kid who isn't super motivated and sure what that want to do to get by so I wouldn't choose it for my kids.
I think some unschoolers do go to college, which helps them catch up on the gaps in their education, but I imagine that can be a challenging experience for them without standard school training and getting an office job would be even harder. |
Anonymous
| How do they get jobs without some kind of degree. Homeschooling has state requirements. It might be fine for 7 and under, but at some point school is required for success. |
Anonymous
| Unschooling only “works” if the kid is engaging frequently in enriching life experiences (travel, museums, learning how a farm or factory operates first hand, practicing an art or skill, dissecting and rebuilding computers, coding, talking history with people who lived it, etc) and reading a lot. Doing nothing but sleeping in and playing video games may be a teenage boy’s fever dream, but it doesn’t meet the idea of unschooling. It’s just…not schooling. |
Anonymous
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My friend unschooled.
Her son reads stuff he likes mostly books about boats, fishing, fish, animals, birds and photography. He learned Math from doing it in grocery stores, etc. He learns government and politics by discussing at dinner the top items in the newspaper and Twitter. Her son is behind in writing so she just hired him a tutor. He is very advanced in oral presentations, which he would do at dinner. He needs to learn traditional math to pass his GED so she hired a tutor. He works on a boat at 16/17 and intends to run a charter business and sell boats. |
Anonymous
| When I was a kid homeschooling using a regular curriculum, we made fun of unschoolers. The ones everyone knew seemed to be incapable of getting it together enough to actually homeschool so they called doing next to nothing unschooling. |
Anonymous
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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. |
Anonymous
A few years ago my aunt and I were discussing "unschooling" (she homeschooled my cousins K-12 using a traditional curriculum and homeschooling groups). She said in her experience (they didn't use the term back then), that is what ended up happening if the homeschooling parent wasn't able to keep up with a schedule, they just decided their kids would learn from "life experiences". I'm sure that unschooling is great for some kids, especially if a family has the resources to do lots of enrichment and hire tutors if needed. SOUNDS amazing if you are a curious, self-motivated kid. DCUM isn't really a great forum for nontraditional schooling options. Not a lot of nontraditional folks here. |
Anonymous
| A couple years ago I heard an NPR story about a woman that wrote a book. Her father was a Harvard Med school graduate dr that decided to not school his kids and they surged in CA and lived in a van. She said as she and her siblings grew up they realized how horrible it was because they are now adults with no education. It’s hard to find someone to hire you when you don’t have a background in anything. |
Anonymous
| That should say they surfed in CA. |
Anonymous
That worked for her and an older brother who hated their family and were self motivated to study on their own for the appearance of normalcy. The other three kids live on their parents land, still UNEDUCATED. Luckily for them their mom's oil business took off before it was a huge thing in the US. Otherwise the three uneducated adult kids and their families would all be on food stamps, etc. Tara is an outlier. |
Anonymous
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. |
Anonymous
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Op here. It sounds like they aren't even unschooling - he just does what he wants all day. I know they homeschooled for a while when he was younger. That stopped a few years ago.
On another note, she mentioned once that he only showers once/week or so. It shows; his hair is a greasy mess. It reminds me of Alaskan Bush People. |
Anonymous
And this child will probably go on to make a great living but just be a bit behind academically. |