Reply to What exactly is "unstopping" and is it legal?

Forum Index » Elementary School-Aged Kids

Reply to "What exactly is "unstopping" and is it legal?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Unschooling and schooling are not necessarily mutually exclusive. I have a middle schooler in traditional public school, and a lot of what goes on in our family outside of school hours could fall under the unschooling umbrella. Along with encouraging a natural curiosity and further critical thinking and exploration, we also discuss critically how some of school works and problems with curriculum (e.g., absences in history due to design or compression of the subject). However, this child is still attending (and doing well in) traditional school. It's not an all or nothing thing.[/quote]

Ummm, no.  A major tenet of unschooling is that you don't do school either brick and mortar or at home.  If you give your kid rich and varied experience, and time to explore, and follow his lead some of the time, but send him to school, then that's not unschooling, it's being an involved parent.  It doesn't become unschooling until you take them out of school and rely on the experiences you describe to provide the sum total of their learning.

It's kind of like how you aren't vegetarian if you also eat meat.  You can eat a wide variety of healthy foods, and cook things from the Moosewood cook book, but if you include meat in your diet you aren't vegetarian.  Both unschooling and vegetarianism are defined, to a large degree, by what you don't do.

Conversely, if you don't send your kids to school or do school at home, and also don't provide them with a rich and varied experience, and they don't learn anything, you're still unschooling you're just bad at it.  Just like if you don't eat any meat or fish, but subside on french fries and Cap'n Crunch cereal like my college roommate, you're still a vegetarian, just an incompetent one.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics