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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]This is OP. Sure, [b]I'd let an unschooled professional do significant work for me.[/b] The professions you cited all require licenses, btw, so there's your independent authority checking that they quality, if that's something that you value (though somehow there are still a lot of awful doctors and such). Plenty of other professions don't require licenses, and I'd judge those people's abilities by looking at the quality of their previous work and their references.

Regarding teachers, I guess we will just have to disagree. Do parents have to hire professional teachers to teach their kids to talk? That's a very complicated skill, but somehow children learn it just fine on their own, in their own way and in their own time, by listening and practicing. Do parents learn how to be parents from professional teachers? Another complicated skill set that most people manage to acquire through reading and talking to people and observing. And so on and so forth.

If you think about it, everyone is unschooling until age five, and everyone is unschooling after age 18 (in college, you have freedom to choose your major and many of your classes, decide whether or not to attend lectures, and so on). People learn a great deal as little children and as adults, and it works. There's no reason that things HAVE to be done differently between ages 5 and 18.

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Would you agree to be operated upon by an 'unschooled' surgeon?

I also call BS on the notion that 'everyone is unschooling after age 18". I don't know where and when you went to college, OP, but where I did, we had a significant number of required courses, and attendance was taken in a lot of classes. [/quote]

I would go to a good surgeon of any background, and not only would I not mind if they had been unschooled, but I would probably consider it a plus. Remember it doesn't mean no training. All surgeons go to medical school and then do residencies. That is a completely separate thing from compulsory K-12 education.

And to your second point, regardless of what any college is like on a micro level, it is the student who chooses to go there and the student who chooses their major (unless they have really over-controlling parents, but that's a whole separate issue at that age). The element of student choice is the essence of unschooling. (There should be a better term than "unschooling" that more accurately captures how it differs from conventional, compulsory K-12 schooling.) And everyone is definitely "unschooling" in every sense of the term after college. [/quote]

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