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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]
The question for those of you who say you wouldn't go to an unschooled surgeon or CPA, the question really is how do you know?  They have a college and medical degree on the wall.  Do you often question your physicians or accountants or plumbers about where they went to high school?[/quote]

If they have a college diploma and a medical school diploma on the wall, they weren't unschooled.[/quote]

I think that some people define an unschooled person as someone who only studied what they chose to study.  One unschooled family I know has a child who studied dance at a very intensive level for many years with classes, and teachers, and eventually dance boarding school.  Another unschooled family I read about had a child who would choose a subject and devour it for months at a time, including reading everything they could get their hands on, taking online courses, making arrangements to be tutored by adults in the field.

By that definition, if someone chose to study science on their own, and then at college and then at medical school they'd still be "unschooled" in the sense that they were in the driver's seat.

To me, I can imagine unschooling working for certain families and certain kids.  I think that if there are adults present who are passionate about learning, and model how to seek it out, and act as references, that many kids will pick up on that, and explore and learn on their own, and that eventually in the course of that exploration they'll need to learn to read and write and do a fair amount of math which will motivate them to learn.

I also think there are "unschooling" parents who basically neglect their kids, or who come from an antiintellectual place, and that it can be a very harmful way to raise the child.  I think that, in order to unschool a child properly and adult needs to be monitoring . . . is my kid happy?  is he/she curious?  is he spending time doing things that are intellectually engaging and where he's learning (note: I don't care if the learning comes in the same sequence or at the same pace as schooled kids, if you want to read voraciously at 8 and not start thiniking about math until you're 10, I'm OK with that), do they have access to the resources they need such as intelligent adult experts, and a good library, etc . . . [/quote]

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