Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote: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.

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.

Anonymous wrote: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.

Anonymous wrote: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.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:My sister in Oregon (more hipster/geeky than hippie, and definitely not religious) has unschooled her kids for more than a decade. In her case, it literally means not schooling them. They are very involved in a homeschooling co-op, but when they are not there, they are basically left to their own devices. Which is why they are expert wood carvers and archers and musicians but don't really have their multiplication facts down solidly. These are young teens.

That's what I perceive as the major flaw of unschooling. There is stuff you have to learn, even if you're not interested in learning it. Mor,e generally there is stuff you have to do, even if you don't want to do it.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:My sister in Oregon (more hipster/geeky than hippie, and definitely not religious) has unschooled her kids for more than a decade. In her case, it literally means not schooling them. They are very involved in a homeschooling co-op, but when they are not there, they are basically left to their own devices. Which is why they are expert wood carvers and archers and musicians but don't really have their multiplication facts down solidly. These are young teens.

That's what I perceive as the major flaw of unschooling. There is stuff you have to learn, even if you're not interested in learning it. Mor,e generally there is stuff you have to do, even if you don't want to do it.

Anonymous wrote:My sister in Oregon (more hipster/geeky than hippie, and definitely not religious) has unschooled her kids for more than a decade. In her case, it literally means not schooling them. They are very involved in a homeschooling co-op, but when they are not there, they are basically left to their own devices. Which is why they are expert wood carvers and archers and musicians but don't really have their multiplication facts down solidly. These are young teens.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:basically it's the same as home schooling. Un-schooling may the hippie granola method while home schooling may be the ultra right wing religious method (and no, I don't have a citation).

It's a type of homeschooling.

There are plenty of atheist or nondevout families who strictly follow a secular curriculum. They would be referred to as homeschoolers.

Glad you can read, so re-state what I said. And also that you detect sarcasm. Oh, oops, wait...

"The same as" is not the same thing as "a type of." That goes back to basic reasoning skills. Turtles are a type of reptile, but they are not "the same as" reptiles because, while all turtles are reptiles, not all reptiles are turtles. This poster rightly pointed out that your sloppy phrasing made an invalid point.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:basically it's the same as home schooling. Un-schooling may the hippie granola method while home schooling may be the ultra right wing religious method (and no, I don't have a citation).

It's a type of homeschooling.

There are plenty of atheist or nondevout families who strictly follow a secular curriculum. They would be referred to as homeschoolers.

Glad you can read, so re-state what I said. And also that you detect sarcasm. Oh, oops, wait...