Poll: Unschooling: Parenting at it's worst

[Tjebbe]

What kind of crappy schools do you have? I've seen multiple people saying they haven't learned anything useful in school. Looking at myself, the general subjects I had in high school, and if I need or use them regularly;

French: Check
German: Check
English: Very much check, using it as we speak
Physics: Check
Biology: Specific parts of it, definitely check
Chemistry: Okay this one perhaps not so much
Basic Math: Very much check. Daily, even outside of job-related things this one is underestimated most.
Even the latin and greek comes in handy once in a while

And i am in retrospect sorry that I didn't take economics. Oh well can't have it all.

Of course, school, like university, can only teach you the basics. Whatever you need more of must come from actual experience, but it does provide the foundation on which you can build that experience.

Oh and kids need some form of structure in their life. Home-schooling can certainly give this too (perhaps, if good, even more than public schools), but this unschooling stuff certainly sounds like it wouldn't.

 

[Sixties Spidey]

Wow. That's just... That's probably the most retarded thing I've ever seen in my entire life. Fucking parenting these days. Where did we go wrong? Sometimes I fear for when our generation becomes parents. Our kids are going to do some extremely fucked up shit.

 

[Chloe Berg]

Everything useful I learned at school, I would have learned by myself and it probably would have been easier and faster.

I can't believe that someone, when asked the question 'what is the best way to teach children?', could possibly answer 'you need to make them sit in rows at desks and make them listen to someone they barely know for 8 hours a day, talking about topics they mostly don't care about, for more than 12 years'. Come on. Please, tell me nobody can say that with a straight face.

I'm not exactly convinced that unschooling is the best way to teach children. I haven't read enough about it. I dont currently have kids, and I certainly would feel uncomfortable doing it with them. When the time comes, I will probably look for a good (scratch that, a GREAT) private school, or I would be also very happy to homeschool them. But yes, I will defend unschooling by arguing that no school is currently waaaaay better then the current gulag that is public school.

I will also say one last thing. People, try to remember how you were before you went to school. I don't know about you, but in my case, I absolutely LOVED to learn. I kept asking questions. I couldn't read yet, so I kept asking my mom and dad 'What's written here? What's written there? Is that the letter E?' and countless other questions about nature, our house, our friends... I had an unquenchable thirst for knowledge. And I don't think I'm alone in that. If you doubt that, try talking to a child between two and five (even children as old as eight still have it to some degree, in my experience). Children, as a whole, absolutely crave to learn.

Why is it then, that children often become bored, uninterested and lazy after just a few years of school ? What kind of mental torture do you need, and how much, for someone's entusiasm and curiosity to get squeezed away from their brain ? I think we all know the answer to that. 'Make them sit at desks in rows and make them listen to someone they barely know for 8 hours a day, talking about topics they mostly don't care about, for more than 12 years.'

 

[Good morning blues]

The key goals of primary education are to prepare responsible citizens, to give future workers the skills they will need for their jobs, and to provide day care for children. This concept doesn't appear to achieve any of these goals.

 

[Burningsok]

I can see why some parents what let their kids do this, but there is just one problem... the real world. They have to go through school in order to survive life, plus they may end up finding new interests along the way. You never know.

 

[KP Shadow]

And another thing, thanks to educational television, I got a head start when I got to school, already knowing how to read on the level I was expected to at what, the same time a year later? Of course, I tended to lie about it for... reasons I don't recall. The moral of this? Have your kids watch PBS's adult literacy program and other edutainment programs for older audiences, and they'll be just fine until sixth or seventh grade. That's when, unless they set limits on how far ahead of the crowd they can get (which they won't think to do, trust me, I'm going by personal experience), will set them so far ahead that it's of no use for them at the moment, and, if they have honor's classes, may actually put them at risk of dropping out. In this case, the moral is, to paraphrase Yahtzee (because I can't remember the entirety of the original quote), "I'd rather be stupid and having fun than be a genius and be bored out of my mind." But still, that's the reason why I'm here now, so it doesn't always apply.

 

[Dastardly]

We do our jobs here at school.

The problem is that people learn things, but don't give much thought or care to the source on average. There are a shit-ton of things we all learned in school, and we wouldn't have learned otherwise, but we don't realize it because bits of knowledge don't come with a "Made in..." tag.

Those people playing the uppety college kid that "hated high school and did it all on my own" are just committing intellectual plagiarism, refusing to recognize that SOMEONE helped them find that knowledge, or at least provided them a place where they could look for it.

We don't need "drones" that can only conform, but we also don't need kids that are addicted to self-esteem to the point that they forget they've got to function in the world well enough to EARN the right to feel good about themselves.

 

[Goth Skunk]

I say let them be unschooled. Makes competition for real jobs easier.

Besides, SOMEONE will always have to pump my gas, flip my burgers and ask me if I want fries with that. Might as well be these Unschooled kids.