Homestead mailing list

[Clansgian AT wmconnect.com]

In a message dated 11/27/2006 9:34:30 PM Eastern Standard Time, 
lisakvperry AT gmail.com writes:


>  He's doing well, overall, but we can't stand the VA
> SOL's (Standards of Learning) and other bureaucratic crap.

When children are not schooled, they have no use for tests and the culture 
and conditioning that goes along with it.  This often baffles the schooled.  
The 
conditioning of schooling is so strong and pervasive (and, Marie, 
religious-like) that the schooled automatically assume that if a child is 
quizzed and 
does not answer, it means they don't know it.

Many times someone would ask our children where they went to school and when 
they said they were homeschooled, the person would say, "Oh, well, if I had 
twenty apples and divided them among you children equally, how many would 
each 
of you get?"

The children would stare at them.

"Ah, they don't know, do they?"
"It isn't that, they think you are a moron.  What normal person would be 
going about asking a question like that?"

A great deal of effort in schooling is devoted to conditioning children to 
respond to quizzing, a condition ('skill' if you will) that for the most part 
has no use in the real world.



>  Our youngest son is friends with an unschooled brother
> and sister, the boy is 13 and struggles to read and do basic math. My son is
> frustrated that their school work is done by or before noon, he occasionally
>  


Eh?  Are you sure you are not mixing metaphors?  How can the boy be an 
unschooler and have a time when his school work is done?  Unschoolers don't 
do 
school work.  My children use math every day, probably every hour.  And yet 
they 
have never had one minute of "math work".  Math is part of life and normal 
trafficking in everyday interests and living.  It's not possible for them to 
'do 
poorly' in math, since they don't "do math" in the schooling sense.  But when 
the measure, extent, quantity etc. of something is needed, they come up with 
the 
solution in their heads and it is invariably correct.

I find that "doing poorly" in this or that almost always means "didn't 
respond to quizzing" which might be for any of a number of reasons.