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  • From: Clansgian AT wmconnect.com
  • To: homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [Homestead] Schools
  • Date: Tue, 28 Nov 2006 08:37:39 EST

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.





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