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  • From: KNat <knat AT sprintmail.com>
  • To: homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [Homestead] Schools
  • Date: Sun, 03 Dec 2006 09:44:57 -0600

Marie McHarry wrote:
Really? I'm on a copyeditor's list, and the topic of when we learned
to read came up. Almost everyone was reading by the time they were 4.
Unschooling puts the child in an atmosphere of "Reading? Oh, you'll pick
that up when you need it or want it. Don't sweat it." And they do. As
long as
the process is not blocked or thwarted, it always happens.

Unless they're dyslexic, which is an actual neurological dysfunction.
Which is not to say that public schools necessarily deal with dyslexic
kids well. Some do, some don't.
Like life being a natural state, defined in different ways in different people, but not inherently flawed and requiring treatment, dyslexia and autism are both better understood as different strategies than defects. Both are totally problematic for schools because they cannot process disjointed bits that form a picture later and the schools have to offer education with whole pictures instead. Not an assembly line model, but only a problem for those who bought into assembly line childhood concept.
As a person who needs to eat a little strangely to compensate for hereditary issues is "normal" but needs to have nutrition fitting him/herself available, a student who excels at learning from proximity or broad pattern and struggles to do linear, small bits is "normal." He/she is not flawed except in norms set for the deskables. They often do well as adult learners since they've seen the big pictures more times, if they aren't mentally unbalanced by then at all the focus on their "defects." In a homestead life, learning from looking at how a squirrel does something might be a better skill to have taken time cherishing.
Dyslexics sometimes read quite early, especially females. They miss a lot of good skills they would have been shown, but they invent other things. Only the ones who read at inappropriate times get diagnosed. If you want to use copyeditors as a test set, see how many can look at a page and have misspelled words seems highlighted because the shapes are wrong. How many got into editing because of a feeling of success, or giftedness, with written words. Won't find as many as in a set of engineers but you will find plenty.
A man who had been first a priest and then an educator (now there's a
background for everyone to fault) held the opinion that we were
wasting our time with NCLB. His opinion was that we as a society
needed to make sure that pregnant women and infants had good
nutrition.
Total agreement from me. If she could learn to feel what health was for her and notice the changes caused by the growing being, there is no doubt she would know 2 things critical for a child's development. That her body (and the child's) will respond to whatever is ingested. And, that the child's being is distinct and needs respect as an individual not a future individual. NCLB denies individual existence. Its statistics are based totally on relationships between tutoring, testing, and limiting factors. As with health, they create a need, fill it, then "fix" the need for anyone else too. (anyone actually gotten better service from a Microsoft Certified Technician yet?)

Peace,
Kathyann




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