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[Clansgian AT wmconnect.com]

> >How many examples do you need? Walk through any housing project for  
> starters. Then walk through the barrios. Then observe the home lives  
> of children whose parents are working minimum-wage jobs. All children  
> deserve the opportunity to rise above their beginnings.

-----------------------

This, I am going to suggest, Gene, is based on a misunderstanding of the 
nature of learning and the concept of unshcooling.

Throughout human history children have learned about adult life by being 
exposed to the real world.  As far as math and reading and such go, if a 
child is 
exposed to it being used, he picks it up.  All children do.  I am involved in 
extended groups of unschoolers.  Not one of several score of children ever 
had 
one reading, phonics, spelling, or math lesson in their lives but by an early 
age they all read and all do whatever math is necessary to operate their 
rather extensive world.

Did I mention ALL children. But, says you, what about this or that hard luck 
example or this one particular individual .... you can't say 'all'.  Read my 
lips, ALL children.

Unschooling was the way of things from tribal societies all the way up 
through the cottage indsustries and farm of pre-industrial times.  With 
slavery per 
se falling out of disfavor, people who wanted to get rich on the backs of 
others created what we recognize today as public schools.  It's main function 
was 
to break up the family, indoctrinate the children to accept token rewards for 
their labor, and instill the "work ethic" which means to go off into some 
dismal place like a sweat shop or a cubicle and feel guilty if you don't.

The situation you describe above is a product of that form of societal 
management.  Children naturally learn from their surroundings.  Fish swim, 
birds 
fly, children learn.  It's their nature.  The function of schooling to to 
convince parents and children that they can't learn.  If high priest and high 
preistess of education does not perform the appropriate rituals over them, 
the will 
forever remain ignorant and illiterate.

In unschooling families this cycle is broken.  Not knowing that they are 
supposed to not be able to learn without the "professionals", children learn 
instantly when they are ready to do so.

The argument to look into the enclaves of poverty and explain how those 
people, sans the supervision of government schools, can ever hope t make 
anything 
of themselves, is exactly the same argument made in the 1860's about the 
slaves.  When emancipation was general, it DID cause a lot of social problems 
for 
those whom it was intended to benefit.  Did that mean it shouldn't have been 
done?

Also there will be some reading this who will stare and drool and fall into a 
fit absolutism, much as people do about subsistence homesteading.  When I 
have advocated hand labor and simple methods, there is always someone who 
will 
say, slackjawed, "But you are using a computer so you really don't do that 
yourself!  So you using a computer is the same thing as me using a John Deere 
to 
till up my 20' x 30' garden."  The absolutist thinks that for the minimalist 
to 
have any credibilty, they must wander off into the forest naked and find some 
flint to knap out tools.

Like that, the same foggy mentality thinks that unschooling is locking your 
child in a closet and never talking to them.  It is the exact opposite.  
Government schooled children are the ones locked into closets.  The 
unschooled are 
in constant contact with people of all ages, all relationships, all skills, 
all 
beliefs.   

The housing projects snd barrios are not a reason why we need the status quo 
government education and nannyism.  Rather it is the PRODUCT of these social 
debacles.   </HTML>