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  • From: Gene GeRue <genegerue AT ruralize.com>
  • To: homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Homestead] Homeschooling and unschooling
  • Date: Sat, 14 Jun 2008 10:18:47 -0500


On Jun 14, 2008, at 9:49 AM, Clansgian AT wmconnect.com wrote:



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.

Could very well be. I have no personal experience with unschooling. I find the concept wonderful in many ways. My caution is thinking it can replace school for all children.

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.

In what way are you involved? Do you assist parents who are unfamiliar with the concept?

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.

Surely what they learn is what is around them. If they are surrounded by disorder and criminality is that not what they would 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>
________

I understand the history, the motivation, the logic. I can see how homeschooling and unschooling would be most helpful to many children. I have strong reservations that it would work in areas where some children are trying to do good things while surrounded by gangs pushing them around, taunting them, recruiting them, training them to be good gang members. It seems to me that urban gangs are in fact a result of lack of guidance, of extreme unschooling. What these children learn is how to survive in a criminal atmosphere.





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