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[Clansgian AT wmconnect.com]

> >James, you're beginning to sound like a preacher, and like most
> preachers, you seem to be overstating the case. .......
> But perhaps your children are more perfect than any children anywhere.
> Of course, you'll say that I've never met unconditioned children. What
> can I say? That I have?
> 

Marie, assuming (which is reasonable) that you have tried other gardening 
methods than the instructions on seed packets that tell you to grow the 
veggies 
so many inches apart in rows so many inches apart,  have you ever had someone 
see one of the 'living mulch' garden beds and make comments like I used to 
get 
all the time:

"Planted them cabbages too close together, didn't you?"
"No I planted them that way on purpose."
"No good, can't hoe the weeds between the plants."
"Look how they are growing, the leave of one plant just touch the leaves of 
the next.  All the ground between them is shaded so weeds can't grow."
"Well, I'll be!  You're right!  No weed could grow there!"
"So you are going to grow your cabbages this way?"
"Oh, no, I couldn't do that!"
"Why not?"
"No way to hoe the weeds between them!"

Whenever I have the schooling/unschooling discussion with the schooled, I 
feel as if I'm having the cabbage exchange all over again.

Under the schooling paradigm, shirking the rigid schedule and oversight migh 
gain one something.  If you could get the loopy math teacher talking about 
her 
son's military career, you didn't have to do that days idiotic math.

But under the unschooling paradigm, it gains one nothing.  The children know 
that if the chickens are not put up and they have opted to watch a movie at 
night, they will have to interrupt it to do the chickens.  In fact you see 
them 
on their own planning.  Once they took a row of old mason jars and measred 
out 
corn and feed so that when it came time to feed the chickens (in the winter), 
they could grab a couple of jars and be done in seconds.  They want it to be 
off their slate so they can go about their more important personal business.  
Their day and week are like the scenario I described about making a pact with 
a school student to do all the work at once and then be free of it.

They aren't 'perfect', they simply haven't been trained from a young age that 
any snippet of time they can steal from the system is the only time they can 
be truly self determined.  

If all you have seen are children with a procivity to squirm out of their 
constraints when they can, then you indeed have never come acros an 
unindoctrinated child.   </HTML>