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  • From: Clansgian AT wmconnect.com
  • To: homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [Homestead] Homeschooling and unschooling
  • Date: Mon, 16 Jun 2008 23:21:29 EDT



> >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>




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