💾 Archived View for gemini.ctrl-c.club › ~stack › gemlog › 2022-03-10.unschooling.gmi captured on 2022-04-28 at 18:13:55. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
I read the reference article with great interest. Yes, kids learn by osmosis, with joy, and little planning. Instead of immitating them and learning new things by playing, we lock them up in a prison and abuse them until they are broken and do as they are told. At that point, they are ready to populate the cubicles and do as they are told.
gemini://tilde.pink/~maria/log/2022-03-10_on_learning.gmi
I am no expert on human nature, but school was a torture to me. My mother was a math teacher (who also tutored kids at home), so I absorbed enough math to last me through precalc before I was 10. Other subjects were occasionally interesting but hardly worth the kind of time that was requested from me.
I always thought that the modern school system (one of Karl Marx's planks, by the way) was more of a daycare system to allow parents to toil unencumbered.
I dropped out in high school and made my way through life. Learning continuously - things that interested me. Things that actually made a difference in my life. I am not talking about just plumbing, but philosophy, literature and poetry as well - when I was ready and interested, not just to pass a test.
When it came time to put my kids into the torture chamber, I could not do it. We tried homeschooling, but quickly realized that one of our kids has similar issues to mine, and is even more stubborn. In the end we chose radical unschooling.
There are different definitions for that, of course. In the beginning, we joined a newly-formed Sudbury model school, which is a democratic collective in which the children just choose what they want to do. If they wanted to learn math, and do it in a classroom setting, they would call for a vote, and with a few interested kids the school would put together a math class. If they wanted to make shoes out of duct tape, that is what they did.
The idea was pretty solid, especially in Sudbury Mass., where a bunch of hippie college professors in the 60's decided that their kids can figure it out for themselves. It worked a little less than perfect in a rural setting where redneckery prevailed, and the school collapsed within a year of operation, after consuming much duct tape.
In spite of that setback, I was convinced that there is nothing wrong with the general idea, just poor execution. So we continued.
Instead of schooling the kids, we lived with them. We traveled (not enough) and moved around a lot (too much). They did what they wanted, and we helped them.
Occasionally we were terrified that they would grow up incapable of doing anything.
It is important to note that the kids were shy introverts, and did not (and still do not) enjoy the kinds of interactions expected at school. Neither had I, or my partner, by the way.
Well, we sure got a lot of "You made us stupid" and "We just wanted to be like everyone else". But is that really true?
Our kids are pretty amazing. As teens they decided that they didn't want to be out of the system completely, so they got their 2-year Associate degrees at a local community college.
They tested out of high-school math after a couple of months of self-directed preparation. Their peers wound up taking algebra while they did calculus. What?
It turns out that a highly motivated teenager can cover the entire high-school math starting with pretty much nothing but basic add/subtract/multiply/divide knowlege. They can do it in a few months.
We actually got a 'Thanks for not making us sit in the classroom for 10 years'.
Probably (my partner may disagree).
One of the kids is not a reader, to our dismay. He certainly can read, and in fact did really well in all college courses. He just doesn't enjoy it. Could it be different, if we had broken him? Probably not, realistically.
The other is an avid reader and writer, doing amazingly creative stuff with words and images, and other media. Would I change a thing? No.
Was it easy? No. Is their life harder for it? Maybe -- it is not easy to be different. Will they blame us for all kinds of issues that will come up in their lives. Probably -- that's what kids do, until they don't (when they are pretty old, generally).
The kids are still figuring out their place in this world. So are we.