I've always had the feeling that I could do better with my daughter. Next year I plan to home school her but a girl friend tells me she heard she first has to be unschooled. What is that?!
I think your friend has confused deschooling with unschooling. Deschooling is when you take a break from any sort of academic protocol to de-institutionalize your child and help them adjust to not going to regular school. Unschooling is when you never force anything resembling school upon your children, at home or elsewhere, and trust them to learn the things they need to know in their own time in their own way. Either way, it may help you to read some of John Holt's books, whether you agree with him or not, he has much insight into how children actually learn new things.
Thank you so much. That's so sweet of you to take the time to reply. I'll try to get a hold of those books. ps: you look like a very happy person!
thanks! and congrats on breaking free of institutionalized education!! Your child will someday thank you for it (but that might take until she's a parent herself to realize how big a difference homeschooling made in her life).
I was just wondering, how far does unschooling continue to? I mean, is it just an elementary schoolage thing?
for most people, it continues until it no longer works. Usually it fails to work when the parent(s) can't deal with not being in control of their child's education. It's really scary for some people to allow their children control over their own lives and their own education. But it doesn't have to stop at any given age, there are real-life applications for any subject taught in school, all the way through highschool level (sometimes you just have to look a little harder to recognize all the algebra you use at the grocery store and stuff like that). There are all sorts of books that can be checked out from the library and outside courses are always available to the student who is motivated to learn more about something and doesn't mind learning it in a classroom setting.
I agree with mamaboogie. And at least for me, it got tougher at about the same time things like district requirements started making their way into our school schedule. (sigh) ALL parents unschool their children to one degree or another. Have you ever been cooking in the kitchen & had your daughter come up & ask what you're doing, and you slowed down to allow her to learn how to cook alongside you? Or gone on a walk and seen something cool and came home to read or look up that cool thing to learn more about it? That's unschooling. It's teaching your child through everyday life. No, let me rephrase that. It's allowing your child to learn on their own through everyday life. As a schooling technique there's a little bit more to it, but that's the basic concept. love, mom
Unschooling is pretty much unteaching your child all the crap they learned in public school. Now I'm not talking about the actual knowledge, I'm talking about the cultural and social aspects. You unschool the notion that what you wear is who you are, that being ultra thin is important, that you have to conform to have friends...that sort of thing. Unschooling is just getting rid of all the negative things kids pick up in school.
not so. what you describe is deschooling. Not all unschooled children have ever been to public school to learn those things you mention in the first place. unschooling is more than an approach to education, it's a philosophy, a way of living life. It requires that the parent believe heart and soul in their children's ability to make their own choices in life. It requires complete faith in a child's ability to learn all the things they need to learn, on their own, when they are ready to learn those things. I do whole-heartedly believe that people (even very young people) who are allowed to make their own decisions are perfectly capable of doing so. It's those people who have not been allowed to make their own decisions who need someone else to tell them what to do, and how to do it.
i just read up on this thread. im sorry but i dont guess i get it. how can you know that a lazy child will learn to read and add. i know when i was young i would not have learned half the stuff i did if it was not required. how do the children get the idea that there is more to learn. do they come up with the idea to learn long devision on thier own. you can only learn that by repeating it over and over. iv never met a child who would do that unrequired. it sounds like there are similaritys between that and montessori. meaning its not so institunalized. you have pretty kids.nice pic
Hi there! I am a teacher on a elementary school from Germany and I read some posts here in the Homeschooling forum. I believe I am a bit off topic now - but I didn`t find a right thread where I could ask my questions (my English is not that good, so I could read all the threads, it takes too much time...) I never heard of the Hometeaching Concept here in Germany. We have compulsory education here. Possibly some kids are taught by private teachers at home (for example when they are ill). So: are in the USA parents allowed to teach their kids at home? Do the parents need a special education for that? Do you have to use the usual curriculums? And one question I also have: don`t the kids need other children (at kindergarden and school) for their social developement? Don`t they learn elementary social behavior by integrate themselves in a schoolclass? I would be very glad if you could answer my questions and hope you understood my English. Love, Heaven
YES parents in the US are alowed to teach thier children at home. We do not have to have any kid of special education to do it. just a high school deploma or GED which is the same thing just for people who dropped out of high school. there are many curriculums out there for the homschool parents to choose from. Abecka, Son light and montessori are the ones i am fimilar with. ALso i just learned about unschooling which i dont understand but works for alot of families.i didnt know you could not home school in your country. also the last question you asked was about social development. there are alot of homeschool groups out there who get together for skating parties and pizza parties and such. and like me alot of the parents homeschool because we dont WANT the children to learn some of the things they learn in school. Academcly and socially.they are tought at home that GOd made the heavens and the earth and taught at school that it was just a big accident. and many other issues like that. they are taught to tolerate behaviors that are just plain wrong because people dont want to hurt others feelings. soooooo for parents like me the social development is not as important as what they can learn at home where they belong. but they do have some homeschool classes for the older kids to go to. like speach classes and music. those are wonderfull.lots of other kids to learn with. usually once or twice a week for two or three hours. any more questions let us know
yes, my oldest child, who is only five, is teaching herself division and fractions, because she wants to learn more about it. She is learning sociology and history because she wants to be an archaeologist. Even were I doing school at home, I wouldn't be introducing these subjects at her age. Kids who are not told what to do, choose to do things on their own. It really is that simple. But it's a totally foreign mindset than what we are programmed to believe by institutionalized education and the entire way our society runs things. It involves believing heart and soul in the autonomy of all people, especially children, and the beleif that when allowed to make their own decisions people choose the right thing. Most people simply can't get past the issues of needing to be in control of their kids (or other people, or needing other people to tell them what to do, what to think, and what to believe). And that's okay, unschooling is not for everyone, it's not even suitable for most people. Heaven - yes, in most states in the US, parents are allowed to educate their children. But different states have different laws and requirements. Not all parents choose to homeschool for the reasons monte has described, but we have our reasons and we share a belief that for our children, education should be at home rather than in a school. As far as socialization goes, it has been repeatedly shown that children learn more social skills away from school than in school. there's a thread here in which I linked to a great article on this subject.
That is very interesting! Thanks a lot for the informations. On the one hand I understand you and I know there are a lot of bad teachers in public schools out there. But I also know very very many competent teachers that work really hard to teach the children best. And myself, also a teacher for religion, I teach my children that god has made the universe and not an accident... I believe you are very competent parents and teachers. But I don`t understand how children learn social behavior in a group without being in a group every day. Children have to taste their behavior in groups and how to behave to be acepted. They learn to take care for the weaker ones and find their place in a group. Just with Mum at home and sometimes eating pizza with other kids is not enough, I guess. In their later lives they also have to act in groups - how can they do when they never learnt it?
Hello to all from Central America....I'm new here, and was just cruising through looking for info about the Victoria, B.C. ferry. I seem to have strayed However...I've unschooled all 3 of our kids...now ages 16-38. They're all good people, well-informed, great company, and are doing what they have a passion for at this point in their lives. Monte...you can't say that you never would have learned that stuff unless coerced, because you were never allowed to be in that situation. Only kids with the actual option of doing what they wish to do every day have those options. My kids read when they needed to, learned math when they wanted to pass exams for a specific purpose, and learned everything else they wanted to know when and how they preferred. In some situations that involved mentoring, in others it involved classwork, and some just required some directed study or experience. It took them very little time (relative to school time) to learn what they needed, because they never had the bizarre idea that knowledge of the world was artificially divided into "subjects", and they never really had to internalize the idea that some stuff is "hard". As for social situations, my children all grew up in a community (or in communities actually). Instead of 30 children born the same year as they, their community consisted of 10,000 people in our town, a large extended family living on 3 continents, and two parents and siblings who all love each other and have their own distinct personalities and needs. Living in three different countries meant speaking three different languages, so that was that...no classes involved. The kids grew up fine. I now have two young granddaughters who've never been to school, and who are learning by living as well. And yes, the older two went to college...their choice. Our oldest is an IT troubleshooter for a large telecommunications company, and the next is director of information architecture for a multi-national based in England. The 16 year old is working with an artist and producing a portfolio of painting and sculpture in hopes of going to study art in Europe. It IS all about trusting that you need to put a stone wall between a child and information to stop them from learning what they need to know. Unfortunately for many, school IS that stone wall. It's also all about critical thinking, the "rights" of children, and evidence of success. We were never impressed by the stated mission or the obvious results of a government supported education system. The private systems (maybe with the exception of the Sudbury Valley schools) were as disappointing. Thanks for taking the time to listen Saramandaia
I am a mother of 5 daughters who homeschooled all of them to some degree or another. The first was homeschooled until she was 8, and then because of peer pressure of friends, she wanted to attend grade 2 at a nearby elementary and went until grade 6. The second girl went to a kindergarten class, knew she didn't want to go again. The third went to kindergarten and that was it for her. It was slow discovering homeschool for me, as it wasn't as prevalent in the 80's, and I was always wondering and worrying about the issues of socialization, and whether I could really teach them what they needed to know.(There is so much knowlege in the world). It can be a bit overwhelming.!!! I just decided to teach elementary education to my kids, Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic. I made up worksheets ( vocabulary words, dictionary usage, days of week- month-year, weights and measures,etc) ,encouraged writing by sending letters to the relatives,and poems, and stories. I purposely sat them down and taught adding, subtracting, multiplying, dividing, and fractions and percentages.(Basics for everyday life). That is it for math. So. I agree that beyond this elementary education, the things they learned were subjects that just came up because of their interests, and I trusted most of the time that this was satisfactory, to give them the foundation they needed to learn anything they wanted or needed to know. A love of learning is intrinsic to human beings if it can develop. This is the job of the homeschooler, to encourage a love of learning, and then everything else just turns out fine. I believe the world needs good people right now, and I as a mother, put high on my priority list, to teach my daughters to first of all be good women, who will be good mothers, who will have children who will grow up to help make this earth a better place to live. This to me is their primary education and this begins at home, and if this is now called unschooling, then this worked for me.
Did someone have to force you to learn to walk or to speak or to feed yourself? No, you learned the things you needed to learn to function in life because you wanted to learn them. My son loves astronauts and the planets. He knows more about this stuff at four years old than I'll ever know. He has not been interested in learning numbers or letters. But he has recently discovered that he wants to read all those words in all the books that we have. He gets frustrated because he can't read. I've explained to him that he needs to learn letters in order to read. I'm not forcing him to learn his letters. He wants to read so he is working on letters now. When he helps me bake cookies or bread he is learning about fractions with the measurements and he is learning about chemistry because of the chemical reactions that turn a bunch of different ingredients into a loaf of bread. He goes to political protests with daddy and is learning about how the political structure works. He watches the news with us and is learning about the world around him. Unschooling is about learning in the world around you. When you go to school you learn to be around kids your age. When you unschool you learn to live in the world you live in. My son talks to the clerk at the bank, the attendant at the gas station, the librarian, all the adults we hang out with. He is learning to relate to the whole world, not just a small bunch of kids his age. He is also NOT learning racism, sexism, classism, how to be a bully, and all the other junk they learn in school. And Heaven, the Waldorf schools were actually started in Germany. They are the basis for the way a lot of people homeschool. Homeschooling is as different as the number of families that homeschool. Some people use a cirriculum and sit at desks and have school for 5 hours a day. Others don't use anything other than the books they already have at home and the local library and all the rest of the world around them. But kids learn in a safe environment. They learn the values and mores of their family, whether that be that god created the world in 6 days or that the planets exploded and created the earth and all the people came from the one celled amoeba in a creek bed. They learn honesty, integrity, kindness, love for everyone and all things, and all of the values that are important to their family. Homeschooling is best in my opinion. It's hard some days with a very active 4 year old. But I think the end result will be incredible. Kathi
lifetime unschooled kids tend to hit pubertey and get mighty fucked up.... that is just my observation.
