Unschooling: An Encouraging Option

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Uuh......

So yeah, as to OP, that thing in the beginning of the thread...

I love it! Some questions:

What about the legality of it? Aren't you required to school your children though some kind of approved program? I understand that Montessori programs work in much a similar manner, and there are home-school Montessori.

But if you fully detach from a program...doesn't The Man bring the hammer down?

Here in AK you are allowed to funnel your state funded public education into whatever approved program you desire, or whatever charter school lottery you can get on. They even allow siblings to be automatically added if one child gets in. It's pretty rad.

Still, I like the idea of actively diving into interests that already exist.

If my son loves the shit out of Spiderman, and he does, he will be more likely to draw, which he doesn't do freely, if we draw Spiderman.

It varies from state to state; most states require that homeschooled students pass the same standardized tests that kids in school have to, and unschooling, for most purposes, falls under the umbrella of homeschooling. Some states might require that parents use an approved curriculum, but I know that in others that's been found unconstitutional, and really, who's going to be checking?

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

RWHN, how can you separate the non-economic factors from the economic factors? Are economic factors not part of the system as it is designed?

I think you're just arguing in order to be argumentative, and you're also pretty far off topic.

No, I'm not.  You can introduce all of the educational models you want, shit will still be broken, too many kids will still get lost because the economy is still broken.  Fix the economy and more kids will thrive in ALL educational models.

That's true. Can you relate it to the OP?

Can you defend the premise that economic factors are not part of the system as it was designed?

That isn't my premise, my premise is that economic factors are entwined with ALL of the systems, including your unschooling model, because in large part of the impact on families and how that (the bad economy) discourages parental involvement in education and parents instilling education as a necesssary value.

Sooooo, because the economy is an overarching factor that affects all other systems, we can't have a dialogue about anything else until we've fixed the economy?

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Nigel, I am sorry for further fucking up this thread. I really liked your essay and find the idea fascinating.

Thank you Alty!

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I think this "Unschooling" idea is fine as an option for education, but it won't work for all kids, just like homeschooling doesn't work for all kids, and traditional k-12 schools don't work for all kids.  But, K-12 DOES work  for kids, surely there are improvements to be made.  It worked for me, it's working for my daughter, but then again, I think the parents are the key.  I don't care which educational model you put your kids through, if you as a parent(s) are actively engaged in their education, they will be fine.  If parents aren't engaged, the kids will struggle and fail, whether it is homeschool, public school, or unschool.  Period.

As long as we're  using anecdotal evidence, my parents weren't engaged, or, often, even present, and I experienced a lot of setbacks and trauma related to that, but did fine educationally speaking.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Anyway, if there's any chance this conversation could steer back to the potential of unschooling as an option for engaged parents and children, I certainly would appreciate it.

[Salty]

What I like most about this is how it not only forces the parent, if they give a damn at all, to become more active in their child's interests, but it forces both of them to learn more and to think about different ways to approach things.

It's easy to let your kid go to a prison-modeled daycare, let them come home and drown out the horror in video games and TV, and lose track entirely with who they are. It's a challenge to give a damn about their seemingly trivial fascinations. Even more so when you figure that most parents a product of the same model producing system.

I'll have to check in on what my state allows. It'll matter a lot because talking my kid's mom into it will likely take a powerpoint presentation, many impressive graphs, and vague, cheap blows regarding the violence seen in schools. She prefers to set her ideals by whatever the status quo is.

Currently, as far as I can tell, the status quo states:

1. If you take your kids out of public school, they'll turn into freaks.

Even if you take them out for extracurricular activities involving other kids they will still be HORRIBLY STIGMATIZED because they aren't like all the cattle in the big buildings.

The most perfect argument against this is ME. I went through 11 years of US public school and I have a HORRIBLE personality.

2. The legality of it.

What will people think, what if The Man finds out. I will look into the local requirements, and it seems like there's a lot of wriggle room. Like you say, Nigel, who's gonna know, really?

But this is the sort of thinking I am going to come up against when working with my son's mom. I'll probably have to wait until he's more self-sufficient (12 seems like a good age) and capable of making his own choices without interference.

If I had had an opportunity like this I would have wept for joy.

[Salty]

Okay so actually what I like most of this was a response I found to a parent saying their kid has done nothing but watch TV, play games, and listen to music.

The response was the many and varied way that they interact with their kids based on those interests.

They find out and dicuss how the frames were shot, what was used to get the shot, what special effects. Who is the actor, what else have they been in? Where do standard plot devices come into play, could they have used them more subtly? If a show ends, how could they have done it differently.

What kind of math goes into those games? How can we play the music from those games? How else can we play? How else can we make this fun? How can we naturally take these things that exist, and most of us just shove down our intellectual gullet, and deepen out experience.

In the end I think that's the core of it, you deepen your experience and those your children in a way that creates actual, real lasting learning.

This is indeed how I approach things in life, and I'll tell you, it can get a little stagnant. It's hard to know where to go, especially when you're so used to thinking you HAVE to go SOMEWHERE instead of dicking around SO HARD that you gain more understanding about the world.

Rethinking my son's interest boosts my own knowledge and understanding and takes me out of my dull comfort zone.

Awesome!

[Salty]

The more I think about it, the more.I realize I have NO IDEA what the legal requirements for childhood education are. I'm going to fix that.

[Anna Mae Bollocks]

It varies state to state.
Here, you can homeschool, but it costs thousands for the state approved material. You can keep 'em home, but you have to shove the same curriculum down their throats. There's free homeschool available but you have to stay on a waiting list for a few years, I think.

So, nothing like Unschool. 

[Salty]

Looks like in my state you can provide any education provided by a parent or guardian in their home with no regulation.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

That's awesome, Alty!

Let me give you a little advice, which is that if you want to unschool when he's older, start working on mama now. Give her my essay, give her the articles and books I cited, and email her the links. Find some of John Holt's books on unschooling.

If you have about six years to work on her, that gives you a huge head start for when your little guy hits middle school and starts having problems, which is very very common.

Hell, he might be one of the few who loves it and thrives in regular school, but just in case, that way at least you'll have a leg up. 

My ex used to be dead-set against any kind of alternative school for the kids, when they were little and still pretty happy in grade school. Now that he's seen the abject misery of middle and high school, he's changed his tune completely.

[Golden Applesauce]

I think a lot of problems of schools in general result from their scale. I don't know about modeling schools after factories or intentionally trying to create drones, but when you have a teacher:student ratio of 1:30 things just start breaking down. Overhead just overwhelms any kind of structure at that point, and the only solution is to streamline the structure by creating streamlined students. In my middle school the cafeteria was noisy enough that the teachers would routinely declare silent lunch to punish us for talking too loudly. (Well, with all chatter going on, you had to do a low yell to be heard by the person next to you, which created a feedback loop.) They weren't trying to be cruel or deprive us of socialization or anything, it was just that so much noise bled into the nearby classrooms that teaching was impaired. They framed it as a discipline issue - which caused quite a bit of unnecessary animosity between students and faculty - but really it was as combination of architectural problems (terrible cafeteria acoustics and the proximity of classrooms to the cafeteria) and scale (if they didn't have so many students, everyone could have eaten at the same time and thus not been in class during someone else's lunch.)

Actual discipline problems are magnified by class sizes and close proximity - if you're teaching 8 kids, each kid can at maximum disrupt 7 other students, and as a teacher you can afford to give her special attention. If you're teaching 24 kids, it's 3x as likely, by pure statistics, that one will be having his off day and they're bothering over 3x as many people and you have about 1/3 as much time to deal with him. The opportunity cost of 1:1 help is 23 students at 1:24. You quickly reach the point where by economy of scale it's more practical to expel students with perfectly solvable behavioral issues. Zero-tolerance policies don't help students and aren't intended to; they make it easier to justify dumping the bottom 10% who are responsible for 90% of the discipline and paperwork problems.

At that same middle school, there were a bunch of kids who spent as much or more time in "in-school suspension" than class. There was no education happening there, unless you count being harangued by the authoritarian suspension supervisor. He was generally of the opinion all of us were up to no good and treated us accordingly. Honestly, he was right, if only because there was nothing else to do in suspension and children generally try to live up to the expectations of the adults around them. One miscreant girl smuggled in a whole bag of mint hard candies and shared them around with the "class", I think for no other reason than to prove that he wasn't the boss of her. My parents complained about the lack of education part, so a counselor came in and - very dramatically and deliberately - brought me the worksheets that the rest of my class would be going through, while studiously ignoring every single other student in the room. (RWHN is right - involved parents are vital to a modern school education, without them you don't even get worksheets. All anyone else got to learn in suspension was to hate and mistrust authority figures!)

Sarcasm aside, at some point the sheer number of students makes "controlling the classroom" a more important qualification for being a teacher than having enthusiasm for learning or respect for children. I don't think humans are really equipped with the capacity to make a sincere investment in the individual outcomes of a constant stream of 20-30 students per year, and the ones who try burn out. At best one might scale down to only the most sympathetic students in the class, which by pulling out of my ass I'm going to guess are also the ones who are cuter, more sociable, smarter (for specific types of smartness), whiter, and (for some subjects) male-er.

Although in fairness to small schools, I should point out that if you have ~15 students per grade, as one tiny private elementary school my sister and I attended for a whole semester did, you probably don't have a ton of resources or economy of scale to be able to afford things like special ed or ESL, which also sucks.

Sorry Nigel, I realize almost none of that has to do with Unschooling itself. I have a post with more detail / thoughts / questions but it's just not coming out tonight.

[Golden Applesauce]

(the actual Unschooling post)

Nigel - what is it about college education that you find more valuable than, say, high school? Is is the age/maturity of the students, or something different between the structure of high school and the structure of college?

Mostly it's the structure. High schools for the most part have students in the classroom for seven-eight hours a day from very early in the morning, slowly doling out up to seven different subjects (with a ton of redundancy) and then sending them home with homework which is almost always repetitive, grindingly dull makework and not particularly educational. In college you pick three to four subjects you're interested in and spend on average three hours a day in class and another 3 doing homework. They say you should allocate twice as many homework hours as you have class hours, but I've never had it work out that way. Many classes are available online, so you can do bits and pieces of them throughout the week when you have time.

The materials are interesting and engaging, and the teachers treat you like an adult... which of course most college students are. Because you choose your classes, you're there voluntarily in a class you decided to take, so engagement is naturally higher. Fewer subjects means you're able to focus on the areas that interest you and learn them comprehensively.

Classes, unless they're highly specialized (for example, my social psych class next term is only available at 3 pm) are generally available at a wide range of hours, so early birds can take morning classes and night owls can take afternoon or evening classes, whichever suits their nature better.

College is not for most kids under 16, because it's very self-motivated and there's nobody holding your hand to make sure you attend classes or turn in work. But I'm watching my kids in middle and high school, and they have three times the classroom hours I have, the same amount of homework, and it takes them YEARS to plod through the same material I cover in weeks, and they come out of it with a poorer grasp, and definitely without liking it much. These are fucking smart kids; all of them test in the 99th percentile for IQ. The logical and natural conclusion I must come to is that the way they teach in school is ineffective to the point of being counterproductive.

If I was boss of the world, I would have k-6 schools for kids 6-12 for basic skills, supervised open/community based study for kids 13-16, two years of optional self-directed learning, and then college.

Kids here do have the option, at 16, of taking core classes at community college for simultaneous high school and college credit. A lot of kids are intimidated by the idea because they're afraid it's going to be really hard. However, the high school kids I see in my classes do just fine.

I completely agree with you on the value of engaging courses, instructors who treat the student like an adult, and 3-4 hours of instruction on 3-4 subjects/day instead vs. 7ish hours of solid schooling starting at way-to-fucking-early o'clock. I disagree that those features only work for 16 y.o.+ students - you're exactly describing that amazing summer camp I mentioned on the first page (seriously, go look at their course list if you haven't already.*) The courses list is basically all of the teaching faculty (some are full-time educators, all are professionals in some field or another) come up with things that they want to teach and that students would find interesting. Kids pick their classes on the basis of what looks fun. The end result is that you have a class where the teacher wants to be there and the students all want to be there and everyone wants to do whatever cool idea the class is structured around, so engagement occurs at all levels.

I don't think there's an grade level that's too young for electives. The first elementary school I attended [I've been in a lot of different schools] had two electives for K-1 and three electives for grades 3-5, per quarter. Everyone had to choose a foreign language, but other than that it was up to the student/parent. We were exposed us to a variety of different things, although being an actual public school the electives were less... eclectic... than the AICL offerings - most in some way or another were related to the curriculum. I think kids behaved a lot better during electives than during regular class or whole-class specials like music/gym; not sure if it was because the elective classes were ~1/3rd the size of normal classes or just because we tended to like our electives better. Learning to count money was very exciting to five-year old me - everyone else could count by 2s or even 3s (but probably not past 9 or 12), while I and the other kids in the Money elective could count by 5s, 10s, and 25s! My first introduction to deductive logic was in a 1st grade elective where all we did were simple mysteries and logic puzzles, and my sister and I are both very glad that we learned Japanese phonetics in kindergarten. On the other hand, I can't remember a single thing I learned in Social Studies from K-6.

The whole "college experience" probably demands too much autonomy from most sub-16s, but there's no reason you can't move the most important parts of it - letting the students themselves choose which classes they take, which are taught by people excited about the subject - down to even the elementary school level.

Related to this is smorgasbord vs. intensive education. By smorgasbord I mean something like the AICL extreme, where every week you take four classes in whatever seems interesting at the time. Education by clicking the Random Wikipedia Article button until you find something neat and then following all of the links. Reading books at random from the library, that kind of thing. Whereas by "intensive" I mean something more like setting out pass med school or master some specific skill, a goal that requires both organization and sweat. A smorgasbord education is "learning by play," intensive is "working to learn." I don't mean to make a value judgment about the two modes - both are necessary - but children are best equipped to learn in the first way. Learning in the smorgasbord style doesn't require effort or self-discipline, just that the student is surrounded by enough tempting opportunities. Putting yourself through an intensive education does, which makes it more suited to (young) adults. Persistence and hard work is uncomfortable, and trying to convince a child that they should put up with with it on your schedule for something that you happen think is important is a losing proposition. I get the feeling that schooling is as structured and authoritarian as it is because schools have to go to absurd lengths to force children to apply themselves as if they were miniature adults when every natural instinct says they should be playing and sampling the world.

And the worst part is that even if you succeed in getting them to study as if they were an adult, children aren't that good at it. Nigel's point about being able to learn in 3 months of community college what normal schools teach in 8 years is perfectly reasonable. Probably half of each year is spent reviewing the previous year's material, a third un-learning the "lies to children" portion from above, and the remaining sixth brute-forcing the new material into all of the other students in your class with a "damned if they understand it, just need to make it past the next test!" mentality. Personally (and this may be in part because of changing schools so often) I didn't learn any anything other than Ancient Egypt and American History (pre-founding through Civil War only) in Social Studies or anything but Habitats and the Food Chain in Science in all of K-6 schooling. Every year was a rehash of the previous year in only slightly more detail and with slightly lengthier make-work assignments. All of the actual social studies / natural science I learned in those years came from a mixture of National Geographic and my dad's IEEE Spectrum magazines, mythology collections, science/historical fiction, few odd encyclopedias/illustrated dictionaries we kept at home, and copious PBS tapes of Bill Nye the Science Guy and The Magic Schoolbus. (Which, supporting Unschooling, adds up to probably more stuff in general than I learned even in college. 30 years of National Geographic plus every single science fiction book in the first floor of the local library is a lot.)

[*anyone who thinks they might want to send their kids to AICL but would be unduly stressed by the cost, PM me. I might be able to help you get a scholarship.]

[navkat]

       Llewellyn's position may seem extreme, and the reality is that unschooling may not be for everyone; there are, after all, children who thrive and seem very happy in the structured hierarchical world of middle school and high school.

This lends credibility to the entire argument.  In every other case I have read, the argument is either that homeschooling is universally a disaster, or that homeschooling is a universal panacea that should be adopted by everyone.

I have been against homeschooling since it became a movement, but this article has given me a reason to reconsider the subject.

Yeah, Nigel and I share a friend on FB who homeschools. I had my head turned around on the homeschooling issue as well this year. Her kids are so so smart and so damned good. The oldest is my son's age but she's more like a teenager--she actually taught me that you can substitute canned pumpkin in certain baking recipes if you're out of egg. She found this information on her own because she ran out of egg one day and the way she is schooled, you don't get an A by paraphrasing exactly what's in chapter 2, figure 3. You have to be resourceful and seek out answers to your own problems and questions. My son plays with Jessica's younger kids because mentally, emotionally and developmentally, Lex is closer to their level--and he's very bright himself (not just bias. He gets the "He's so smart, why won't he work up to his potential?" speech I did).

The difference is; Jessica's kids are not wasting precious, formative brainspace on useless hierarchical bullshit. They're liberated from all that. They're not being packed full of fluff. Are they able to be disciplined and "toe the line?" Can they "survive out there" in a world among peers who have learned to play academic hopscotch? Dude, they're toeing a further line. No sweat.

You ever go on an all-night wiki-surf and absorb SOOOOOO much information and think to yourself "I wonder what I would have turned out to be like if I'd had access to all this shit (and time to think about it) at age 8?"

Well, that's her kids. They get to be the smart kids AND the cool kids too. Unhindered by social inhibition of any sort. School takes place 24/7 when Jessica hands the middle-child a handful of change at the checkout line and says "count this, make sure it's right." The youngest gets P.E. in the form of separate soccer classes at the Y or whatever. She takes them to parks. She teaches accurate history right from the get-go so they don't find themselves at age 20 with silly "black-or-white" archetype parables in their heads, out-of touch with what motivates history, saying things like "WTF do you MEAN Lincoln was a racist?" They are smart, nerdy, confident, gentle, helpful and responsible. They don't care about the latest toys or about wearing sketchers or adidas or whatever. The oldest is ten.

Lex thinks they're the coolest people he's ever met. Of course, he's right.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

(the actual Unschooling post)

Nigel - what is it about college education that you find more valuable than, say, high school? Is is the age/maturity of the students, or something different between the structure of high school and the structure of college?

Mostly it's the structure. High schools for the most part have students in the classroom for seven-eight hours a day from very early in the morning, slowly doling out up to seven different subjects (with a ton of redundancy) and then sending them home with homework which is almost always repetitive, grindingly dull makework and not particularly educational. In college you pick three to four subjects you're interested in and spend on average three hours a day in class and another 3 doing homework. They say you should allocate twice as many homework hours as you have class hours, but I've never had it work out that way. Many classes are available online, so you can do bits and pieces of them throughout the week when you have time.

The materials are interesting and engaging, and the teachers treat you like an adult... which of course most college students are. Because you choose your classes, you're there voluntarily in a class you decided to take, so engagement is naturally higher. Fewer subjects means you're able to focus on the areas that interest you and learn them comprehensively.

Classes, unless they're highly specialized (for example, my social psych class next term is only available at 3 pm) are generally available at a wide range of hours, so early birds can take morning classes and night owls can take afternoon or evening classes, whichever suits their nature better.

College is not for most kids under 16, because it's very self-motivated and there's nobody holding your hand to make sure you attend classes or turn in work. But I'm watching my kids in middle and high school, and they have three times the classroom hours I have, the same amount of homework, and it takes them YEARS to plod through the same material I cover in weeks, and they come out of it with a poorer grasp, and definitely without liking it much. These are fucking smart kids; all of them test in the 99th percentile for IQ. The logical and natural conclusion I must come to is that the way they teach in school is ineffective to the point of being counterproductive.

If I was boss of the world, I would have k-6 schools for kids 6-12 for basic skills, supervised open/community based study for kids 13-16, two years of optional self-directed learning, and then college.

Kids here do have the option, at 16, of taking core classes at community college for simultaneous high school and college credit. A lot of kids are intimidated by the idea because they're afraid it's going to be really hard. However, the high school kids I see in my classes do just fine.

I completely agree with you on the value of engaging courses, instructors who treat the student like an adult, and 3-4 hours of instruction on 3-4 subjects/day instead vs. 7ish hours of solid schooling starting at way-to-fucking-early o'clock. I disagree that those features only work for 16 y.o.+ students - you're exactly describing that amazing summer camp I mentioned on the first page (seriously, go look at their course list if you haven't already.*) The courses list is basically all of the teaching faculty (some are full-time educators, all are professionals in some field or another) come up with things that they want to teach and that students would find interesting. Kids pick their classes on the basis of what looks fun. The end result is that you have a class where the teacher wants to be there and the students all want to be there and everyone wants to do whatever cool idea the class is structured around, so engagement occurs at all levels.

I don't think there's an grade level that's too young for electives. The first elementary school I attended [I've been in a lot of different schools] had two electives for K-1 and three electives for grades 3-5, per quarter. Everyone had to choose a foreign language, but other than that it was up to the student/parent. We were exposed us to a variety of different things, although being an actual public school the electives were less... eclectic... than the AICL offerings - most in some way or another were related to the curriculum. I think kids behaved a lot better during electives than during regular class or whole-class specials like music/gym; not sure if it was because the elective classes were ~1/3rd the size of normal classes or just because we tended to like our electives better. Learning to count money was very exciting to five-year old me - everyone else could count by 2s or even 3s (but probably not past 9 or 12), while I and the other kids in the Money elective could count by 5s, 10s, and 25s! My first introduction to deductive logic was in a 1st grade elective where all we did were simple mysteries and logic puzzles, and my sister and I are both very glad that we learned Japanese phonetics in kindergarten. On the other hand, I can't remember a single thing I learned in Social Studies from K-6.

The whole "college experience" probably demands too much autonomy from most sub-16s, but there's no reason you can't move the most important parts of it - letting the students themselves choose which classes they take, which are taught by people excited about the subject - down to even the elementary school level.

Related to this is smorgasbord vs. intensive education. By smorgasbord I mean something like the AICL extreme, where every week you take four classes in whatever seems interesting at the time. Education by clicking the Random Wikipedia Article button until you find something neat and then following all of the links. Reading books at random from the library, that kind of thing. Whereas by "intensive" I mean something more like setting out pass med school or master some specific skill, a goal that requires both organization and sweat. A smorgasbord education is "learning by play," intensive is "working to learn." I don't mean to make a value judgment about the two modes - both are necessary - but children are best equipped to learn in the first way. Learning in the smorgasbord style doesn't require effort or self-discipline, just that the student is surrounded by enough tempting opportunities. Putting yourself through an intensive education does, which makes it more suited to (young) adults. Persistence and hard work is uncomfortable, and trying to convince a child that they should put up with with it on your schedule for something that you happen think is important is a losing proposition. I get the feeling that schooling is as structured and authoritarian as it is because schools have to go to absurd lengths to force children to apply themselves as if they were miniature adults when every natural instinct says they should be playing and sampling the world.

And the worst part is that even if you succeed in getting them to study as if they were an adult, children aren't that good at it. Nigel's point about being able to learn in 3 months of community college what normal schools teach in 8 years is perfectly reasonable. Probably half of each year is spent reviewing the previous year's material, a third un-learning the "lies to children" portion from above, and the remaining sixth brute-forcing the new material into all of the other students in your class with a "damned if they understand it, just need to make it past the next test!" mentality. Personally (and this may be in part because of changing schools so often) I didn't learn any anything other than Ancient Egypt and American History (pre-founding through Civil War only) in Social Studies or anything but Habitats and the Food Chain in Science in all of K-6 schooling. Every year was a rehash of the previous year in only slightly more detail and with slightly lengthier make-work assignments. All of the actual social studies / natural science I learned in those years came from a mixture of National Geographic and my dad's IEEE Spectrum magazines, mythology collections, science/historical fiction, few odd encyclopedias/illustrated dictionaries we kept at home, and copious PBS tapes of Bill Nye the Science Guy and The Magic Schoolbus. (Which, supporting Unschooling, adds up to probably more stuff in general than I learned even in college. 30 years of National Geographic plus every single science fiction book in the first floor of the local library is a lot.)

[*anyone who thinks they might want to send their kids to AICL but would be unduly stressed by the cost, PM me. I might be able to help you get a scholarship.]

This is an excellent post, GA! Very much.

I would have loved to homeschool/unschool my kids (and in fact I rearranged my entire career so I could be home with them; that beadmaking gig was not entirely coincidence), but their dad was not down with it; he's an amusingly chronically unemployed establishmentarian. Funny thing is, I knew him at a pretty young age, so I was able to see firsthand how badly damaged by the system he was, and then to watch him suggest doing the same damage to the kids... well, I guess it's just one more anecdote that supports the adage that we prefer the devil we know. So many people support the school system as it exists on the basis that "it worked for me", even though I can look right at them and see that it completely didn't. People will look me IN THE EYE and insist that it's working for their children and that it's the best thing for their children and that their children just need to "get through high school" when if I pull their kids transcripts THEY ARE FAILING.

FAILING, and in many cases being criminalized for it, for stupid shit that arose from simple boredom.

Parents, I just want to tell you that you can pull your kids out of the mill and they will be OK. They will be fine, and they will be better than fine. You can give them a year off and they will not only recover, they will thrive. I have seen it so, so many times. There is now a solid and growing body of evidence to support the benefits of unschooling.

I understand that you are afraid to leave them at home alone while you work. It's true, one thing our public school system has done is to provide an effective free babysitter to support the mamas and papas who have to leave their kids behind while they go to work. As far as I'm concerned, it's pretty much the only thing the school system is good for. As GA notes, they will spend years reviewing the information they learn during this time. But elementary school isn't so bad; most elementary teachers still like their charges, and the criminalization typically doesn't start until middle school.

But, god forbid you be a poor, single parent of a middle schooler, especially a brown middle schooler. In many states, Wackenhut is "providing security" for schools, and the system is set up to earmark "failures", which include anyone who thinks for themselves. It's chilling. You can see it pretty systematically, and its especially evident in girls; they are doing pretty good, then they hit middle school and they start failing, HARD. Their self-esteem plummets. From a psychologist's perspective, school does significant, irrevocable damage. Many girls experience their first bouts of depression at this point, and never recover.

Parents, please consider pulling your kid out of school when this happens. They will still have a social life, they will start to feel good about themselves. They will learn more. And they will be less likely to commit suicide.

We are SO afraid of pulling children out of school, like it's this act of rebellion... but every professor I have spoken with says that their non-schooled students outshine their schooled students on every front, every time.

I believe that school hurts kids. It's not just a matter of doing no good, it's a matter of doing harm.