Unschooling: An Encouraging Option

[Cainad (dec.)]

I may have gone too far. I actually nauseated myself typing that.


Edit: or maybe that's the chicken lo mein talking.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Welcome to getting pipelined to jail.

Pardon me, but 'round these parts that's spelled AMERICA.

Prisons are a business, and we need them to create jobs. Jesus and George Washington didn't bring down the Berlin Wall just so that we could let the prison industry wither away.

[The Johnny]

I had made a long post about education and its corruptness, but i think it was in Cain's (now dead and unplugged) forum which was basicly a summary of my findings of my thesis =/ I already have a couple of things in schedule for PD but i will get here eventually

[The Johnny]

What i will speak of is based on my own experience, and also, as i said, from my thesis that earned me my bachelor's degree; what i understood from the OP, its about the advantages of Unschooling and its viability, so ill focus on that.

I think that the most important aspect of the experience is teaching the child/teenager about responsability and autonomy instead of forcing him to learn and forcing him to interact with people which might do more harm than good.

I remember all my grade school years, bunch of teachers babbling on about stuff i didnt care about, giving out unreasonable homework loads, and after being 6 hours in that prison without bars every day, all i wanted to do when i got home was to either watch TV, play videogames, or later on, go out drinking with friends, play the guitar or read stuff that had nothing to do with the curriculum...

basicly after graduating High School i took a year off just to fuck around, which for about 2 or 3 months translated to playing videogames, exersicing and drinking... but at some point i got bored of "having fun"! so i started reading sociology, psychology and philosophy for easily about 4 hours or more per day (i used to read after school in highschool, but not nearly as much) and that motivated me to go into University for Social Psychology, which also had flexible schedules where i learned what interested me.

I think that learning for 6 hours straight is an unreasonable expectation... even now as a dedicated graduate, i have a hard time focusing for more than 4 hours in a row in learning tasks... my preferred strategy for either working or learning consists of 2 hours of doing it then taking a break so that my fucking brain doesnt get fried... extended and continuous periods of learning =/= efficient learning... so thats a point for Unschooling, the flexibility of the schedule and having your own preferred distribution of time and learning what works best for yourself.

Now, the dark side of traditional education would be:

-Interstudent bullying

-Teachers with an ideological agenda

-That its not really about learning, its about memorizing

-That grades and passing is not a reflection of knowledge, but the result of students calibrating their behaviour to the teacher's expectation, effectively cheating the system.

-A fuckload of over-specialized curriculum that will, for the most part, be useless in the student's short or long term.

-Teaching the student's to be quiet and obedient citizens that follow the authority's orders

[Nast]

I like this idea of unschooling. It's liberating to both parents and kids. It would teach parents how to educate their children without relying solely on the state to accomplish this, and it would be beneficial to kids because it would give them skills to find and assimilate new knowledge for themselves without it being crammed into their head dully and repetitiously by a third party.

Based on my own experience, I started to hate  school when I was 12 (that magic age again?). I did well on tests, but resented the tedium of the homework load put upon us. Since about 75% of my grade was based on homework, my grades swiftly went down the shitter. This led to a lot of family conflict and undue teenage angst, as you can imagine. Then I went to a public high school (I was at a private middle school prior), and their was even more undue teenage angst. I only went for 2 years before I decided to get my GED to get the hell out of there, but they were undoubtedly the unhappiest 2 years of my life.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

However did we allow a society in which we cannot trust the schools?

[Salty]

However did we allow a society in which we cannot trust the schools?

It seems like we've done our best to make it that way on purpose.

Public schools in particular seemed to have been designed with control in mind, as opposed to actual education.

[tyrannosaurus vex]

However did we allow a society in which we cannot trust the schools?

It seems like we've done our best to make it that way on purpose.

Public schools in particular seemed to have been designed with control in mind, as opposed to actual education.

They were. Public education, as an institution in America, was created specifically (and quite openly) to train children to grow up and work in factories.

[Salty]

However did we allow a society in which we cannot trust the schools?

It seems like we've done our best to make it that way on purpose.

Public schools in particular seemed to have been designed with control in mind, as opposed to actual education.

They were. Public education, as an institution in America, was created specifically (and quite openly) to train children to grow up and work in factories.

Factories which THEY now deprive us of.

Which is funny. Someone told me today, and I haven't verified it yet, that the largest amount of jobs in the US are retail sales.

So, THEY create a system whereby anomatons are produced to work jobs that do not quite exist anymore.

Yeah, I'm pulling my kid out of that meat grinder.

[The Johnny]

I dont mean to derail, but since i already apported something to the OP and the conversation seems to be going this way:

I do not think that education is even meant for producing factory workers.

I think that highschool is just day-care for teenagers, and not just daycare for the benefit of parents, but also for society... there is this thing in the curriculum of schools that they try to teach specialized subjects to people that do not need them... bio-chemistry, physics, advanced maths and statistics... neither a factory worker nor someone going to work at retail need this or any job that is not a very specific specialization that actually comes with college... its an education that aspires to create the "well-rounded" Rennaissance man that had a dozen "specializations" while also keeping people off the job market so that there is less discontent with unemployment.

If anyone wants to argue this point I make, they should share their state's curriculum for highschool, because the point im making is valid in the Mexican public school system, and it might or might not apply within their local educational curriculum.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

I dont mean to derail, but since i already apported something to the OP and the conversation seems to be going this way:

I do not think that education is even meant for producing factory workers.

I think that highschool is just day-care for teenagers, and not just daycare for the benefit of parents, but also for society... there is this thing in the curriculum of schools that they try to teach specialized subjects to people that do not need them... bio-chemistry, physics, advanced maths and statistics... neither a factory worker nor someone going to work at retail need this or any job that is not a very specific specialization that actually comes with college... its an education that aspires to create the "well-rounded" Rennaissance man that had a dozen "specializations" while also keeping people off the job market so that there is less discontent with unemployment.

If anyone wants to argue this point I make, they should share their state's curriculum for highschool, because the point im making is valid in the Mexican public school system, and it might or might not apply within their local educational curriculum.

In the movie Teachers, one of the teachers brings up the notion that they exist solely to keep teenagers from fucking. 

"I'm a condom!  I'm a Goddamn prophylactic!"

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Johnny, I really liked your posts. I don't have much to add other than that I agree with pretty much everything you had to say.

In the US, K-8 education was designed to create obedient, conforming factory workers. I think that high school was originally designed to prepare people for college, but something shifted sixty or so years ago and I don't really know what it's for now other than "keeping the kids off the streets".

[tyrannosaurus vex]

Johnny, I really liked your posts. I don't have much to add other than that I agree with pretty much everything you had to say.

In the US, K-8 education was designed to create obedient, conforming factory workers. I think that high school was originally designed to prepare people for college, but something shifted sixty or so years ago and I don't really know what it's for now other than "keeping the kids off the streets".

That's pretty much it, and it even fails at that, especially in all the places where that's one function it should probably serve. But keeping kids off the street only goes so far. If it doesn't actually give them the tools they need to succeed and stay off the streets, it's only delaying the inevitable for 4 years.

<sales>This is why I am actually pretty happy to work where I do, where we help high schools transform into places where people actually learn a range of things, at their own pace, and we push for college accreditation for our courses so we can help to create schools that are not just "training," but actually provide people with opportunities they wouldn't have had otherwise.</sales>

[Salty]

Seems to me that roving packs of unschooled bags of highly inquisitive chemicals is just what Murrica needs to takes its genitals out of its collective carrying case and pulls its head out of its collective ass.

We must set the children free.

FOR THE CHILDREN!

[The Johnny]

I dont mean to derail, but since i already apported something to the OP and the conversation seems to be going this way:

I do not think that education is even meant for producing factory workers.

I think that highschool is just day-care for teenagers, and not just daycare for the benefit of parents, but also for society... there is this thing in the curriculum of schools that they try to teach specialized subjects to people that do not need them... bio-chemistry, physics, advanced maths and statistics... neither a factory worker nor someone going to work at retail need this or any job that is not a very specific specialization that actually comes with college... its an education that aspires to create the "well-rounded" Rennaissance man that had a dozen "specializations" while also keeping people off the job market so that there is less discontent with unemployment.

If anyone wants to argue this point I make, they should share their state's curriculum for highschool, because the point im making is valid in the Mexican public school system, and it might or might not apply within their local educational curriculum.

In the movie Teachers, one of the teachers brings up the notion that they exist solely to keep teenagers from fucking. 

"I'm a condom!  I'm a Goddamn prophylactic!"

It's free, for all to see! (Not that specific part, i mean the whole movie)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHO0LQ-ysmA