Quality public education can serve children much better than unschooling or poorly performing private or public schooling.
Some areas just have very little choice though, the Catholic Schools are shit, the public schools are severely underfunded and decrepit, and unschooling starts to look reasonable, despite how it seems to have stunted my friends :(
Could you elaborate on this?
Modern US Catholicism has, for a range of reasons, become very politically conservative (particularly in comparison to the Catholicism elsewhere in the Americas), and because Catholic schools are generally attended by the children of practicing Catholic parents whose conservative views shape their view of schooling, these private schools reflect those political views. As a result, if you aren't Catholic, many Catholic private schools are going to look like political and religious indoctrination.
The Seattle Archdiocese has created a haven for spreading diseases unheard of in public schools by not encouraging or requiring vaccination of students. The other nearby archdiocese do not permit unvaccinated students to attend, and haven't had repeated outbreaks of once banished diseases.
Could you elaborate on this a bit? I can imagine what might be different, but I'm curious what it was like in reality.
I'd be curious how large your sample size of unschooled friends was and what sort of longitudinal observations you had on their whole lives.
I don’t think it’s as cut and dried as you make it out to be. There are risks on both paths. All kids are unique and what works for one may not work for another.
I’m going to try to go the unschooling route, and see how it goes.
Unschooling doesn’t make those disappear. I knew plenty of homeschooled kids that had sex and kids before 18, who drank and did drugs, and I’m pretty sure all of them are in middling careers as corporate drones.
Weird as it sounds, the earlier you come in contact with many human pathologies the better.
You might not want to be a corporate drone, being socialized differently to almost everyone is just another extreme.
Still, I'd say there's way more consistency between schools than between unorthodox parents.
Most people who are behaving like sociopaths in middle school appear to grow out of it and lead normal lives.
I'm still quite irritated, decades later, that the end result of my high school Honors English program was to take entire groups of people who clearly loved reading, and teach them to hate books. I kept in touch with a range of them, and almost none of us read a book for fun, for a decade after high school - because HS Honors English taught us that we couldn't properly understand a book unless we sliced it into tiny pieces, analyzed all the literary metaphors, and generally we weren't any good at that anyway, only the English Teacher could properly appreciate the book. And don't you dare read ahead of the assigned section!
I don't remember the plots of stuff I read, but I remember that grass was green to symbolize new life, rebirth, hope, etc. And I learned to bullshit.
It was miserable. And after four years, nobody touched books again outside requirements. It was awful.
So many people analyses the hell out of it. I’ll never forget after the first show when someone asked afterwords, “I love how X is such a metaphor for Y.” My friend just stared at them and said, “it isn’t a metaphor for anything, it’s just an obvious consequence of betraying your friends.”
I HATE that crap. Just enjoy it for what is, entertainment.
Her response was, "Oh, well, that's why they're great writers - they do all this without even having to think about it!"