'Unschooling' parents put their kids in charge of their own educations
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
I know a few homeschooled people. One is entirely self taught because their parents put 0 effort in. They're very smart, well read, but there are gaps and what they did learn wasn't with the chosen curriculum, but their own reading online, "unschooled" you might say. The others are educated better than public school students.
I've met lots and lots of students of public schools that can barely read. I've met lots of them that are well educated. The key differentiating factor is whether their parents took an interest in their education.
Too often, "unschooling" is an excuse not to care. Public school is used this way more often, with marginally better results. If you're willing to be a private tutor for your kids, to go learn the material you aren't familiar with so you can teach them, probably homeschooling is better. If not, if you don't have the time or patience, public school will work, but you still have to take an interest. Homeschooling is better, if the parent actually educates their kids, but almost no school is going to make your kid well educated if you don't make it a priority in your life. Take an interest in and prioritize the education of your children.
I decided to enroll in a public charter school my next year of high school. It was billed as a "Science Academy". I gave it about 6 months before I quit that school year altogether. It was even worse than the urban school, and was filled with students who had been expelled from the local public school district, and couldn't be turned away from the charter school by what they laws were at the time. And the teachers were all foreign with incredibly thick accents. It went about as well as you'd think: constant disruptions in class and terrible quality teachers.
So I decided to switch back to the urban, public school for the next year. I think I ended up going another 8 months before just deciding to drop out completely of high school and get my GED after I was beaten and robbed in the parking lot, and start going to college.
The education system, in most places in the US, is a complete joke and my story is way more common than you'd think. If your parents don't care about your education and aren't willing to move to a good school district, you're basically screwed.
You just ... decided to enroll? You, as a child, can do that? I didn't obtain that kind of personal agency until my early 20's. My late teens were a confusing time of basically waiting for any kind of adult to tell me what I was allowed to do.
You didn't like it and ... just went back to a different school? That's something that you can do?
You just... dropped out? You had that option?
My experience is the polar opposite. My mom kept a vice grip on everything we learned. Bringing up wanting to go to Public School resulted in literal months of venom and self-victimization (aka: "I guess you hate how I sacrificed my body to bring you into this world ,and I sacrificed my dreams to stay here and raise good Christian children"), various punishments, and bible verse memorization assignments. Books were excised from the house if there was a hint of independence within. My mom literally took away a book I was reading about an orphan boy and his love of dirt-bike racing because on one page, the boy's foster parents asked him if he would attend church with them, he politely declined, and the foster parents accepted that. My Mom told me she "didn't want me thinking that was OK" when she took it away.
To me, being accepting of home-schooling is in the same camp as ditching all CI tooling because "every developer's style is valid and has its benefits". Accepting home-schooling means accepting that the lowest common denominator is good enough to teach the next generation.
This is just as true for most public schools. GP is rather unique in that most students don't get to choose where they learn. The option(s) available to them are often constrained by their zip code. Of those that had a meaningful choice, most tested into a magnet/exam/grammar school, lived in a charter school friendly areas, or resided in a city with a bussing program. In spite of what you've suffered, home schooling shouldn't be condemned wholesale. I've met several home-schooled individuals with interesting lives and well-rounded educations rivaling those of private school graduates.
We homeschool our kids and are generally quite the opposite (we’ve never been religious either). I wouldn’t say we are smarter than tertiary teachers in specific fields, but for the junior years it doesn’t really matter. Our kids are (electively) performing at higher grades than their age level requires, and we support that where they’re interested in it.
We do structured learning every day and also unstructured learning and just enjoying life. It’s a good balance that enables us to raise the happiest kids we can. My eldest has expressed an interest in going to school next year, we are fostering that interest and if he’s still keen next year we will enable that too.
People make blanket statements about homeschool, public school and private school. But after having kids one thing is certain: everyone’s experience is incredibly unique.
I went to college with a guy who attended a prestigious private school. He was an indifferent student there and still knew more than me on most subjects.
I was left with the impression that public school in the US overall, as a system is a joke even though I went through a pretty privileged one.
> Still, many survivors of unschooling, and home schooling, aren’t buying it. The projection of normalcy, and even success, has long been part of the home-schooling toolkit.
> “This is exactly how my mother was back in the 90s,” says Tyler. “For her, it was touring support groups and conferences and whatnot, to brag about how happy, well-adjusted and educated her children were, while neglecting to mention the suicide attempts, running away, screaming and tears that permeated daily life.”
This maps to my experience being Homeschooled. To this day my Mom refuses to acknowledge that every one of her children needed remedial education the moment we left the home, from basic math & composition down to just plain old human interaction. All 5 of us have been "that weird kid" well into our 20's, until we caught up enough to mask our history.
"Bloom's 2 sigma problem refers to the educational phenomenon that the average student tutored one-to-one using mastery learning techniques performed two standard deviations better than students educated in a classroom environment."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem
We just keep doing it this way because now it's a cargo cult.
Policy inertia is always a factor in adopting techniques that appear better in limited testing, but we also do it this way because 1:1 instruction with mastery learning techniques is more than 30 times as expensive as 30:1 instruction with classroom techniques, and because education sits as #2 behind healthcare (ahead of things like debt service defense, and non-healthcare entitlement spending) in overall public spending in the US, and if it was multiplied 30 fold it would be over 150% of GDP, which is...problematic.
It's never been controversial that being educated by an expert personal dedicated tutor is better than classroom learning, but it just doesn't work at scale. Unfortunately, the success at the challenge laid out in the article you reference of finding group learning techniques that achieve the same benefits, in practice, has been less than successful.
(And, no, unschooling/homeschooling isn't a general solution here.)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41500932
Considering how much more effective tutoring is, we do it this way not because it's the best way to provide free child care (it isn't and doesn't even cover a whole work day). It's not the most effective way to educate students. Nor is it even the most cost effective way to teach students.
I'm left with the belief that it's either a cargo cult or a program designed to make a servile, uncreative population.
No, we keep doing it this way because the public refuses to actually engage the real challenges of actually educating a nation. Comments like this one being excellent cases in point.
"It only takes about 50 contact hours to transmit basic literacy and math skills well enough that kids can be self-teachers from then on. The cry for "basic skills" practice is a smokescreen behind which schools pre-empt the time of children for twelve years and teach them the six lessons I've just taught you." [1]
Unless you have some strong evidence to argue why "sit down and lecture" is the most cost effective way to educate a population, I will retain my belief that it is a cargo cult at best.
Can you also substantiate the claim that 50 contact-hours is sufficient for students to become "self-teachers" and that they actually do that?
I have volunteered at a school that allows students to become self-teachers and it is very effective. They follow the Sudbury model, and students entirely teach themselves everything from reading to mathematics. They graduate from college at higher rates than traditional school students, make more, and have very high levels of self reported happiness. It's a really cool model, I wish it was more common. The school I helped at had no teachers, only 3 adults for 120 young people. They could all come and go throughout the day as long as they signed in and out. It's been up and running for decades, so it's not just a flash in the pan.
See:
A long term side project of mine is to build a neighborhood that can sustain a model like what you’re describing so I’m always looking for inroads into the practice of it. I’ll dive into the Sudbury Model but keen for real world examples as well!
The problem is that many of those who choose to homeschool or 'unschool' are not looking to do anything near this; instead, they want to buck the system in a way which does not create a usefully educated human--usually in a very narrow siloed way (e.g., religion-focused).
It worked because in a way, they already had it in them. They both were (and still are) very curious and self-starters. They liked unschooling for a while, and to this day they still have an do-it-yourself attitude when it comes to learning things that they’re interested in —- I think most kids do, and in their case it got cemented during this period.
But they got sick of it too, they got sick of not having a clear schedule, clear goals to meet, too much uncertainty. Now they like more academic-oriented schooling, a bit of the opposite of unschooling, and they’re thriving.
We were lucky that the director of the elementary school they ended up in. She was very welcoming of our kids, and expressed that she herself had an unstructured upbringing. More interestingly, she seemed to think kids should have some unschooling period in their lives, as having free range helps them develop as people.
Anyway, as I said, 2 data points