ismail

Exactly. The other metaphor i see used often is you provide the scaffolding while they do the building.

Please could you share your experiences? Did you face any of the concerns highlighted in these comments?

“I would also caution potential homeschoolers to be mindful of how they frame their choice when they talk to their children. Making it about the child or taking a strong us v. them stance against other options can be very isolating for the child, especially if they ever feel like they're not getting the education they want at home.”

Great point. This was one of my concerns I had having spoken to some of the teens who had been educated like this. They all seem to have a kind of “us versus them” mentality against traditional schooling.

“But unschooling requires serious engagement on the part of the parent”

Yep it is much easier to just send your kid to school and make their learning someone else’s responsibility.

“I've seen unschooling families get lazy and end up with 18-year old ballerinas who can't do times tables to save their life”

Would you care to provide details on this? Over email if you would like to avoid a public forum.

Thanks for this.

Rather then argue against SDE (self directed education) most of what you said above actually provides evidence for it. Will post a more detailed response from my laptop.

2. There seems to be some confusion in your understanding of SDE. You believe that SDE = no assistance at all.

Rather it is exactly the opposite. The child would seek out more assistance. It does mean they choose who they seek assistance from. It means the assistance they get is not mass communication like a teacher lecturing 30 kids at once. It is individualised and highly customised to them.

Great points;

“To a small enough child, reading is a "useless fact." After all, an illiterate child has gone his whole life without needing to know how to read”

“Why waste time learning letters...”

This is the point/philosophy of it. The child will choose to learn when they need and want to. Having spoken to some of these children I found most taught themselves to read without formal instruction.

“None of the facts they teach in school are truly useless, but rather the person who judges them useless is just too ignorant to know their value.”

Exactly. So if they are useless to the person it means an EXTERNAL party has made a judgement call on what knowledge is useful. It comes down to who decides what Is useful knowledge and what is not. Who should make threat decision?

“I would be careful. As a young child I was allowed to self-direct many aspects of my education (Montessori schools, permissive parents, etc.)“

Could you provide more detail On this? Did your parents involve you in their day to day activities, were you completely free or did you have a choice out of a set of activities. I know this may be a difficult question to answer as our memories of early learning is always hazy.

“Unschooling may result in illiteracy, social isolation, and difficulty to pursue areas of interests later in life”

Do you have any reading on this? Even anecdata? All the reading I have done seems to indicate the exact opposite.

Granted i have been specially seeking out material that is pro self-directed education. Would love to read anything that actually builds a strong case against it.

“I find it curious and confusing that the stated objective is to help the child develop improved critical thinking skills, while the stated philosophy (Unschooling) seeks to never have the child try anything they don't choose to do (learner directed education). Has intellectual isolation ever resulted in improved critical thinking skills before?”

Inherent in the question posed here is the assumption that the child/learner would be intellectually isolated? However from my reading this is not necessary the case.

Once they have the means learners would seek out others with the knowledge they require or ask for help.

If you can point me to some reading that contradicts the unschooling view and builds a case against it, or expands on some of the points you have mentioned that would be great.

The biggest take away for me personally is:

We all have an inherent drive/desire to learn. It is why most of us learn to talk, walk, run with out any direct instruction. Yet school is based on a massive assumption which I had never questioned. The assumption that it has to be forced on you. Education that your are not interested in has to be forced. True Learning, which differs from education, is self directed. It happens because you are interested and curious.

Personal anecdata I thought myself coding in high school because I enjoyed it. No one told me to go out and teach myself this. I found myself coding and hacking instead of learning useless facts.

Edit:

Regarding the “schooling the world” documentary I have added two links. YouTube and the documentary website where you can rent it. I chose to rent the documentary to support the filmmakers.

thanks. What do you think is broken with the current model?

Added an Ask Hn for the question.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18878153

Question:

1. Anyone considering or practicing unschooling/self directed education [0] for your children?

2. Were you home schooled/unschooled/practiced self directed education ?

What’s your story?

I am Considering this approach. Just finished reading free to learn [1] and Peter gray makes a compelling case for this approach. Also the documentary “schooling the world” covers some of the chilling effects of compulsory schooling. [2] it has made me seriously question our current education system.

Thoughts?

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unschooling

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Free-Learn-Unleashing-Instinct-Self-R...

[2] https://schoolingtheworld.org

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XLSIgZWNR9M

I recall Toronto had a labyrinth of passage ways under ground, with shops etc. It connected to the subway and it was very convenient. Guess they built under ground due to the weather?

WhatsApp and other messaging apps have practically killed sms for personal one on one communications. The only thing still prepping up SMS is the bulk messaging such as notifications and marketing.

The story may be simpler than initially thought.

“Whereas the Bloomberg story singles out Supermicro servers, Mr. Appleboum’s sentiment is that this is an industrywide issue”

Review the site at: https://www.sepio.systems/solution/

What type of companies stand to gain from the piece?

XDR is a highly efficient format, primarily used in telecoms

We have a developer who has developed decoders in C. Ping me if you need details.

See: https://www.tmforum.org/resources/standard/ipdrxdr-encoding-...

Wow. “We made Google+ with privacy in mind and therefore keep this API’s log data for only two weeks.”

The wording of this is really pushing the boundary of plausibility.

I fail to understand the logic of how this would protect privacy? Access logs with no profile data logged would not compromise privacy would it?

Can anyone confirm the timing of the google blog post? It seems the WSJ article was posted at a similar time.

This leads me to believe that the most likely reason we are hearing about this now is due to comment requests from the WSJ. WHEN Goog realised it was out they published.

Goog is trying to avoid using the words Data breach as they may get into hot water in EU.

Love how it is buried in the article.

My guess is a similar thing has been happening with android permissions. Data has been leaking through that they have just not admitted to it.

+1 for South Africa

Wow shows how my thinking has changed. I own a few Kafka books that are probably in a box somewhere. Was an avid reader in my teens.

Yet when i read the title I expected a technical article on Kafka the software system. I last read Kafka so long ago I had completely forgotten about him.

Thanks for the reminder :)

Yeah. Good point the effects will take several years to be demonstrated. So maybe a better comment would be, avoid FB for holding in the long term.

Would you think they are sacrificing the long term for the short?

I suspect we will get more scandals from FB.

Facebook is going to get worse and so is Zuckerberg. I would short FB if I had a position.

The reasoning is, once you see a CEO installing loyal lieutenants. Who does not value conflicting, and opposing views. You know the company will loose the plot soon. With out any moderation from others I believe that FB will accelerate their disregard for their users while publicly communicating something else.

Fundamentally the Instagram founders and WhatsApp founders leaving is due to a values conflict with Zuckerberg and the culture at FB. My theory is there are the values they talk about and communicate externally, which is not congruent with what is practiced.

There was conflict due to these unspoken values and Zuckerberg took the easy way out. Install people loyal to him. This is a sign of weak leadership.

Edit:

It also seems like ego is getting the better of Z

“Severe cutbacks ordered by Mr. Zuckerberg in how much Instagram was promoted on the main Facebook platform”

Either that or instagram ads are not as profitable as FB?

Edit2: “That’s a shame, since that’s exactly what Facebook needs. Which is to say, people willing to challenge the groupthink that for too long included a stubborn resistance to admitting and addressing the company’s flaws.”

This is the biggest danger

I paid $1 on the App Store

Wow. This is an amazing piece of investigative journalism and probably one of the reasons we should all be supporting an independent media.

Does the ECB hold bonds for Danske bank? The ECB and other central banks have been on a bond buying [0] 'spree' [1]

If the ECB holds these bonds then technically eu monetary union citizens do have exposure.

To me this seems to have been a dangerous decision by the ECB and other central banks. With their policy, could this have created a situation whereby companies that would not otherwise survive are now over-leveraged. The result being a small disruption bringing everything down with it?

To put the question another way, do we have a massive bubble in corporate debt due to central bank polcies, resulting in companies that should have gone under being over-leveraged.

With the ECB planning to stop the buying by end 2018, will we see a correction?

[0] https://www.ecb.europa.eu/mopo/implement/omt/html/index.en.h...

[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/central-banks-put-squeeze-on-so...

Edit:

According to JP morgan [3] the policy has created 'zombie' companies.

[3] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-07-18/jpmorgan-...

Yep +1 for Drucker.

Was thinking more in machine readable format. Could write a script for this thought I would check if it has been done before

Thanks

Yep I agreee.

This is the nature of complex systems. you cannot possibly see all permutations of your decisions/actions.

However one should at least think them through and then have a feedback or monitoring system in place to recognise when you are having unintended consequences and then react.

You iterate to a solution by constant monitoring and feedback, then reacting. Put another way it is not “I implement this and I am done”

Rather then having two screens try the following setup.

An ultra wide monitor like:

https://www.lg.com/us/monitors/lg-29UM68-P-ultrawide-monitor

Then you have your code screen + browser/test/shell in split screen. it’s like having two full screens due to being ultra wide.

When I am away from my screen I can feel the drop in productivity having to shift between virtual desktops.

If you have a laptop you also get a 3rd screen that you could use for something else like docs.

Is it possible to have best of both worlds, not having to worry about layout engines. But you can check into version control

See the case study of Nidan. They setup unions in India for informal workers. A union of unions so to speak.the centre that did the case study is one of the best to understand Systems change

http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_SF17_Case_Studies_02_Nidan_...

Wow just at a time I was considering this. So currently in a workshop doing an evaluation with a group of people and the amount of group think that starts to occur is unbelievable. You notice it when people start ignoring relevant information. So wrote the problem down and came up with a solution of doing a split between: 1-formulate your own ideas. 2. Then meet and discuss.

Based on this maybe ideal maybe 1. Formulate own ideas 2. Meet 3. Forumulate own ideas 3. Meet