Kentucky ‘free range’ family loses custody of 10 kids over apparent ‘unschooling’

I think that you have embraced an underlying assumption: that people who don’t engage in a structured educational track are doomed to be social inertia. That assumption is not true.

“Even a carpenter or roofer needs a minimum of 10th grade math skills.”

And those skills can be taught in a day to a willing student. Conversely, they cannot be taught in a lifetime to an unwilling student.

There is a proverb older than us both:
When the student is ready the teacher will appear.

I know a family who’s second son didn’t read a syllable until he was nearly nine. He got interested in sea life, his parents waved their hands toward the bookshelves and said, “Quite a bit of what you want to know is over there,” and he was reading at a college level within six months. Yes, it’s a single anecdotal account, but it is illustrative of the dynamic between an organic (contrasted with synthetic) human desire to know, and the capacity to acquire the tools and the knowledge explosively. The boy’s inability wasn’t owing to incapacity, but to an ignorance fuelled by disinterest. When the interest arrived, the motivation came on-line, and the end result was achieved with rapidity that is shocking compared to the reading progress of the bell-curve “normal” school student.

Common educrat notions of what it means to “fall behind,” and their dismissal of the human power of motivation to not only catch up, but surpass their supposed peers deserve to be far more deeply questioned. The educational structures we are accustomed to deserve less grant of authoritative status; their track records don’t warrant the respect they haughtily demand. Far less ought they command the unconsidered obeisance of parents regarding the daily disposition of their children.

This society interest in this wide-open landscape of education has interested me for several years. I’ve come to notice a number of things:

- There was a religious sect in Germany that wanted to create an intern/apprentice-like program for young teens in their village. The state gave them some room to maneuver and demonstrate. After about two years, the state shut them down. What the sect was doing was simply using the teens for manpower and passing virtually no knowledge or skills onto the teens. Even when confronted, the leadership of the group kinda admitted that they had no training program.

- Home-schooling (structured, with books, reading assignments, etc) has proven itself effective and can work in most cases. This other method (unschooling) is basically zero structure, zero reading, and zero tutoring. Maybe out of a thousand kids, there’s one Einstein-kid who might thrive in this environment and go off to self-learn. The rest will be the chief candidates for Burger King or some low knowledge/skill job.

My view is that I really don’t want to be standing there at some state-employment office or some welfare office, and have some 30-year old walk in...who can’t be hired by anyone. So I would go through the questions and reach this conclusion that the guy can only read to the 2nd grade level, and can’t do multiplication/division problems. After extensive interviews...I would come to realize he’s a product of ‘unschooling’. To fix this, you’d have to go and put him into some gov’t-funded program (tax revenue paying for this) and spend three or four years teaching the guy enough to be productive, while on welfare (again tax revenue being used).

I like to point out that in the mid-1700s....with the likes of Thomas Jefferson and George Washington...they were privately tutored. In their cases, these were highly structured hours. A year of this type of study would today probably equal three years of public school. You see the same type device in France, Germany and England across the 1500s/1600s.

I do agree public schools are built to deliver basic and cheap education. It’d be far more better if class sizes were eight to ten students. Teachers run from incompetent, to competent....with unions screwing up the process of dismissing bad teachers. When you do find good school programs, it’s typically in small towns or rural areas where you don’t have social pressure existing.

There’s one glaring element that you have wrong and it’s coloring the rest of your perspective: your definition of unschooling is quite a ways off the mark.

“This other method (unschooling) is basically zero structure, zero reading, and zero tutoring.”

NOT true. You have unschooling confused with “not educating” and that simply is not the case. Unschooling is taking advantage of everyday activity to teach and train in natural science, basic personal economics, language skills — whatever subject areas mesh with the activities of the day; it isn’t the absence of instruction. Further, activities are often chosen intentionally for instructional value. No, not a trip to Wal-Mart — that would be used as an incidental platform, perhaps to teach some basic math, or a simple aspect of personal finance like staying within one’s means. But a trip to the tidepools, or a hike in the hills might win out for the natural science educational value over just another afternoon at the park. There IS truly educational method to the seeming madness of free-form education; there’s more structure than there seems to be by outward appearances.

Also, unschooling typically looks super free-form through grade school, and transitions to more structure and rigor as the students get toward High School age and begin to evidence interest and/or talent in more specific areas. So, for most of the years up to high School level study, unschooling looks so unstructured that it sparks concern in those who’ve little or no familiarity with what’s going on, and people are panicked unnecessarily by this. But by High School age - 14, 15, 16 — there’s a direction that’s typically begun to gel, and the student can then be pointed to increasingly structured means of acquiring the knowledge and skills needed to capitalize, and move successfully to the next level.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.