Pam

Unschooling is one of my “hot topics”. My definition of a hot topic is something you care about and want to share with other people because other people are clueless. Using this definition, for me, religion wouldn’t qualify, since I’m not interested in it and everyone has an opinion on it. Unschooling, on the other hand, is something few people know about and most people have wrong. Let’s face it, most people (the world over) think kids need to go to school. In fact think everyone needs to be taught by a teacher to learn anything.

1) You can’t teach people that aren’t interested!
2) You CAN teach yourself.

One of the by products of going to school is being brainwashed into thinking you need to go to school to learn anything. Or, conversely, learning stops when you leave school. BS!

Two good quotes:

1) Knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind.  — Plato
2) Imagination is more important than knowledge. — A. Einstein

Heather and I “unschool” our kids. What this means is, you let THEM tell YOU what they want to learn. You don’t teach. You answer questions. The “biggie” for most people (myself included) is “will they learn to read?” Don’t you have to be taught to read? Schools certainly want you to think that. And yet, we have not “taught” our son to read and he most definitely is reading! (He is 9 years old.) He reads because he desperately wants to know what his video games are saying, what his computer game is saying, what the deserts are on the menu at the restaurant, or what the sign outside Toys R Us says. He learns by asking and by being read to by us. We read to him constantly. And the end result is, he doesn’t hate to read, because he was never forced.

Do your kids hate to read? I remember, it took me until I was a teenager to “get over” hating to read. I can even remember the book that started my reading again. “The Illustrated Man” by Ray Bradbury. I was stuck in the company car at one of my dad’s drilling rigs (he was working, and I was hanging out) and had utterly nothing to do, so I read it and got hooked on scifi at that point.

Anyway, the point of this post: Everytime pam writes a response on the yahoo group “unschoolingbasics” or “alwayslearning” I sit up and pay attention. (I’ve quoted her before.) She’s one of those rare individuals that have the ability to write and get the point across clearly. She says it much better than I can and I want to give her a bigger audience! Here goes:

Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2005 08:35:36 -0800
From: pam
Subject: Re: family

On Feb 8, 2005, at 6:37 AM, daniel wrote:

> Any comments I make about how obviously well he is doing without this
> stuff is usually met with how well he would have been doing if we
> strapped him down in an institution and force fed him what an
> impersonal bureaucracy wants him to know (slight paraphrasing).

LOL – this is my husband’s fall-back. He never has entirely understood any of the philosophy behind unschooling – never understood unschooling at all – just let it go because I knew so much more than he did and clearly he either was going to have to do the research himself and get up to speed to fight me on it, or just accept it. So he accepted it.

Now the kids are great – he can’t argue that point. They’re intelligent, well-informed, better “educated” than either of us, for the most part. So once in a while he says things like, “Imagine what they’d know if they’d gone to school,” like they’d be BETTER educated if they’d gone to school. Ha. But he wonders, for real, if we haven’t deprived them. They haven’t “studied” chemistry and biology and algebra and calculus and world history and all those things he thinks they’d have studied if they’d gone to school. He still believes in “better learning through suffering.” That’s the problem. He still, after all these years, can’t entirely accept it that learning by choice and with pleasure is REAL.

Even the evidence of his own wonderful kids seems like a fluke to him – he doesn’t really know how it happened that they learned so much, that they are so knowledgeable and, in fact, academically capable. They waltz into college courses and get “A’s” – but he thinks those are not like “real” college because they’re at the community college. Now Roya is at the “real” college, but she’s in a lightweight major (Recreation and Leisure Studies), so he discounts that, too. The absolute only thing that would have proven to him that unschooling works would have been for them to become medical doctors or engineers and none of them have that inclination, so far. Thank GOODNESS they aren’t doing it just to prove something to their dad.

I chose my college major to prove something to MY dad. We argued politics and he was a big businessman and could always end every argument by saying, “You don’t understand the economics of it.” HA – showed him. Got myself a graduate degree in economics. Let me just say that proving something to your dad is not a good basis for a career choice.

-pam