The unschooled mind

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1. gregjorOct 2022
   > You clearly made choices in how you were raising your children, which means you were satisfying some constraints.

   Well, yes, over time. At first we just wanted a child. We didn't have any plan. As a parent you have to make it up as you go -- the experience of other parents only goes so far. Before long I understood that I was dealing with an autonomous person, not someone I could mold or shape. Parents tend to overestimate the control and influence they have, which leads to conflict especially in the teen years and sometimes long into adulthood. I have friends my own age (past 60) who still resent their parents forcing them to play sports or go to violin lessons or sit through math tutoring.

   You can find plenty of resources for homeschooling. I think of unschooling as a form of homeschooling. Traditional homeschoolers use a curriculum and try to duplicate at least some of the forms and rituals of traditional school at home. Unschoolers don't follow any curriculum, and involve their kids in the "real world" of adults rather than confining them in school or a simulation of it. The majority of homeschoolers in America do it for religious reasons, though you can find secular homeschooling groups in every city.

   Some resources:

   How Children Learn and How Children Fail by John Holt.

   The Seven Lesson Schoolteacher by John Taylor Gatto (online) https://www.wanderings.net/notebook/Main/SevenLessonsTaughtI...

   Dumbing Us Down and Weapons of Mass Destruction by John Taylor Gatto.

   Deschooling Society by Ivan Illich.

   The Unschooled Mind by Howard Gardner.

   Anything by Maria Montessori.

   We kind of fell backwards into it. Our first child went to Montessori school at first, she loved it. Then we moved and couldn't find a Montessori school that had openings (many have long waiting lists), so we enrolled her in public school. After a few weeks she got in trouble for reading a book in class "above her grade level" according to the teacher. She was in second grade reading a Nancy Drew book, bored waiting for the other kids to learn how to read. She cried about going to school after that because the teacher shamed her in class. So we didn't make her go and let her do her own thing. We told the school we planned to move, they never followed up. She went on to (easily) get a high school diploma and went to college. We didn't send our next two kids to school but left the option open, they decided to go later but mainly because of their friends.

   We gradually found out about organized homeschooling groups and joined those, which led to lots of opportunities for sharing ideas and letting the kids socialize and play.

   It helped that I was able to support all of us so my wife didn't have to work at a job, she did most of the work handling the kids. Unfortunately homeschooling only makes sense for middle- and upper-middle-class families who don't need school to provide day care while they work two jobs. We knew families with stay-at-home dads, and couples who had flexible jobs that allowed them to alternate. I came to believe that kids should have a parent around as much as possible, as a role model and person to answer questions, which is why I objected in the first place to the idea of hiring a nanny or sending kids to school.

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2. aaronswDec 2009
   For people interested in this stuff, Howard Gardner's book _The Unschooled Mind_ collects similar results from every discipline, from computer science to history.

   http://books.google.com/books?id=DVB1n_KkYEQC

   For more on CS, of course, you'll want to read http://www.cs.mdx.ac.uk/research/PhDArea/saeed/paper1.pdf

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