Forget "homeschooling" - that idea is so passé. Here comes "unschooling":
The Biegler children live as though school doesn't exist.
They're at home all day, but they're not being homeschooled. They're being "unschooled." There are no textbooks, no tests and no formal education at all in their world.
What's more, that hands-off approach extends to other areas of the children's lives: They make their own decisions, and don't have chores or rules.
Christine Yablonski and Phil Biegler of Westford, Mass., are self-described "radical unschoolers." They allow their teen daughter and son to decide what they want to learn, and when they want to learn it.
"They key there is that you've got to trust your kids to … find their own interests," Yablonski told "Good Morning America."
Yablonski described unschooling as "living your life as if the school system didn't exist."
Juju Chang of Good Morning America has more on this unusual approach to educamacation: Link
The human veal-crate of cubicle servitude awaits for ALL! NONE shall DEFY!!!
After all, we're on the correct path, surely? Don't you want these children to be able to paddle in the waters of the GULF OF MEXICO, drink CLEAN WATER, eat TUNA FISH without MERCURY POISONING, and buy a HOUSE without going UPSIDEDOWN and being a bankrupt LOSER without a HOME?
How else could such a condition be achieved, other than by doing things as they have always been done, and by following the WISDOM of their ELDERS.
We should trust our fates to the ways of the PAST. These younglings should, nay, MUST surrender their bodies and minds to the prison-school industrial complex, to be indoctrinated into the dominant creation mythology of civilisation. Not for them the freedom to follow their freak, to seek out troublesome writers like Daniel Quinn (author of "Ishmael"), or contrarian madmen like Robert Anton Wilson (author of "Prometheus Rising").
GOD FORBID that any child should be free pursue their own path, for better or worse. All must obey the Platonic ideals set forth in "The Republic", or surely perish.
Unfortunately these young people will find out the hard way. The parents are pretty clueless to think that the five or so hours left in the day is not enough time to pursue their own interests.
I'm surprised this is legal. I Finland homeschooling is allowed, as long as you follow the curriculum. These are certain things that people should just be given the opportunity to learn.
And I met a lot of my friends through school.
In society, you cannot make money without school, unless you have a freak fluke. If you could get a job without a college degree somewhere, if they based it on your integrity and personality, they would be fine. And I would have done the same. I hate the school system.
But it's so impossible not to do it. Because if you don't, you're screwed. It's not because school is good or important. It's because society relies on it, now. College is important but the other things... not so much. College is good because it lets you be an expert at something.
It is not allowed because it is considered proven all to often that by far the most people who do not go to regular schools just will fail to find their place in society.
And since there still aren't that much opportunities for most of us to find trouble-free happy places outside society, all of us have to go through the system before they are free to make their own choice on wether they want to take their place inside or outside the system.
These kids are in for a very hard adult life and they will "thank" their parents for it...
However Foreigner1 makes a good point, you need to achieve a certain level of perspective to be able to deem this path appropriate.
One thing this country does need though is to start treating teenagers more like adults. Teens all over the world have responsibilities and expectations and they deliver...American teens don't because they're babied or get condescension from adults.
I remember being an senior in high school at the age of 18 and cursing this fucking society for making me ask the teacher for a bathroom pass. It also means people spend their twenties trying to figure themselves out and work out many things they could have in their teen years.
(I was going to get all smarmy and pedantic about it and write the following before I had second thoughts about sounding way too much like my dad. Boy, I'm glad I didn't embarrass myself spending a lot of time and effort writing something pointlessly sarcastic and stupid.)
The world I live in has rules. They don't go away if I choose to ignore them. We've developed these hard-fought rules together as a society over a long period of time not for the good of the few but for the good of the whole.
Anarchy may seem like a good idea when you're a young rebellious teen with delusions of wisdom and maturity, but eventually one has to grow up, something I doubt the parents in the article have done. Apparently a few responders, regardless of their age, also haven't grown out of the teenage angst stage of whining about not getting their own way.
The teachers did not intervene when the kids bashed eachothers brains because the philosophy was that the children eventually would ask for help themselves.
The result was that most kids just made a mess of it- some got completely traumatised and dissapeared from that school by themselves. And others eventually started to learn to some degree pure out of survival-strategy. To me it sounded like hell and luckily those friends saw that too.
Human children have to learn from elders and have to be pointed in the right direction. That is the way we humans have evolved and that is the way that sofar over the eons has proven to be the most effective way.
Every now and again there are people who want to throw that knowledge and experience overboard and who want to re-invent as it were the wheel on how children grow up and gather knowledge best. And every time again it has been proven that these people fail miserably if they discard the need for active education and guiding of their children.
I wonder how many thousands of children have to become victim of that while all these thousands of years we already know how things work best.
Well, see, these kids are formally uneducated. It's like they went to Dumb School and sat in the closet.
The entire system is broken, pointing fingers at "unschooling" and saying it doesn't work is disingenuous, and laughably narrow minded of people here. And for the record I'm a college graduate who's doing well in his career but realize the whole thing is just a system to get you a piece of paper that is supposedly worth something but it's not about making you a better person, it's about pigeonholing and as someone above said making you a slave to a system. School would be about what you want out of life if it were real, but it's not, it's about sticking you in small boxes that will bolt up to some system of society. If you don't see this, well, congrats, you're part of the problem.
Call it "unparenting." Too bad their kids will suffer because of it.
So the threat of giving children the choice to choose their own educational path is not nearly as huge as some people seem to think. Children are human beings, and perfectly capable in making good decisions. And why is obtaining guidance from their parents – in lieu of an impartial school official – somehow condemnable? How can exploring subjects they truly have interest in be a bad thing? The .5 seconds of video which showed those kids garden setup was impressive, but the journalists wanted to shock you with images of messy rooms and TV. All people should have the freedom to choose what and how they want to study and educate themselves – even if we don’t agree with what they are learning. The freedom to make decisions about education means you get thinkers who are able to perform outside the constraints of a limited and homogenised curriculum.
As for Foreigner1, your horror story about the nameless alternative school is laughable at best. I’ve witnessed my cousins get mentally/physically bullied at mainstream schools and receive a complete lack of response from staff – even when directly confronted about the problem. It is obvious you’ve never read any contemporary texts of child development or alternative education models. You’re missing the (very obvious) fact that ‘traditional’ schools for working & lower middle class children only started to exist as we know them in the early 20th century. But why cast pearls before swine? If you actually cared at all about the methods of fostering understanding in children, you could research the history of education yourself.
I see this failing miserably...utter FAIL.
but back to my original question, does that vary by state or what? I'm being serious, not sarcastic (I hate that I feel I have to say that...)
What's my point? I don't really remember now.
My kids are going to school, its nice to know that your's will be filling in those low niches in life so they can climb higher.
Sure, it seems fun for these kids now- play and sleep all day, parents who give them financial support, excelling at Pokemon Gold. But what happens as they grow older and their parents either die or toss them out? A life of pan-handling, cheap welfare hotels, digging through dumpsters for food and cans.
Maybe modern schooling is whats wrong with things.
Yes sure in regular schools children also take their own lives because of bullying and unbearable pressure.
But if the lack of guidance is institutionalised, in my mind the problem is far bigger. The school I was referring to was a Dalton-school, based on the ideas of Helen Parkhurst. And sure other Dalton shools will likely do better because of different idea's of the staff.
I'm not missing the fact that ‘traditional’ schools for working & lower middle class children only started to exist as we know them in the early 20th century but in Europe has it's roots well into the 16th Century and that has a centralised and uniform definition since the early 19th-Century - It's not part of my argument since I refer to ideas about education that go back to at least Classical Greek times: Our human youth gets it's best education by being guided and taught by older learned and more experienced elders/teachers. That is what I refer to.
So call me a Moron, but I know for a fact that if I as a child would have had that freedom, I would have made an utter mess of it- I needed that more strict guidance and education otherwise I would not have succeeded. And that is what I see also with lots of people all around me- we turn out well because of that sometimes so despised school and stricter guidance - Why some even need it even stricter and they have to be sent onto military styled education. Okay so perhaps you L-mo are one shining exception to the rule. Respect. But even you in the end went to university so you conformed, didn't you? Perhaps you were a shining light as a kid in that you could make all the right decisions for yourself and your parents were overly proud of you and even your environment looked at you in utter glorification. But you seem to be an exception and not the norm. For most of us, society has become far to complicated to just start out on our own and then just take what we need to cope with our situation in society. And that ranges from the social interaction within the schoolwalls to the factual education that we get there.
...and thats being on the positive side.
Who also was New York State and City's teacher of the year.
I read it, and couldn't put it down once I started.
Schools as they were structured for the industrial revolution are not necessary and they are no longer even relevant to the modern world. Education does not have to come from a mold. We learn more quickly and easily when we have interest and motivation.
Of course, our society has rules. You have to be quiet in the library, you have to pull over when the nice officer tells you to, you have to pay for that bag of chips. Most people who don't learn to follow the rules end up getting an in depth education in the criminal justice system. Whether it interests them or not.
I think that in that case, we ought to put more focus on instilling interest and motivation, giving useful applications for various subjects and/or just try to instill an appreciation for learning for its own sake.
Some things do have to come from a mold. How many people have an "interest" in learning how to spell correctly or write in a fluent manner(consider the number of online posters who don't give a damn if they write actual sentences)?
I am skeptical of most young people's to teach or want to teach themselves anything of value (e.g. basic arithmetic and writing). There's just not that level of context for what skills you will need in life there. How many high schoolers would still opt to do homework if it were all completely optional and tests on that material didn't matter? I know I heard (and uttered) lots of grousing about many of our various assignments, a lot of which were, in the end, helpful.
The idea that kids who are not in school are not learning is utter hogwash. Humans enjoy learning. It's what we do. Kids enjoy mastering new ideas and skills, but not when it's crammed down their throats. What school taught you how to walk? To speak? Have you learned nothing since leaving school? Think of the things you feel are most important to know in the life you live day to day. How many of those things were learned in school, and how many were learned by simply living them? How many were forgotten since school, but re-learned because you didn't have a use for that information at the time?
It's easy to think that unschooling means 'hands off' and that it's a lazy form of parenting. In truth, it's simply allowing your children to approach concepts and areas of inquiry when they're ready for them and can immediately apply them, not at some pre-determined step along a cookie-cutter curriculum.
It is our jobs as unschooling parents to provide a rich wealth of experience so our children understand that there is a complex, wide world beyond the four walls of our house; that this world has certain expectations of them; how to set goals and achieve them. But we're not taskmasters, we're guides. Unschoolers do enter traditionally 'academic' fields of endeavor - and they're free to aggressively pursue those interests deeply and satisfyingly instead of being shuttled from classroom to classroom, from subject to subject every 40 minutes. They're free to intern with experts in the field. They're free to seek out traditional classes in the subjects of their choice, if they like. And yes, they're free to fail and learn from those mistakes as well.
For those who would like to step beyond their initial judgemental reaction and actually learn more about how unschooling is lived in practice, this is a good site to start with:
http://www.sandradodd.com/unschooling
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summerhill_School
As a young man that was unschooled until I was 16 (at which point I, myself made the choice to attend high school) I am a bit aghast at the number uneducated (ironic eh?) comments here. Many of you have repeatedly said things like "parenting failure," "laziness," "uneducated," etc. But this is not even close to the truth. What many of you are missing is the fact that most kids have "education" shoved down their throats since the time they can speak and so have no desire the pursue things on their own.
Like unschooling_dad said, humans have an inherent desire to learn. When you treat education as an opportunity rather than a rule/obligation kids yearn to learn new things. I speak from experience. I had no formal education until I was 16 and yet I was constantly exploring new things. Everything from science experiments to construction to art. When I chose to attend school at 16 it was because of that same desire to learn. It was strictly my choice and I did it in order to broaden my view and experiences. I also attended college strictly because I wanted to and I chose to. I didn't do because I felt obligated to or because it was required to be successful.
When looking at the big picture, one of the biggest advantages unschooling offers kids is time. It gives them the time to explore their passions, to develop those passions and to find themselves for who they are.
To those of you still questioning and nay-saying it, take me as example (no egotism intended.) I was unschooled until I was 16, entered highschool with no previous formal education, was in the top of my class, went to college by choice for two years for the experience and am now working as a full-time freelance 3D animation artist and teacher. I am the co-founder of a very successful site, http://blendercookie.com, am authoring a technical book on using 3D animation software, and have been published in two animation books thus far. Oh and I have been freelancing professionally since I was 16.
None of this would have been possible if I had been through a molded schooling system.