There are two rules of thumb that smart parentbloggers adhere to. One – don’t write a post asking the general public if you should circumcise your son. Two – when you have a splitting headache, don’t write about homeschooling. As I’m not one for rules, and not particularly smart (example: I took my wife and two-year-old son on a cross-country road trip for the holidays, thinking that spending seven days in the car while dodging blizzards and the occasional sandstorm would be “fun”; it might have been, were I Ernest Shackleton), I bring you this curious piece on unschooling.
“Unschooling” is a form of homeschooling, in which the kids get to direct their own “education”. According to the article, there’s very little in the way of structure – children learn about what’s interesting to them, or they watch TV or play Xbox, whatever they prefer. Advocates say that unschooling is an antidote to the often static curricula and rigid devotion to rules found in most public schools. Skeptics argue that young kids lack the proper mindset and maturity to recognize that subjects that are important (basic math, science, and history) are not always “fun”. Indeed, with American students falling behind the rest of the world in knowledge of the hard sciences, the idea of unschooling seems even more ridiculous than having undereducated parents attempting to homeschool their kids on complex subjects. Then again, I would argue that if the student in question were in his or her late teens/early twenties, one could take the unschooling concept, toss in an endless supply of cheap beer and/or bad weed, and rename the thing “college”.
There’s certainly a case to be made that the traditional method of schooling is not and should not be for all students, and that as a society we need to rethink our notions of “success” and “education”; as my dad was fond of saying every time I brought home a “C” in math, the world needs ditchdiggers too. It seems to me, though, that unschooling is an inherently bad idea. Unless there’s money to be made playing Doom 3.
