Unschooling

[Maggots on a Train v2]

For ever one parent who could successfully implement it, there are 100 Cecily Ks. And once they start utterly fucking up their children, they will be too stupid to notice, or too proud to admit it.

 

[Fagbag]

Andrew Carnegie

It's funny because when you made the assertion that most of the world's geniuses have been self taught, Carnegie was literally the only example I could think of off the top of my head.
Carnegie is the exception to the exceptional.
SOME kids might have a natural inclination to learn, but definitely not most of them, and even those that do need structure and direction.
Kids don't teach themselves practical skills, they teach themselves about whatever catches their interest. Like fucking dinosaurs, trains, and the animal kingdom.

You're retarded. Your kid is going to be at least half as retarded as you are.
If you want them to make what little they have of your awful genes, make sure that their education is entrusted to someone else.

 

[keyboredsm4shthe2nd]

I agree to a certain degree. Have you been forced to endure common core and test obsession in modern schools? Even to a third grader it makes daddy's shotgun look mighty tasty.

 

[WhoBusTank69]

Just like regular schooling there's too many variables to account for in asserting that unschooling is either superior or worse in comparison to anything else. The major problem in this is that public schooling is becoming increasingly terrible for a myriad of reasons including funding, the incentive for increased funding, unions keeping poor teachers employed, shitty/absent parents raising shitty kids, etc. which skews the theoretical favor towards anything involving homeschooling.
I can agree with one of the earlier posts in that the 3rd grade to 8th grade gap is immensely important to personal development suited well for homeschooling, and that the schoolyard environment is absolutely exhausting whether it can be blamed on socializing and bullying or an increased focus on useless standardized tests. Middle school/Junior High is such a fucking nightmare for almost everyone with puberty kicking in that I wouldn't blame parents for homeschooling during just that three-year period.

 

[ES 195]

Unschooling sounds really stupid. Even if the child is gifted or whatever and learns almost everything they're supposed to by choice they're still going to avoid some subjects they don't like or are bad at and you would gambling on if that's something stupid like interpreting poetry or something important like math or science.

 

[Gravityqueen4life]

home schooling feels so alien too me every time i hear it since i was raised in a socialist country were that sort of thing was un-heard off. if you even tried doing it here, the state would take your kids away and you be charged with child abuse.

 

[UQ 770]

So what real school provides in contrast is an inescapable lesson on how shitty the world is. Public education teaches us that the world will force you to pass a test or it will ruin your life, the world will force you to attend something against your will or it will ruin your life, the world will expend way more energy that its worth to punish you for breaking its rules.

As someone who did go through K-12 I can confirm that this is really the only thing I actually learned in school, that the system is just there to defeat you and keep you occupied for six hours a day. Just about everything else I learned on my own through books and documentaries and later on the internet. It follows that I was bored out of my skull most of the time in school. The rest of the time I was stressing out about how shit everything was. I think this way of controlling people is starting to break down though, because we're seeing an uptick in stuff like suicide and drug abuse where most people go "Well, if this is what life in the real world is about, to hell with it." With the rise of the internet, its becoming easier for the average person to see how empty and monotonous life is, especially if you do everything you're supposed to.

I don't really see how something like unschooling/homeschooling is going to work any better. You're going to get a society of completely depressed addicts one way or the other when they get out into the real world and find that human contact is miserable and you need to spend at least 8 hours a day doing something you hate. I guess the best thing any of us can do is sit on our hands and wait for robots to save our ass, but I doubt we'll get that far before society implodes.

 

[Duke Nukem]

I agree to a certain degree. Have you been forced to endure common core and test obsession in modern schools? Even to a third grader it makes daddy's shotgun look mighty tasty.

I've been saying it for years, the real reason for the current public school system is to keep kids off the streets. That's literally all it's good for these days.

These moronic common core and "study for the test you need to pass to take the other test" things are doing very little to teach our youths about, well, anything, really. We still use the Prussian model in public education (K-12) and it was designed to produce factory drones for the Industrial Revolution, not well adjusted young adults who know how to innovate and produce new exciting technologies for the world to invest in. A lot of people who are passionate about certain subjects lose all interest because of the one size fits all mentality and the watered down, bland nature of public education. They also enforce this idea that if you fuck up now, you're fucked forever. And we're not even getting into the problems of forcing a thousand people who don't necessarily like each other into a relatively small space.

I can see where unschooling advocates are coming from, but I have to concur that most parents are too dumb to make it work. It's great for some kids but many others, yeah, good luck doing anything other than flipping burgers your whole life.

 

[UQ 770]

I've been saying it for years, the real reason for the current public school system is to keep kids off the streets. That's literally all it's good for these days.

I was, as a child, given a mountain of shit for comparing school to prison. A few years after I graduated they installed hermetic doors and a buzzer system. I guess I got the last laugh in the end, no bars on the windows yet though.

These moronic common core and "study for the test you need to pass to take the other test" things are doing very little to teach our youths about, well, anything, really. We still use the Prussian model in public education (K-12) and it was designed to produce factory drones for the Industrial Revolution, not well adjusted young adults who know how to innovate and produce new exciting technologies for the world to invest in. A lot of people who are passionate about certain subjects lose all interest because of the one size fits all mentality and the watered down, bland nature of public education. They also enforce this idea that if you fuck up now, you're fucked forever. And we're not even getting into the problems of forcing a thousand people who don't necessarily like each other into a relatively small space.

I also think its not very healthy to just continuously pound "THE REAL WORLD" into kid's heads over and over again since even in grade school the thought of having to work a boring office job made me want to just give up on everything. I think Middle School/Junior High is a time where a lot of kids just absolutely shut down partially because of puberty but also because the realization sets in that, no, the rest of your life is not going to be fun.

I still think the modern work environment and shift schedules are unsustainable because they were designed in an era where you could buy meth, cocaine and heroin over the counter. I'm reasonably certain that if you coked me up I probably could work a 12-hr shift without even thinking about it. Then we realized that was destroying people, so we banned the drugs, but any reasonably well-paying job still expects you to just have no life and rent out 90% of your head to it. Its just not possible anymore.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

It's funny because when you made the assertion that most of the world's geniuses have been self taught, Carnegie was literally the only example I could think of off the top of my head.
Carnegie is the exception to the exceptional.
SOME kids might have a natural inclination to learn, but definitely not most of them, and even those that do need structure and direction.
Kids don't teach themselves practical skills, they teach themselves about whatever catches their interest. Like fucking dinosaurs, trains, and the animal kingdom.

You're exceptional. Your kid is going to be at least half as exceptional as you are.
If you want them to make what little they have of your awful genes, make sure that their education is entrusted to someone else.

List of autodidacts - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

Ive tried to limit my list to people who didn’t have any more than a few years of formal childhood education, but I haven’t checked each individual person:

Benjamin Franklin
Michael Faraday
Frankly Lloyd Wright
Gustave Eiffel
Leonardo da Vinci
John Smeaton
Thomas Alva Edison
Konstantin Tsiolkovsky
Henry Ford
Melanie Klein
Francis Edgeworth
Oliver Heaviside
Charles Darwin
Blaise Pascal
Michael Faraday
George Boole
Andre-Marie Ampere
Antonie can Leeuwenhoek
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
Eliezer Yudkowsky
Eric Hoffer

“That’s the only one I can think of” says more about you than about homeschooling. Not to mention the scores who probably went to school but didn’t learn anything while there.

Lastly, you, like half the people responding, apparently have some shitty reading comprehension. I’m not going to bother rebutting your points because I’ve already done so multiple times to other people. Go back and read the thread again. You get an F.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

I've been saying it for years, the real reason for the current public school system is to keep kids off the streets. That's literally all it's good for these days.

These moronic common core and "study for the test you need to pass to take the other test" things are doing very little to teach our youths about, well, anything, really. We still use the Prussian model in public education (K-12) and it was designed to produce factory drones for the Industrial Revolution, not well adjusted young adults who know how to innovate and produce new exciting technologies for the world to invest in. A lot of people who are passionate about certain subjects lose all interest because of the one size fits all mentality and the watered down, bland nature of public education. They also enforce this idea that if you fuck up now, you're fucked forever. And we're not even getting into the problems of forcing a thousand people who don't necessarily like each other into a relatively small space.

I can see where unschooling advocates are coming from, but I have to concur that most parents are too dumb to make it work. It's great for some kids but many others, yeah, good luck doing anything other than flipping burgers your whole life.

The worst problem I’ve ever heard of with the new system is their Nu Math. They teach the children exactly one way to do it and count it as wrong if they do it another way. The thing is, the new methods violate the Properties of Algebra. When x + y = a, the teacher will claim y + x = b.

I have a hunch that the system is deliberately designed to depress the scores of the lighter races, bring parity by reducing everybody else rather than bringing Black scores up.

They’re also banned; now; from punishing certain students. They straight up can’t do anything. That alone has completely torpedoed the value of public school, rendered it lawless. Private school is still fine, but public school is a lost cause even for those without much academic potential.

The biggest problem I have with the idea of unschooling growing is that parents are fucking awful at judging their own children’s abilities. Damn near everybody I’ve met has thought that their kids were lazy geniuses, some of them when the child was an idiot.

 

[UQ 770]

“That’s the only one I can think of” says more about you than about homeschooling. Not to mention the scores who probably went to school but didn’t learn anything while there.

It doesn't really disprove anything in your arguement, but I think its worth noting that a lot of people on that list were born in an era where being an autodidact was one of the only ways you could actually get an education unless your family was absolutely loaded.

I have a hunch that the system is deliberately designed to depress the scores of the lighter races, bring parity by reducing everybody else rather than bringing Black scores up.

They’re also banned; now; from punishing certain students. They straight up can’t do anything. That alone has completely torpedoed the value of public school, rendered it lawless. Private school is still fine, but public school is a lost cause even for those without much academic potential.

This is total paranoia, the racial issues public schooling faces are related to the trouble educators actually have in engaging with students of different ethnic backgrounds. For instance, in my area anyone who lacked a decent command of the English language was basically just dumped in with the speds when most of them were of average intelligence at worst. Having a functioning brain but being treated like a tard would make anyone give up and tune out, if they could even follow along due to having ESL. Even to born Americans like inner city blacks, they have different standards and dialects than stuffy suburbanite whites, hence why we see inner city schools performing much better when the teachers are black.

I don't believe segregated classrooms are the answer here though, I've always been an advocate of trying to create a more flexible educational program that gives students a bit more freedom to decide what they want to do. Currently there are a lot of kids trapped in the system who are dumb as stumps because they got hit by the sped train and dragged all the way to the gutter.

Further, identity poltics are a total demon in this situation. The same way you worry that whites are being deliberately targeted in some kind of conspiracy to make them dumber, you can go on Twitter right now and see people on the other side of the color bar complaining that public education is a conspiracy by whitey to make the black race into tards. The real conspiracy is that schools are factories designed to churn out grades and government funding. Any kind of discrimination or fuckery with identity politics or rewarding poor students with fake grades is based on that. Unless you find a real ideologue in the system, the rest of these assholes are just trying to make a paycheck.

I'm sure one thing kids of white and ethnic households share is that they both really fucking hate school.

The biggest problem I have with the idea of unschooling growing is that parents are fucking awful at judging their own children’s abilities. Damn near everybody I’ve met has thought that their kids were lazy geniuses, some of them when the child was an idiot.

Its a difficult call to make because intelligent people tend to not be terribly social. Refer back to your list of autodidacts; most or all of them were known for having weird personalities or being gigantic assholes. Someone's seemingly idiot kid could be a math wizard . Personally I think a possible solution to this would be a comprehensive set of exams and tests given to kids before they get too far into their education. If they score very high on certain subjects, it may be a good idea to start pruning off some of the shit no-one cares about.

This is just an aside became I'm full of them, but also the parents of children who really are geniuses tend to not talk about it, because often having such a powerful mind at such a young age drives them mad. It becomes a thing to be hidden and rarely discussed, and generally parents of really intelligent children report suffering from intense stress. Another reason we need formalized testing to detect this stuff sooner rather than later.

 

[Queen Elizabeth II]

I was homeschooled, and considering I later gained several post graduate qualifications I'd say my level of education was fairly decent.

Homeschooling has the potential to be far superior to state schooling, considering you literally can have one to one attention, but also far worse. In my case my parents chose it for practicality, we never stayed in one place for very long and being relatively conservative they were afraid if I went to an international school I would "lose" our culture; I needed to be learning in our language, learning our history and traditions etc. At the time I thought it was strange, and despite learning them I don't follow most of them myself, but now I feel as if I was given something very precious, an option very few get, something if I ever had children I would feel duty bound to ensure they got as well.

I was not "Unschooled". The relative who was my teacher was a very highly qualified and intelligent woman who took the curriculum of our home country, added a few things she thought would be essential or culturally significant in where we moved to, and gave me a very strict timetable and course of study. I did the same things that others in private and state ran schools did, but far more as well and in less time since my "school day" was from 7am to midday. That might sound early, but that was to replicate the discipline and routine element that schools try to instill and for me that worked.

We also joined a type of informal union for other homeschoolers; and this is where I got to see where homeschooling is very poor. Most homeschoolers there did so for religious reasons; they couldn't find a single sex school for their girls, they believed the Earth was flat etc. These kids were just taught utter shit and beyond being able to recite sections of the Koran/Torah from memory had basically no other skills of note. There were also the hippie parents who did this "Johnny is just so gifted, he chooses what to learn" stuff, and while their little darling (often aspie darling) was the most informed person you could ever meet on a single niche topic was ignorant of everything else. I'm saying Johnny because I did know one guy in this group who I kept contact with for a while who knew everything that was worth knowing about World War II history, but who at the age of twenty literally could not count past seven and had devised this strange system of reciting specific dates of deaths and battle from the Second World War to give the impression he could, despite not actually understanding what was meant by "give me nine of x" . I'm not even joking.

The only thing I think was lacking in my curriculum was the social element; despite living somewhere for several years I retained a clearly foreign accent and never really integrated or made friends with the local children (I hung around with other kids in the church who came from the same place as my family). This would have been fairly easily solved by joining say a soccer club at the weekend or even a church youth group. It was never a "problem", but just an area for improvement really.

Just my $0.02. Teaching your kid personally if you've got more than a couple of brain cells to rub together is obviously going to be better than sending them off to some random fuckwit fresh from university with a degree in hair dressing trying to corral thirty-to-forty other little darlings unless the aforementioned fuckwit is actually smarter than you.

 

[Crunchy Leaf]

List of autodidacts - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

Ive tried to limit my list to people who didn’t have any more than a few years of formal childhood education, but I haven’t checked each individual person:

Benjamin Franklin
Michael Faraday
Frankly Lloyd Wright
Gustave Eiffel
Leonardo da Vinci
John Smeaton
Thomas Alva Edison
Konstantin Tsiolkovsky
Henry Ford
Melanie Klein
Francis Edgeworth
Oliver Heaviside
Charles Darwin
Blaise Pascal
Michael Faraday
George Boole
Andre-Marie Ampere
Antonie can Leeuwenhoek
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
Eliezer Yudkowsky
Eric Hoffer

“That’s the only one I can think of” says more about you than about homeschooling. Not to mention the scores who probably went to school but didn’t learn anything while there.

Lastly, you, like half the people responding, apparently have some shitty reading comprehension. I’m not going to bother rebutting your points because I’ve already done so multiple times to other people. Go back and read the thread again. You get an F.

Really, putting Eliezer Yudkowsky on a list with Leonardo da Vinci? And da Vinci did have a formal education--he became a studio boy and then an apprentice. Likewise, after Ben Franklin left public school, he too became an apprentice. This is different from homeschooling unless the parents happened to be skilled in a particular trade, and the majority of Western parents in 2019 are not.

A lot of unschooling parents think it's great if their kids do nothing but play vidya all day and that it's extremely educational. They think their kids are totally gonna learn Japanese because of how much they love Japanese games.

 

[Slap47]

> Looks at Andrew Carnegie
> One of the greatest industrialists in world history
> Created the US steel industry, made a fantastic fortune, gave most of it away out of generosity
> Considered a model for titans of industry even to this day
> Didn't have a formal education
> Taught himself through hard work, self-motivation, reading books in a library

He lived during an age where most people didn't have any kind of formal schooling.

Genius level people would probably benefit from a structured education. Carnegie was basically the apprentice of an already successful rail tycoon afterall.

Is is really an example of unschooling? He was basically the product of child labor and he was lucky as his boss wasn't an insane person who made him mine coal naked.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

It doesn't really disprove anything in your arguement, but I think its worth noting that a lot of people on that list were born in an era where being an autodidact was one of the only ways you could actually get an education unless your family was absolutely loaded.

I bring them up mainly as an argument that great men can and do tend to rely mainly on themselves and their willingness to seek out knowledge from others.

This is total paranoia, the racial issues public schooling faces are related to the trouble educators actually have in engaging with students of different ethnic backgrounds. For instance, in my area anyone who lacked a decent command of the English language was basically just dumped in with the speds when most of them were of average intelligence at worst. Having a functioning brain but being treated like a tard would make anyone give up and tune out, if they could even follow along due to having ESL. Even to born Americans like inner city blacks, they have different standards and dialects than stuffy suburbanite whites, hence why we see inner city schools performing much better when the teachers are black.

I don't disagree with any of that. It's just that we know Blacks (for whatever reasons) tend to score poorly and Whites tend to score well (relatively speaking). There's always this push to try to close the gap.

Well, you can close the gap by improving things for the Blacks... or you can depress everybody down to the same level of shitiness. It's kind of like when Blacks continually violate certain misdemeanors in cities (like not paying fares on buses), so they just get rid of the misdemeanor.

Or the schools do what they do out of stupidity. Most of these problems seem to stem from the Department of Education having been created. The idea of having a standardized curriculum for a nation where people move from state to state frequently makes sense. But, it invited the bureaucrats and the professors (there are a LOT of education professors who have never actually taught children) to start imposing their shitty ideas on the actual teachers. Trying to make education more professionalized and "scientific" seems to have only made it worse.

Speaking of Blacks feeling more comfortable among their own, I'm totally on board with teaching AAVE in Black-majority schools. The school systems ought to encourage fostering the native cultures of the area (Cajun, Black, Gullah, Chicano, Appalachian, whatever it is) over subjugating the students to a national monoculture.

Further, identity poltics are a total demon in this situation. The same way you worry that whites are being deliberately targeted in some kind of conspiracy to make them dumber, you can go on Twitter right now and see people on the other side of the color bar complaining that public education is a conspiracy by whitey to make the black race into tards. The real conspiracy is that schools are factories designed to churn out grades and government funding. Any kind of discrimination or fuckery with identity politics or rewarding poor students with fake grades is based on that. Unless you find a real ideologue in the system, the rest of these assholes are just trying to make a paycheck.

I'm sure one thing kids of white and ethnic households share is that they both really fucking hate school.

To Blacks everything is a conspiracy by the White to destroy them, which would have been true sixty years ago, but if anything they've become more paranoid and hostile since then rather than less.

Deals with the Feds (the same is true, to a lesser extent, of the states) always turn out bad in the long run. They use money as a weapon. They give it as a gift to state and county governments, and then once they get the state/county dependent on it, they threaten to take it away if they don't comply.

Its a difficult call to make because intelligent people tend to not be terribly social. Refer back to your list of autodidacts; most or all of them were known for having weird personalities or being gigantic assholes. Someone's seemingly idiot kid could be a math wizard . Personally I think a possible solution to this would be a comprehensive set of exams and tests given to kids before they get too far into their education. If they score very high on certain subjects, it may be a good idea to start pruning off some of the shit no-one cares about.

This is just an aside became I'm full of them, but also the parents of children who really are geniuses tend to not talk about it, because often having such a powerful mind at such a young age drives them mad. It becomes a thing to be hidden and rarely discussed, and generally parents of really intelligent children report suffering from intense stress. Another reason we need formalized testing to detect this stuff sooner rather than later.

This seems like a fine idea. Essentially exempting students from some aspects of the state's system, subject to permission from a board of educators.

He lived during an age where most people didn't have any kind of formal schooling.

Genius level people would probably benefit from a structured education. Carnegie was basically the apprentice of an already successful rail tycoon afterall.

Is is really an example of unschooling? He was basically the product of child labor and he was lucky as his boss wasn't an insane person who made him mine coal naked.

I think a lot of genius types would benefit from structure in some form that's less like public schooling and more like tutoring. Of course, that runs into a cost issue. Rich men can afford to pay for tutors for anything. Middle class men have to make do with private school. Poor men probably can't afford anything but public school. I don't see unschooling as being incompatible with having a teacher, but there's a different structure there that makes the experience fundamentally different. I had a saxophone tutor (once a week) when I was young and going to see him felt totally different than going to Music class once a week in grade school.

Carnegie wasn't what I'd call unschooled; like you said, he was a child laborer. But he's an example of a willingness to learn on your own. Not everybody has that (thus the need for compulsory school for most people), but some people get more mileage out of reading on their own than sitting in classroom lectures.

Really, putting Eliezer Yudkowsky on a list with Leonardo da Vinci? And da Vinci did have a formal education--he became a studio boy and then an apprentice. Likewise, after Ben Franklin left public school, he too became an apprentice. This is different from homeschooling unless the parents happened to be skilled in a particular trade, and the majority of Western parents in 2019 are not.

A lot of unschooling parents think it's great if their kids do nothing but play vidya all day and that it's extremely educational. They think their kids are totally gonna learn Japanese because of how much they love Japanese games.

I think (not sure) Leonardo achieved a fair bit as an architect/scientist/inventor that he didn't have formal training in.

I'm in favor of apprenticeship as an idea, anyways. The modern equivalent of it basically being the trade school.

 

[UQ 770]

This seems like a fine idea. Essentially exempting students from some aspects of the state's system, subject to permission from a board of educators.

It scares the shit out of people whenever I suggest it, but we really should just have a program where we isolate out all the little narcissists and psychopaths and figure out how to teach them to use their massive egos for something constructive. This idea has also been suggested by more left-leaning figures as a way to solve bullying, which I actually agree with. Telling a kid that they're smart and perceptive and then locking them in a cage with a bunch of tards is just going to make them despise our species even more.

 

[Crunchy Leaf]

I bring them up mainly as an argument that great men can and do tend to rely mainly on themselves and their willingness to seek out knowledge from others.



I don't disagree with any of that. It's just that we know Blacks (for whatever reasons) tend to score poorly and Whites tend to score well (relatively speaking). There's always this push to try to close the gap.

Well, you can close the gap by improving things for the Blacks... or you can depress everybody down to the same level of shitiness. It's kind of like when Blacks continually violate certain misdemeanors in cities (like not paying fares on buses), so they just get rid of the misdemeanor.

Or the schools do what they do out of stupidity. Most of these problems seem to stem from the Department of Education having been created. The idea of having a standardized curriculum for a nation where people move from state to state frequently makes sense. But, it invited the bureaucrats and the professors (there are a LOT of education professors who have never actually taught children) to start imposing their shitty ideas on the actual teachers. Trying to make education more professionalized and "scientific" seems to have only made it worse.

Speaking of Blacks feeling more comfortable among their own, I'm totally on board with teaching AAVE in Black-majority schools. The school systems ought to encourage fostering the native cultures of the area (Cajun, Black, Gullah, Chicano, Appalachian, whatever it is) over subjugating the students to a national monoculture.



To Blacks everything is a conspiracy by the White to destroy them, which would have been true sixty years ago, but if anything they've become more paranoid and hostile since then rather than less.

Deals with the Feds (the same is true, to a lesser extent, of the states) always turn out bad in the long run. They use money as a weapon. They give it as a gift to state and county governments, and then once they get the state/county dependent on it, they threaten to take it away if they don't comply.



This seems like a fine idea. Essentially exempting students from some aspects of the state's system, subject to permission from a board of educators.



I think a lot of genius types would benefit from structure in some form that's less like public schooling and more like tutoring. Of course, that runs into a cost issue. Rich men can afford to pay for tutors for anything. Middle class men have to make do with private school. Poor men probably can't afford anything but public school. I don't see unschooling as being incompatible with having a teacher, but there's a different structure there that makes the experience fundamentally different. I had a saxophone tutor (once a week) when I was young and going to see him felt totally different than going to Music class once a week in grade school.

Carnegie wasn't what I'd call unschooled; like you said, he was a child laborer. But he's an example of a willingness to learn on your own. Not everybody has that (thus the need for compulsory school for most people), but some people get more mileage out of reading on their own than sitting in classroom lectures.



I think (not sure) Leonardo achieved a fair bit as an architect/scientist/inventor that he didn't have formal training in.

I'm in favor of apprenticeship as an idea, anyways. The modern equivalent of it basically being the trade school.

White people score better because white people on average have higher incomes. The children of rich Nigerian immigrants will do better than the child of someone from the hollers of Kentucky.

Middle class men have to make do with private school? I don't know where you come from, but where I come from, middle class people don't send their kids to private school unless they get a lot of scholarship money or it's a Catholic school. Private school is not the norm.

Most kids aren't geniuses and therefore their unique educational needs aren't relevant to an overall discussion on unschooling. This is a problem I see a lot on parenting forums discussing education. A child growing up in a household where their parents are married, native English speakers, college educated, and nerdy will do better in school than a child who does not have those advantages. That doesn't make your child a genius. This is why you hear about 'gifted' kids getting to college and becoming a total failure--they weren't truly gifted to begin with. True giftedness is rare.

 

[XYZpdq]

I dunno.
I encounter a few people who brag about doing it and they seem kinda dumb.
Then I hear about random things from public schooling and they seem a lot dumb and fairly often sex offenders and filled with a bunch of goddamn normies for the rest of the kids so I can't really blame the parents who are only kinda dumb.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

White people score better because white people on average have higher incomes. The children of rich Nigerian immigrants will do better than the child of someone from the hollers of Kentucky.

Middle class men have to make do with private school? I don't know where you come from, but where I come from, middle class people don't send their kids to private school unless they get a lot of scholarship money or it's a Catholic school. Private school is not the norm.

Most kids aren't geniuses and therefore their unique educational needs aren't relevant to an overall discussion on unschooling. This is a problem I see a lot on parenting forums discussing education. A child growing up in a household where their parents are married, native English speakers, college educated, and nerdy will do better in school than a child who does not have those advantages. That doesn't make your child a genius. This is why you hear about 'gifted' kids getting to college and becoming a total failure--they weren't truly gifted to begin with. True giftedness is rare.

Private school's not the norm for middle class families where I'm at either, but it's a thing that's obtainable for middle class families (with a lot of sacrifice). We also have cheap, shitty Protestant private schools. I don't know what the quality of their education is, but I'm skeptical of any school who's purpose is primarily religious indoctrination as opposed to high quality education.

I don't see why "this is a thing some people might consider under some circumstances" isn't relevant. I've never, from my first post, been arguing for general implementation of unschooling. And, as I've been reading more, I've come to realize that what I have in my mind is less like unschooling and more of a looser form of home schooling.

Gifted students can fail for many reasons. I'm sure you're familiar with how really high-IQ people tend to not amount to much. There's important traits that people need beyond just intelligence or even beyond intelligence and creativity.

This is a bit of a digression on my part, but one thing I've noticed is that just because somebody is more advanced at a certain stage in their life, that doesn't mean they'll stay that way... and that goes beyond just life becoming more competitive. It's kind of like some kids get a big boost in their mental maturity at an early age, which makes them look like a genius, but... it just never keeps growing. It's sort of like if two people had similar levels of potential that they converge towards, but one starts on it way faster. They still end up with similar outcomes[/QUOTE]