Unschooling - We don't need no education.

[Quijibo69]

I would kill myself first before I would name my kid Jazz.

 

[Betonova]

I go to 4chan for college and I learn more than they teach than at SJW infected universities.

 

[Kumquat]

Exactly. What most people often don't realize or know, is that there are organizations and networks set up so that the parents have the fire lit under them to actually do the work, plus opportunities for the kids to socialize, participate in sports. To further elaborate on my post a couple pages back, there's a local homeschool organization where they have a tightly run ship and are in accordance with government rules. They even their own sports teams and participate in sports against other schools. Most of the families do end up sending their kids to school for the later years, so that way they can be better prepared for college. Of those, the kids/young adults I've seen from these particular families (half-homeschool/half-public school) have gone on to become nurses, doctors, CPAs, and one even taught English in Japan for a few years.

It's only when you get to these unschooling, "I dun' want the gub'ment to indoctrinate muh kids"-types where things completely break down. I saw more than a few at my previous job, where we'd have families of 5-6 kids come running in during the middle of the day and pretty much run rampant and messing up shit, and some who had no real concept of personal boundaries or an indoor voice.

But yeah, the American school system really sucks, but I think having at least some formal education (whether it be homeschooling through a professional homeschooling academy/organization, parochial, Montessori, private, or public) is better than nothing at all. I mean, shit, even the guy who wrote 'Eragon' had a highly structured homeschool education from what I remember, but it probably helped that his mother used to be a Montessori-style teacher.

Also, unschooling gives me bad flashbacks to 'Hathor the Cow-Goddess'.

Hit the nail right on the head. It's like... these parents mean well, I'm sure, but holy fuck this is not how you do things correctly.

Spoiler: All aboard the S.S. Powerlevel

My mother homeschooled me as a child. She tells me she did it because, when she was a kid, she was bullied mercilessly and she had a lot of bad experiences with it. She would tell me she used to be chased off the bus by kids, stalked at school by weirdos, and all manner of horrible shit. She basically said she didn't want to put me through any of that, and from what I hear and see on the news, it would not surprise me if stuff like that happened to other kids on a daily basis.

So again, I can understand their grievances, but the way my mother taught me was pretty much school, but at home. We woke up, had breakfast, then straight to lessons. An hour for English, an hour for math, etc... complete with homework and exams and tests. She even bought these fancy computer programs (well, fancy at the time) where we could do the work on the computer, the program calculated the grades and spit out report cards and shit. She treated it like actual school, and I respect her for that. She did whatever she could to try and make it as close to school as possible, and contrary to popular belief, I actually had a pretty sizeable social circle back then.

In high school she finally had me go to a private school, but even still, homeschooling can work if you do it right. These parents aren't doing it right.

 

[melty]

Also, unschooling gives me bad flashbacks to 'Hathor the Cow-Goddess'.

I forgot about her. Apparently she's still going, kind of

I'm going to post some if no one minds

Spoiler

Sure that sounds neat but where is, I don't know, some math maybe?

Unfortunately "being at peace with the world" doesn't pay the bills.

 

[Lalala]

I forgot about her. Apparently she's still going, kind of

I'm going to post some if no one minds

Spoiler

View attachment 150294

Sure that sounds neat but where is, I don't know, some math maybe?


View attachment 150295

Unfortunately "being at peace with the world" doesn't pay the bills.

This is basic 'understanding the world', a key component of the EYFS and beyond. This is not a learning milestone for children that age, it's a milestone for children younger than 2. You can put whatever flowery description you want on it, if your children are this old and only just forming an understanding of natural processes and the world around them then developmentally they're behind.
But hey you get to feel good so who cares right?

 

[MarvinTheParanoidAndroid]

I forgot about her. Apparently she's still going, kind of

I'm going to post some if no one minds

Spoiler

View attachment 150294

Sure that sounds neat but where is, I don't know, some math maybe?


View attachment 150295

Unfortunately "being at peace with the world" doesn't pay the bills.

Why is she always pregnant?

 

[Piga Dgrifm]

Here's Heather Dowdee's (cow goddess chick's) books.

https://www.amazon.com/Heather-Cushman-Dowdee/e/B00ITDE6KU

 

[Loxiozzz]

Why is she always pregnant?

Her unschooling didn't have sex ed included in its busy schedule

 

[Bassomatic]

Here's Heather Dowdee's (cow goddess chick's) books.

https://www.amazon.com/Heather-Cushman-Dowdee/e/B00ITDE6KU

I had to stop scrolling to vomit after the THIRD book she wrote on breast feeding in public.

 

[Piga Dgrifm]

I had to stop scrolling to vomit after the THIRD book she wrote on breast feeding in public.

The more people like this brag about how they're so brave or whatever to breastfeed openly, the more I think they're just exhibitionists.

 

[Jewelsmakerguy]

Why is she always pregnant?

Simple. It's the only way she can enroll new students.

 

[Piga Dgrifm]

Who wouldn't want a teacher who makes boob juice bread?

 

[Bassomatic]

The more people like this brag about how they're so brave or whatever to breastfeed openly, the more I think they're just exhibitionists.

That whole movement needs a thread imho.

 

[Jewelsmakerguy]

View attachment 150318
Who wouldn't want a teacher who makes boob juice bread?

Something tells me there's more than boob juice in that "bread" if their faces are any indication.

 

[Piga Dgrifm]

That whole movement needs a thread imho.

Made a thread for the Mothering forum, where a lot of them go to discuss this sort of thing: https://kiwifarms.net/threads/mothering-forum.25594/

 

[Phil Ken Sebben]

Sometimes I wonder why more people don't put pressure on pharmaceutical companies, since around a hundred years ago they prescribed heroin and opium as medicine for children. They should never be allowed to forget their mistakes and forever scrutinized by the public for the things they sell.

There's a difference between ignorance and willful harm. Back in the 1920's they had pitchers and the like with plates of radium in them. The idea being that it was supposed to "vitalize" the water and energize yourself. The only thing it gave people was cancer from the radiation but things like radiation and it's harm on people wasn't known back then. You could get opium from the drugstore. It came in convenient drops to take for a toothache. Or cocaine syrup for calming that nasty cough. People, including the pharmaceutical companies, didn't understand the chemistry or that it was dangerously addictive but considering that people have been using opium and it's byproducts for thousands of years there was really no reason why it would be seen as dangerous considering that people everywhere used it.

As late as the 1960's doctors were still prescribing cigarettes to people complaining about being nervous. Now it's rare to find a doctor that even smokes regularly.

Times change and our understanding of the world changes along with it. Now if doctors were prescribing cigarettes and opium today that would be a problem knowing what we know. But they don't so why should we punish the sins of the distant past simply because they didn't know better?

But getting back on point, I'm sure these kids will grow up to be fine examples of people with no real education, social skills or ability to work. Their parents are setting them up for a lifetime of disappointments not to mention welfare.

 

[Whiskey Foxtrot]

Yes, you took the words out of my mouth. I think a huge chunk of public education (the US version at least) is completely useless and basically exists to give parents a place to stash their kids to keep them from getting in trouble while the parents are at work. Let's be honest, who here uses the Geometry equations they learned in 10th grade as part of their everyday life or job? Once you get past basic reading and math, most of the stuff you 'learn' is never actually used in the real world or in a future job. Kids take it in, then regurgitate it onto a test and forget about it. And school, especially middle/high school here in the US, is notorious for being hellish with bullying and such.

So I can see where some of these parents are coming from... why not get rid of that compulsory fluff and let kids learn things they actually want to remember? I think they're tempted by stories of people like Bill Gates, who ditched schoolwork to pursue his real interests and turned himself into a computer genius. Maybe their little kid is a genius in the making too, they just need to let him pursue his true passion in life!

What they neglect to remember is that humans are lazy shitbags content to put in the least possible amount of effort to scrape by, and little Johnny's 'true passion' is probably going to end up being WoW instead of neuroscience.

TBH, I think that we, as a culture, are so obsessed with practicality that children and adults alike forget (or never realise in the first place) that the entire purpose of education is to broaden your mind by looking at the world from different perspectives, regardless of whether or not that information has any direct, applicable use. It's the presentation and delivery of the material that's the problem (on top of the larger societal problem of schools being used as places to dump your offspring) , not the material itself. All of the subjects taught at school -- whether they be arts, humanities or sciences -- are united in that they all seek to better understand the world we live in, and serve as tools for us to get just a little bit closer to the truth of what we are and what we're doing.

And that's one of the stupidest things about unschooling: it seems like it wants to address the failures of an education system that doesn't always adequately provide or deliver an education, in theory, but in reality you get unschooling parents who are terrible, crazy or both, and they may as well have packed their kids off to the shittiest school imaginable for all the good their chosen "methods" do. Illiterate at 8, WTF.

This thread is a masterpiece: http://www.mothering.com/forum/439-unschooling/1350806-feel-like-ru-has-ruined-my-life.html

Like, take this chick. It's no wonder her daughter is bored and disengaged when her education basically boils down to rote memorisation and regurgitation. This mum doesn't know why her kid doesn't want to learn, even though the best she's got to offer are tedious sit-down discussions, dry teaching resources and flashcards. It's learning with all the joy and life sucked out of it. Her kid isn't interested in writing short stories or learning Spanish because her mind is probably a mental wasteland. When even the mum doesn't seem to understand the point of learning, how can her kids be expected to?

 

[Trilby]

In Australia at least, home schooling often happens simply because people who live in remote areas don't have physical access to a school. However, while the children are still very dependant on their parents for their education, there is a considerable degree of organisation, much of it government planned, run, and subsidised. And from what I understand, it's pretty common for these kids to be sent to boarding school in their late teens as well, both to give them an idea of socialising, and also to give them at least a few years free of chasing cattle and in many Aboriginal communities, a few years away from violence and crushing poverty.

It sounds weird, but this unschooling keeps putting me in mind of Scientology, even though the kids are often kept under such control and regulated to the point where even North Koreans would think it too harsh. I think it's another example of a social horseshoe; you've the unschoolers on one end and the Scientologists on the other, and they're so similar in their insanity that the line is curving in on itself.

There's a report that I read years ago that discussed a woman whose baby had drunk some kind of poisonous household fluid. I can't find the thing now, but from what I remember this raging fucktard who should never have been allowed to breed in the first place woman was a Scientologist and believed that all children were born knowing everything from their first life, and didn't need supervision or child proofing. So the woman had left the poison out in the open where the toddler was crawling about because she thought that the toddler would know not to drink the fluid. The woman was quoted as saying something along the lines of not being able to understand why her toddler would want to do something so dangerous when it should have known otherwise.

Think an unschooler would see drinking toxic fluid as one of those great life experiences?

I've no doubt.

Unschooling is yet another show of contempt from willingly ignorant clowns who think that science is just people in white coats in a white room causing cancer in rats, or that roads and buildings appear as if by magic... I don't get unschooling. I really don't. I fucking hated school for good fucking reasons, but it was one of those things that had to be done. Where do the unschoolers think that engineers in their infinite diversity come from? Do they really think that showing their children pictures of a cow will teach them all they need to know where their food comes from? How the hell do they expect their kids to be doctors, accountants, lawyers, builders, farmers, mechanics, graphic designers, or even build those computers that unschoolers are using so happily?

These people are essentially recreating the conditions that Western children were raised in less than a hundred years ago. But the arguably worst thing is that even though so many men and women back then couldn't read or write, they were effectively working from the time they could walk, and never stopped working until something stopped them. In impoverished countries all around the world today, that's still happening. And the results of this are often... unpleasant.

But unschoolers in the Western world are raising children who are both uneducated and used to being fed and provided for by others. :powerlevel: My career to date has been in the infrastructure and primary industry sciences. Both sides of my family are lousy with farmers, soldiers and engineers. I've met people who've done double master's degrees in needful subjects that still have no fucking idea where their water comes from. Hint: it's not the fucking tap. So when you combine children with no education at all. in a society where even the most basic of things is taken for granted to the extent that the majority of the population has no idea how pretty much everything is made, where they can exploit and cheat a system that can't even properly support children and people from genuinely deprived backgrounds.

The fuck is this shit?

It's miserable people wanting to live miserable lives, day to day, year after year, century by century, millennium to millennium.

The last time we had kids not receiving education was the child labor days.

I'll let you note that the child labor kids really wanted that kind of education.

Those children lived such miserable Dickensian lives, nothing would ever change it.

 

[Valkorion]

This is generally another example of how exceptional parents can be when it comes to raising their children. Please note that I do not hold any ill will towards my parents, because I've always experienced them as sane. I'm writing this because parents like the ones shown here generally piss me off.

Over the course of history, parents have often found ways to royally fuck up their children, all while claiming that everything they do, no matter how exceptional/dumb/cruel, is "for their own good". For a long period (and still today, but not as openly) the preferred method was beating the shit out of the children and manitpulating them emotionally. Now one can claim that the generation that experienced this was more resilient and less spoiled than today's, but that was because society was much harsher back then and did not tolerate any deviance, and especially not criticism of one's own parents. Only now people are coming out about the psychological damage this form of parenting has done. People back then just had to suck it up and live with it because they had no other choice, but many people coming from this generation are in fact deeply fucked up.

Later on, parents became overly protective of their children and started shielding them from the harshness of real life. These parents screwd up their children by robbing them of the ability to function independently and, like those mentioned above, made them very docile, constantly having to fear the authority of their parents looming over them. While the children of the first example were usually driven by avoiding punishment, the "helicopter parents'" children will constantly feel the need to ask for permission to do anything.

Then we have excessive coddling and not giving any limits. This doesn't need to be discussed here, CWC is a very good example of what this leads to.

Then we have homeschoolers who try to shield children from anything that doesn't gel with their (the parents') ideology, thus indoctrinating them, anti-vaxxers who think that vaccinatinations cause autism () or are against God or some other bullshit reason, and would rather have their child suffer a potentially fatal infection.


And then there's this. This is literally the stupidest thing I've ever heard. They don't teach their children jack shit? Yeah, great. These children might as well have been born with a debilitating disorder that causes mental retardation. These parents are actively creating retards. The kids won't even be flipping burgers at McDonald's. The result of this will only be complete dumbasses, unable to contribute anything to society.

Sorry for the rant. It just ticks me off when parents fuck up their children so hard.

 

[Hummingbird]

I forgot about her. Apparently she's still going, kind of

I'm going to post some if no one minds

Spoiler

View attachment 150294

Sure that sounds neat but where is, I don't know, some math maybe?


View attachment 150295

Unfortunately "being at peace with the world" doesn't pay the bills.

It's been years since she's done a comic; I wonder how her kids are doing.

Admittedly, the deplorable conditions on the reserves are partially the fault of the people living on them. They have a tendency to protest against anything the government offers except free money and land. The kind of people who when they want clean water in their communities they'll ask the government to give them water. They'll offer to have government workers install a new plumbing system, and maybe a government run water treatment facility on the reserve. The people living on the reserve will then refuse this option and instead ask for the money to fix the problem.

There's an obscure instance of someone wanting to build a golf course on land that went unused for years, unaware that the land belonged to Native Americans, the guy was able to purchase the land and started turning it into a golf course. The Natives protested this, and ended up getting the land back from the man in the state that it was in (partially turned into a golf course) with the intention of continuing the work and turning it into a Native run golf course. They ended up leaving the land unused again.

The residential schools are one of those things that every Canadian knows about, since it's something that's required to be taught in schools (hey, that ties in to this thread!), so it always seems a little weird when people refer to the schools as a dark part of their history that the canadian government is trying to forget. It's like when someone mentions slavery in the United States in an effort to gain sympathy for minorities, then refers to it as a part of history that most Americans are unfamiliar with.

Sometimes I wonder why more people don't put pressure on pharmaceutical companies, since around a hundred years ago they prescribed heroin and opium as medicine for children. They should never be allowed to forget their mistakes and forever scrutinized by the public for the things they sell.

It's sad how some people can get so wrapped up in at looking at the past that they can't see what's going on in front of them.

The FPlus has a episode of stuff from Mothering.com that they read out to you. (Jump to 36:00 to get to the unschooling section.) Prepare to be mad at how lousy these moms are on the subject.