6 ms·

As an unschooler who went to school and did "homework" or any kind of "schoolwork" for the first time when I was 12, it took me about a month to catch up to my

by nibs 10y ago

As an unschooler who went to school and did "homework" or any kind of "schoolwork" for the first time when I was 12, it took me about a month to catch up to my peers in terms of abilities to do the coursework, and about a year to catch up to my peers in resentment and disengagement. Except I got to spend seven years hanging out with my brothers doing fun stuff and my friends had to spend it training to be slaves. There is no reason for the strange masochism that is mass schooling. It is not productive, does not produce smarter or more learned people.

hmottestad 10y ago
"It is not productive, does not produce smarter or more learned people." I would like to disagree, but I don't have anything to back up my claim that mass schooling makes people smarter or more learned. Like you, I just have anecdotes. But one thing is for sure. I would never have gotten to where I am today. If I hadn't learned english at school. Having lived in two countries, neither of which had english as a native language, I would unlikely have learned english unless it had been taught at school
- hmottestad 10y ago
  Also, from one time when I was a temp at a primary school for 2 weeks. I saw a kid who had come to Norway at the age of 10 or so, and now one year later he could still not add double digit numbers. Worse yet, he didn't see how a problem could be solved by adding two numbers. So problems along the lines of "I have two apples, you give me three, how many do I have now?" where beyond his ability to solve without assistance. He did however manage to learn quite good Norwegian in that year.
- guard-of-terra 10y ago
  "I would unlikely have learned english unless it had been taught at school" You could as well play a lot of video games in English and dabbling in programming. That's how I learned. Everybody who relied on school for learning English - still barely understand it.
  - saint_fiasco 10y ago
    I don't know why this is being downvoted. Teaching a language to students with mixed levels of previous knowledge and motivation is extremely hard. The schools I went to could never manage it. I learned English from Japanese videogames that had been translated to English by Ted Woolsey.
    - oarsinsync 10y ago
      > I learned English from Japanese videogames <intentional snip> Did you set us up the bomb?
      - saint_fiasco 10y ago
        What you say !! I remember having an interesting discussion with my Spanglish-speaking friends about whether "All your base" was supposed to mean "your entire base" or "each and every one of your bases". My Engrish-speaking friend could immediately tell that the second interpretation was the correct one.
  - lukewrites 10y ago
    Out of curiosity, does this mean that you didn't have any English lessons in school? I ask because in the field of Second Language Acquisition there's a pretty strong consensus that the optimal path to language learning involves a combination of classroom instruction augmented by interaction with (reading, listening) & use of (speaking, writing) the language. I've spent most of my career as a language teacher, and the typical successful learner is one who isn't necessarily a language nerd, but almost always is someone who does some heavy lifting in the target language outside of class. I love students that have a goal for language use because they help me to target my instruction to bits of language that will be immediately useful to them. (One of the best jobs I had was teaching English to software developenow here I am.rs; as I researched the language they needed, I started to learn programming and )
    - guard-of-terra 10y ago
- nibs 10y ago
  That is an interesting point. I only learned to read when I was 11 (never had any need to, before that) which is strangely late. When I went to school at 12, I found I was the fastest reader, and tested as "University +" reading level, which is the highest there was. By learning independently of school, I learned way later in life, and learned in a way that was right for my stage of development. My anecdote about it not being productive is purely subjective, but the science on development theory is clear. If left to their own devices, almost all people learn native language, writing and math on their own timeline in about 100 hours. School makes this process far less effcient, and teaches things like grammer that program the brain to read slowly and without depth. Obviously my anecdote is hyperbolic, I speak primarily as someone who had a great unschooling experience and then went to school and saw the difference, and a little bit as someone who has read extensive child development theory.
  - Jtsummers 10y ago
    Not learning to read until I was 11 would have been strange. I had no specific need to read, but being literate at 4 allowed me to program at 7. It allowed me to explore mathematics beyond what most of my peers did because I read every bit of the book. And then there were the scores of books I read and the interaction with friends using encoding schemes lifted from my Boys' Life subscription. This is very much a to each their own thing. It worked well for you but it also sounds like you had a uniquely active family and community to support this. The primary problem with homeschooling and unschooling is the lack of family support. Either by apathy or by lack of economic opportunity. Or simply their own lack of education preventing them from even being aware of these options (such as finding a community to coordinate with to make up for their on educational deficiencies). I can't speak for all public schools, my parents deliberately chose better than average schools for my sister and I to attend. But good public schools exist. Good teachers exist. But just like good home schooling and unschooling experiences, this requires either luck of birth (well-to-do parents) or deliberate effort by parents to improve their children's position.
    - nibs 10y ago
      I agree. I went to private school for a year and did well. I went to public school after that because private was too expensive to maintain, and it was not so good. A few non-burned out teachers who made a difference, mostly just soul-crushing apathy and stockhold syndrome all around. And I would love to have learned to program and read earlier, I am not sure how I managed to go that long without reading, I guess I was just different developmentally.
- fiatjaf 10y ago
  Your anecdote doesn't even count, because you're assuming, without any reason to, that you're right about the counterfactual.
Jtsummers 10y ago
Thanks to the economic state of the US, most families can't afford the time to dedicate to their children to properly educate them in the breadth of subjects that schools (attempt to) cover. And this assumes that the parents are either educated or capable/willing to source proper materials to provide information (or the tools to access information) for their children.
- nibs 10y ago
  Agreed. Which makes me sad. The funds do exist, but it all goes to public education. One cannot opt-out of school taxes, even when one opts out of school. It is not just an issue that is purely economic, the money exists, it just does not exist in the hands of the parents.
  - germinalphrase 10y ago
    Possibly, but if the per pupil cost is between $6500-19800 (Utah and New York, respectively) would this amount of money free at least one parent to fully educate their children? If that were true, wouldn't it seem to follow that more people would do it? Public education must be - or at least have the appearance of being - a good deal economically.
    - nibs 10y ago
      Probably not, unless you have 3+ kids. My Mom always worked park time, and we had a community that would get together and hang out and share in the child care. And you definitely have to make sacrifices, we grew up in the country in a pretty small house, etc. but we lived fairly well on 1.5 incomes.
  - emidln 10y ago
    Part of this is that parents alone don't shoulder the burden of paying for their children's education. All taxpayers share in this. Exemptions or credits along these lines are short-sighted. You expose another issue that comes up frequently which is the idea that the cost per pupil is somewhat fixed in a region (for administrative purposes anyway) and so regardless of the school a parent choose for their child, the state should pay that school. As an extension, if the parent would choose to home school, that parent might be paid the prevailing rate for a child. I don't think that works on a number of levels (again, poor parents probably can't afford to not work for $6k for 9 months of the year). Perhaps combined with other social programs (such as a UBI), this would be more reasonable. I think there would be a huge media backlash over kids who end up with effectively no education due to parents just taking their kids UBI+their UBU+school fees and then letting the kids play video games all day (regardless of whether this actually happens or not). Standardized testing would probably become even more important as a means for the state to make sure that your children are actually being educated.
coldpie 10y ago
> my friends had to spend it training to be slaves Oh, get over yourself.
- nibs 10y ago
  ... where I am from, elementary school is basically obedience training for high testosterone boys. It is a battle of wills that the boy almost always loses. Eventually, they rebel hard. I upvoted you though because it was hyperbolic, this subject is just very passion-inducing for me.
  - antisthenes 10y ago
    Could you elaborate? I'm honestly interested in how you came to that strong conclusion. What policies exactly are being applied towards boys?
- fiatjaf 10y ago
  Why do you disagree? Please explain and clarify your point.
  - coldpie 10y ago
    I need to refute the claim that public schooling is "training to be slaves"? Really?
    - bprieto 10y ago
      Yes, you do. Please read this: http://www.sethgodin.com/sg/docs/brainwash.pdf http://www.sethgodin.com/sg/docs/brainwash.pdf Maybe "training to be slaves" is hiperbole, but as Seth Godin puts it, training to be "cogs in a machine" is quite right.
      - coldpie 10y ago
        Slaves were, and are, born into poverty, often forcibly removed from their parents, treated and sold like cattle, worked hard at all times for no benefit to themselves, had no rights and no legal protections, and had no prospect of removing themselves from slavery. In no way is this comparable to receiving a relatively high quality education during the formative years of your life. Teachers work hard for little reward to provide the education they give and it is a slap in their face, the faces of the descendants of real slaves, and the real slaves that continue to exist today, to imply that the good work they do is equivalent to what slave owners and masters did to their victims. The analogy to slavery is disgusting and juvenile and it's ludicrous that I had to explain this to you.
JulianMorrison 10y ago
I think the primary function of mass schooling is to warehouse kids somewhere off the streets and out of the workplace, avoiding having to adapt adult spaces to kids being around. There's a secondary function as a meaningless token mill, for use in pseudo meritocracy. And a tertiary function, much underfunded, of education.
- jxdjsks 10y ago
  This. It's about economics. It's about extracting value from the parents. It's about making the children, who are the workers of the future, more compliant. You may consider it conspiracy theory, to me it's just obvious.
- JulianMorrison 10y ago
  To the person who deleted their comment that it's about compliance. That's an often heard conspiracy theory, but IMO, the main strike against it is that it doesn't work. The USA, compared to eg: Singapore, does not turn out particularly compliant graduates.
fiatjaf 10y ago
Do you have more stories about your education like this? A blog or something? I would like to read it.
- nibs 10y ago
  No, but I have considered it. All four of my grandparents are gradulate-educated educators and they learned and researched education and the various issues surrounding it. So based on their anecdotes and research, my parents kind of were convinced that school was not good and would make our lives worse, and just let us do whatever. I would recommend reading John Holt if you are interested. I'll email you. It is one of those things that is dangerously simple - no structured learning, but there is tons of nuance, I guess.
- robto 10y ago
  I would check out the book "Free to Learn" by Peter Gray - he goes into why "unschooling" or democratic schooling can be effective. It really changed my outlook on education. I had previously read "A Mathemetician's Lament"[0], an essay by Paul Lockhart that made me start to question the value of regular schooling. https://www.maa.org/external_archive/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf https://www.maa.org/external_archive/devlin/LockhartsLament....
jamespo 10y ago
What do you do now?
- nibs 10y ago
  I have a company that makes a system that runs on the plant floor of food processing companies to track production data.

by nibs 10y ago

hmottestad 10y ago

"It is not productive, does not produce smarter or more learned people." I would like to disagree, but I don't have anything to back up my claim that mass schooling makes people smarter or more learned. Like you, I just have anecdotes. But one thing is for sure. I would never have gotten to where I am today. If I hadn't learned english at school. Having lived in two countries, neither of which had english as a native language, I would unlikely have learned english unless it had been taught at school

hmottestad 10y ago
Also, from one time when I was a temp at a primary school for 2 weeks. I saw a kid who had come to Norway at the age of 10 or so, and now one year later he could still not add double digit numbers. Worse yet, he didn't see how a problem could be solved by adding two numbers. So problems along the lines of "I have two apples, you give me three, how many do I have now?" where beyond his ability to solve without assistance. He did however manage to learn quite good Norwegian in that year.
guard-of-terra 10y ago
"I would unlikely have learned english unless it had been taught at school" You could as well play a lot of video games in English and dabbling in programming. That's how I learned. Everybody who relied on school for learning English - still barely understand it.
- saint_fiasco 10y ago
  I don't know why this is being downvoted. Teaching a language to students with mixed levels of previous knowledge and motivation is extremely hard. The schools I went to could never manage it. I learned English from Japanese videogames that had been translated to English by Ted Woolsey.
  - oarsinsync 10y ago
    > I learned English from Japanese videogames <intentional snip> Did you set us up the bomb?
    - saint_fiasco 10y ago
      What you say !! I remember having an interesting discussion with my Spanglish-speaking friends about whether "All your base" was supposed to mean "your entire base" or "each and every one of your bases". My Engrish-speaking friend could immediately tell that the second interpretation was the correct one.
- lukewrites 10y ago
  Out of curiosity, does this mean that you didn't have any English lessons in school? I ask because in the field of Second Language Acquisition there's a pretty strong consensus that the optimal path to language learning involves a combination of classroom instruction augmented by interaction with (reading, listening) & use of (speaking, writing) the language. I've spent most of my career as a language teacher, and the typical successful learner is one who isn't necessarily a language nerd, but almost always is someone who does some heavy lifting in the target language outside of class. I love students that have a goal for language use because they help me to target my instruction to bits of language that will be immediately useful to them. (One of the best jobs I had was teaching English to software developenow here I am.rs; as I researched the language they needed, I started to learn programming and )
  - guard-of-terra 10y ago
nibs 10y ago
That is an interesting point. I only learned to read when I was 11 (never had any need to, before that) which is strangely late. When I went to school at 12, I found I was the fastest reader, and tested as "University +" reading level, which is the highest there was. By learning independently of school, I learned way later in life, and learned in a way that was right for my stage of development. My anecdote about it not being productive is purely subjective, but the science on development theory is clear. If left to their own devices, almost all people learn native language, writing and math on their own timeline in about 100 hours. School makes this process far less effcient, and teaches things like grammer that program the brain to read slowly and without depth. Obviously my anecdote is hyperbolic, I speak primarily as someone who had a great unschooling experience and then went to school and saw the difference, and a little bit as someone who has read extensive child development theory.
- Jtsummers 10y ago
  Not learning to read until I was 11 would have been strange. I had no specific need to read, but being literate at 4 allowed me to program at 7. It allowed me to explore mathematics beyond what most of my peers did because I read every bit of the book. And then there were the scores of books I read and the interaction with friends using encoding schemes lifted from my Boys' Life subscription. This is very much a to each their own thing. It worked well for you but it also sounds like you had a uniquely active family and community to support this. The primary problem with homeschooling and unschooling is the lack of family support. Either by apathy or by lack of economic opportunity. Or simply their own lack of education preventing them from even being aware of these options (such as finding a community to coordinate with to make up for their on educational deficiencies). I can't speak for all public schools, my parents deliberately chose better than average schools for my sister and I to attend. But good public schools exist. Good teachers exist. But just like good home schooling and unschooling experiences, this requires either luck of birth (well-to-do parents) or deliberate effort by parents to improve their children's position.
  - nibs 10y ago
    I agree. I went to private school for a year and did well. I went to public school after that because private was too expensive to maintain, and it was not so good. A few non-burned out teachers who made a difference, mostly just soul-crushing apathy and stockhold syndrome all around. And I would love to have learned to program and read earlier, I am not sure how I managed to go that long without reading, I guess I was just different developmentally.
fiatjaf 10y ago
Your anecdote doesn't even count, because you're assuming, without any reason to, that you're right about the counterfactual.

Jtsummers 10y ago

Thanks to the economic state of the US, most families can't afford the time to dedicate to their children to properly educate them in the breadth of subjects that schools (attempt to) cover. And this assumes that the parents are either educated or capable/willing to source proper materials to provide information (or the tools to access information) for their children.

nibs 10y ago
Agreed. Which makes me sad. The funds do exist, but it all goes to public education. One cannot opt-out of school taxes, even when one opts out of school. It is not just an issue that is purely economic, the money exists, it just does not exist in the hands of the parents.
- germinalphrase 10y ago
  Possibly, but if the per pupil cost is between $6500-19800 (Utah and New York, respectively) would this amount of money free at least one parent to fully educate their children? If that were true, wouldn't it seem to follow that more people would do it? Public education must be - or at least have the appearance of being - a good deal economically.
  - nibs 10y ago
    Probably not, unless you have 3+ kids. My Mom always worked park time, and we had a community that would get together and hang out and share in the child care. And you definitely have to make sacrifices, we grew up in the country in a pretty small house, etc. but we lived fairly well on 1.5 incomes.
- emidln 10y ago
  Part of this is that parents alone don't shoulder the burden of paying for their children's education. All taxpayers share in this. Exemptions or credits along these lines are short-sighted. You expose another issue that comes up frequently which is the idea that the cost per pupil is somewhat fixed in a region (for administrative purposes anyway) and so regardless of the school a parent choose for their child, the state should pay that school. As an extension, if the parent would choose to home school, that parent might be paid the prevailing rate for a child. I don't think that works on a number of levels (again, poor parents probably can't afford to not work for $6k for 9 months of the year). Perhaps combined with other social programs (such as a UBI), this would be more reasonable. I think there would be a huge media backlash over kids who end up with effectively no education due to parents just taking their kids UBI+their UBU+school fees and then letting the kids play video games all day (regardless of whether this actually happens or not). Standardized testing would probably become even more important as a means for the state to make sure that your children are actually being educated.

coldpie 10y ago

> my friends had to spend it training to be slaves Oh, get over yourself.

nibs 10y ago
... where I am from, elementary school is basically obedience training for high testosterone boys. It is a battle of wills that the boy almost always loses. Eventually, they rebel hard. I upvoted you though because it was hyperbolic, this subject is just very passion-inducing for me.
- antisthenes 10y ago
  Could you elaborate? I'm honestly interested in how you came to that strong conclusion. What policies exactly are being applied towards boys?
fiatjaf 10y ago
Why do you disagree? Please explain and clarify your point.
- coldpie 10y ago
  I need to refute the claim that public schooling is "training to be slaves"? Really?
  - bprieto 10y ago
    Yes, you do. Please read this: http://www.sethgodin.com/sg/docs/brainwash.pdf http://www.sethgodin.com/sg/docs/brainwash.pdf Maybe "training to be slaves" is hiperbole, but as Seth Godin puts it, training to be "cogs in a machine" is quite right.
    - coldpie 10y ago
      Slaves were, and are, born into poverty, often forcibly removed from their parents, treated and sold like cattle, worked hard at all times for no benefit to themselves, had no rights and no legal protections, and had no prospect of removing themselves from slavery. In no way is this comparable to receiving a relatively high quality education during the formative years of your life. Teachers work hard for little reward to provide the education they give and it is a slap in their face, the faces of the descendants of real slaves, and the real slaves that continue to exist today, to imply that the good work they do is equivalent to what slave owners and masters did to their victims. The analogy to slavery is disgusting and juvenile and it's ludicrous that I had to explain this to you.

JulianMorrison 10y ago

I think the primary function of mass schooling is to warehouse kids somewhere off the streets and out of the workplace, avoiding having to adapt adult spaces to kids being around. There's a secondary function as a meaningless token mill, for use in pseudo meritocracy. And a tertiary function, much underfunded, of education.

jxdjsks 10y ago
This. It's about economics. It's about extracting value from the parents. It's about making the children, who are the workers of the future, more compliant. You may consider it conspiracy theory, to me it's just obvious.
JulianMorrison 10y ago
To the person who deleted their comment that it's about compliance. That's an often heard conspiracy theory, but IMO, the main strike against it is that it doesn't work. The USA, compared to eg: Singapore, does not turn out particularly compliant graduates.

fiatjaf 10y ago

Do you have more stories about your education like this? A blog or something? I would like to read it.

nibs 10y ago
No, but I have considered it. All four of my grandparents are gradulate-educated educators and they learned and researched education and the various issues surrounding it. So based on their anecdotes and research, my parents kind of were convinced that school was not good and would make our lives worse, and just let us do whatever. I would recommend reading John Holt if you are interested. I'll email you. It is one of those things that is dangerously simple - no structured learning, but there is tons of nuance, I guess.
robto 10y ago
I would check out the book "Free to Learn" by Peter Gray - he goes into why "unschooling" or democratic schooling can be effective. It really changed my outlook on education. I had previously read "A Mathemetician's Lament"[0], an essay by Paul Lockhart that made me start to question the value of regular schooling. https://www.maa.org/external_archive/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf https://www.maa.org/external_archive/devlin/LockhartsLament....

jamespo 10y ago

What do you do now?

nibs 10y ago
I have a company that makes a system that runs on the plant floor of food processing companies to track production data.