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I think it is dangerous. While giving children rope to explore and learn at their own pace is healthy, normal, and welcomed, extremist philosophies like Unschoo

I think it is dangerous. While giving children rope to explore and learn at their own pace is healthy, normal, and welcomed, extremist philosophies like Unschooling may result in illiteracy, social isolation, and difficulty to pursue areas of interests later in life (e.g. college). Traditional homeschooling has been made safer (in terms of outcomes) due to professionally developed programs along with state enforcement of baseline testing. While Unschooling as a philosophy rejects the very idea that children should be measured like their peers (e.g. standardized tests are out), and thus no major homeschooling programs have nor could be developed. I find it curious and confusing that the stated objective is to help the child develop improved critical thinking skills, while the stated philosophy (Unschooling) seeks to never have the child try anything they don't choose to do (learner directed education). Has intellectual isolation ever resulted in improved critical thinking skills before?

ismail 8y ago
“Unschooling may result in illiteracy, social isolation, and difficulty to pursue areas of interests later in life” Do you have any reading on this? Even anecdata? All the reading I have done seems to indicate the exact opposite. Granted i have been specially seeking out material that is pro self-directed education. Would love to read anything that actually builds a strong case against it. “I find it curious and confusing that the stated objective is to help the child develop improved critical thinking skills, while the stated philosophy (Unschooling) seeks to never have the child try anything they don't choose to do (learner directed education). Has intellectual isolation ever resulted in improved critical thinking skills before?” Inherent in the question posed here is the assumption that the child/learner would be intellectually isolated? However from my reading this is not necessary the case. Once they have the means learners would seek out others with the knowledge they require or ask for help. If you can point me to some reading that contradicts the unschooling view and builds a case against it, or expands on some of the points you have mentioned that would be great.
- candiodari 8y ago
  I could give an extreme example and show you what's wrong here. Let's say a kid is born. And we have somehow lost all morality. Kid gets put into a room with food, drink, whatever it needs for physics experiments and left alone. Will the kid ever do, say, the double-slit experiment ? No. In fact it won't even learn how to eat. It'll starve to death. We know this, because people have done that accidentally. Or another "experiment": show a kid only "parents" that walk on four legs. Will the kid ever learn to walk like a human ? After all, the human body is built so that walking on 2 legs is much more efficient. Again, accidental experiment was carried out, in fact many times. Disney made a completely unrealistic movie about it. Answer: no, the kid will walk on hands and feet. They do not find the optimal solution, despite exploring. Despite being forced into the ultimate form of self-directed learning. But let's work from simple principles. How about we start by assuming that the brain is neither magical, nor can it come up with information from nothing. It must absorb information from the outside. You can see, given those easy assumptions that the brain cannot be but almost exclusively a behavior copy machine (which is of course why you seek out help in the first place). Then you see "unschooling" if it works, DOESN'T work because of it's stated principles, but because it copies things from the parents, and/or/later teachers. Unschooling, like any other method frankly, will work incredibly if the parents are geniuses, or otherwise regular contact between the child and very smart people can be maintained over a long time, and will fail spectacularly if that doesn't happen. Second thing to consider is the information content difference between positive information and negative information, and which random (self-directed) information will be. Positive information is showing a particular example that works, for some process. Negative information is showing that a particular way doesn't work. You can easily see that this depends on whichever is less dense in the solution space (in other words: you should show whichever is rare, not the common case). This will in practice nearly always be the positive information. In other words: the correct solution has lots of information, false tries have very little information about the world. If you just let the child try, all they'll ever hit is the common case (in the extreme example given above: not eating the food). So you can't let that happen. You MUST show them the correct solution, or put another way you must transform the solution space for them so the rare and common case happen 50-50, and not 1-99999 like would be expected. Again rephrasing: It's very easy to fail, and very hard to succeed. So a "self-directed learning" would only ever fail. You must prevent that if you want them to learn anything at all. AFTER doing that, yes, you can let them try and explore more by themselves, but it's easy to see that a behavior copy machine like the human brain will be able to learn incredibly faster getting shown the above things compared to trying things out itself. This means in practice self-directed learning requires the brain to process thousands to millions (or worse: trillions) of times more information to arrive at the same level of knowledge. In the overwhelming majority of cases that'll mean it will never happen. Third problem is that skills converge. Having one skill makes almost any other skill a tiny little bit easier to learn (even in machine learning, an imagenet trained network can learn faster to make music than a random start network, vastly disparate skills, but the ability to recognize squirrels allows you learn to make music faster). The problem with that is that 0.99^1000 is a very small number. So if you let a kid be slower, the damage that accumulates over time is incredible. If you slightly accelerate a kid, constantly, the advantage that builds over say 10 years is not only enormous, but is at that point STILL compounding. Likewise, if the kid doesn't have skills the damage will compound. Are you seriously going leave that to chance as a parent ? Wouldn't you require extraordinary evidence in favor of unschooling rather than the reverse ? So self-directed learning is a lie. It cannot work. You cannot explore the world in a self-directed manner and expect to learn much. That doesn't make sense when you consider how the mind must work. But ! There are famous examples where it worked ! It must be able to work. Alas, no. Or at least, there's a simpler explanation. Like most "mysterious"/"natural"/"magical" processes it only works when people cheat. It works when there is another form of learning available to those kids (seeking out help, or having some other form of knowledge easily available to them, like a genius parent). The factor that confuses people, I think, is that Montessori schools can work despite their bullshit method because of the teachers they hire. As long as that method of instruction is very rare and intriguing they will have more money and more interested, more effective teachers. And that can make a big difference, big enough that the disadvantage of their methods is compensated. But traditional instruction works reasonably effectively despite the teachers being underpaid idiots that don't understand the subjects they're teaching. Is it ideal ? No ? Fun ? Hardly. But you can easily see: traditional instruction with actually good teachers vastly outperforms Montessori schools. It also works much better in the practical situation on the ground that will exist in any large society (that practical situation is, in case you're wondering: 50% of below-average performers, and with current teacher pay, teachers will not even be below average 50% of the time, but much more). But as long as unschooling is done only by intrigued smart people, that will be masked. The literature on it is unanimous: the thing that matters more than any other in education is how smart the parents are. Second thing is how smart the teachers are. Only third is the method of instruction used. People really hate this, because of course it amplifies class differences, makes IQ "inherited", but that doesn't make it any less true.
cryptonector 8y ago
I think it's absolutely essential to have a good basic education in: reading, writing, grammar, literature, philosophy, math, science, history (all not in any particular order), maybe add some psychology. These things are essential. How you structure teaching these things is much much less important than actually getting them across. Whatever your concerns with public and private schools, you can spend some time at home making up for their faults. Homeschooling is a full-time job -- great if you can do it and are good at it, but it requires a tremendous commitment. Unschooling... I'd never heard of before, and it sounds dangerous indeed. There is no way that children will self-directedly learn the basic things they need to learn that we've accumulated over the last few thousand years -- the vast majority children don't even have the organization skills and self-motivation needed for this, and they simply do not and cannot have the perspective needed ("eventually I'll be an adult and will need to be able to provide for myself and my family, and so I need to know all this stuff and more"). To force that perspective on them might work out, but might also ironically deny them the innocence of childhood. At least going by what I see here, "unschooling" seems like the sort of bad idea that the State should throw its weight onto and squash, and I'm not one to think that the State should do that. Think seriously of all the culture you enjoy and all the implied knowledge, and tell me there's a chance that children will learn some equivalent of that on their own, and the only thing that will convince me of is the depth of your ignorance. And I say that even though I have some experience with how schools fail to deal with, e.g., students who are on the autism spectrum, or even those who aren't but who are even somewhat gifted. Maybe it's just that I know nothing about unschooling and it comes across in the worst possible way. Whatever OP has been reading, OP should consider reading other views as well before possibly inflicting a huge own-goal on their children's lives.

ismail 8y ago

“Unschooling may result in illiteracy, social isolation, and difficulty to pursue areas of interests later in life” Do you have any reading on this? Even anecdata? All the reading I have done seems to indicate the exact opposite. Granted i have been specially seeking out material that is pro self-directed education. Would love to read anything that actually builds a strong case against it. “I find it curious and confusing that the stated objective is to help the child develop improved critical thinking skills, while the stated philosophy (Unschooling) seeks to never have the child try anything they don't choose to do (learner directed education). Has intellectual isolation ever resulted in improved critical thinking skills before?” Inherent in the question posed here is the assumption that the child/learner would be intellectually isolated? However from my reading this is not necessary the case. Once they have the means learners would seek out others with the knowledge they require or ask for help. If you can point me to some reading that contradicts the unschooling view and builds a case against it, or expands on some of the points you have mentioned that would be great.

candiodari 8y ago
I could give an extreme example and show you what's wrong here. Let's say a kid is born. And we have somehow lost all morality. Kid gets put into a room with food, drink, whatever it needs for physics experiments and left alone. Will the kid ever do, say, the double-slit experiment ? No. In fact it won't even learn how to eat. It'll starve to death. We know this, because people have done that accidentally. Or another "experiment": show a kid only "parents" that walk on four legs. Will the kid ever learn to walk like a human ? After all, the human body is built so that walking on 2 legs is much more efficient. Again, accidental experiment was carried out, in fact many times. Disney made a completely unrealistic movie about it. Answer: no, the kid will walk on hands and feet. They do not find the optimal solution, despite exploring. Despite being forced into the ultimate form of self-directed learning. But let's work from simple principles. How about we start by assuming that the brain is neither magical, nor can it come up with information from nothing. It must absorb information from the outside. You can see, given those easy assumptions that the brain cannot be but almost exclusively a behavior copy machine (which is of course why you seek out help in the first place). Then you see "unschooling" if it works, DOESN'T work because of it's stated principles, but because it copies things from the parents, and/or/later teachers. Unschooling, like any other method frankly, will work incredibly if the parents are geniuses, or otherwise regular contact between the child and very smart people can be maintained over a long time, and will fail spectacularly if that doesn't happen. Second thing to consider is the information content difference between positive information and negative information, and which random (self-directed) information will be. Positive information is showing a particular example that works, for some process. Negative information is showing that a particular way doesn't work. You can easily see that this depends on whichever is less dense in the solution space (in other words: you should show whichever is rare, not the common case). This will in practice nearly always be the positive information. In other words: the correct solution has lots of information, false tries have very little information about the world. If you just let the child try, all they'll ever hit is the common case (in the extreme example given above: not eating the food). So you can't let that happen. You MUST show them the correct solution, or put another way you must transform the solution space for them so the rare and common case happen 50-50, and not 1-99999 like would be expected. Again rephrasing: It's very easy to fail, and very hard to succeed. So a "self-directed learning" would only ever fail. You must prevent that if you want them to learn anything at all. AFTER doing that, yes, you can let them try and explore more by themselves, but it's easy to see that a behavior copy machine like the human brain will be able to learn incredibly faster getting shown the above things compared to trying things out itself. This means in practice self-directed learning requires the brain to process thousands to millions (or worse: trillions) of times more information to arrive at the same level of knowledge. In the overwhelming majority of cases that'll mean it will never happen. Third problem is that skills converge. Having one skill makes almost any other skill a tiny little bit easier to learn (even in machine learning, an imagenet trained network can learn faster to make music than a random start network, vastly disparate skills, but the ability to recognize squirrels allows you learn to make music faster). The problem with that is that 0.99^1000 is a very small number. So if you let a kid be slower, the damage that accumulates over time is incredible. If you slightly accelerate a kid, constantly, the advantage that builds over say 10 years is not only enormous, but is at that point STILL compounding. Likewise, if the kid doesn't have skills the damage will compound. Are you seriously going leave that to chance as a parent ? Wouldn't you require extraordinary evidence in favor of unschooling rather than the reverse ? So self-directed learning is a lie. It cannot work. You cannot explore the world in a self-directed manner and expect to learn much. That doesn't make sense when you consider how the mind must work. But ! There are famous examples where it worked ! It must be able to work. Alas, no. Or at least, there's a simpler explanation. Like most "mysterious"/"natural"/"magical" processes it only works when people cheat. It works when there is another form of learning available to those kids (seeking out help, or having some other form of knowledge easily available to them, like a genius parent). The factor that confuses people, I think, is that Montessori schools can work despite their bullshit method because of the teachers they hire. As long as that method of instruction is very rare and intriguing they will have more money and more interested, more effective teachers. And that can make a big difference, big enough that the disadvantage of their methods is compensated. But traditional instruction works reasonably effectively despite the teachers being underpaid idiots that don't understand the subjects they're teaching. Is it ideal ? No ? Fun ? Hardly. But you can easily see: traditional instruction with actually good teachers vastly outperforms Montessori schools. It also works much better in the practical situation on the ground that will exist in any large society (that practical situation is, in case you're wondering: 50% of below-average performers, and with current teacher pay, teachers will not even be below average 50% of the time, but much more). But as long as unschooling is done only by intrigued smart people, that will be masked. The literature on it is unanimous: the thing that matters more than any other in education is how smart the parents are. Second thing is how smart the teachers are. Only third is the method of instruction used. People really hate this, because of course it amplifies class differences, makes IQ "inherited", but that doesn't make it any less true.

cryptonector 8y ago

I think it's absolutely essential to have a good basic education in: reading, writing, grammar, literature, philosophy, math, science, history (all not in any particular order), maybe add some psychology. These things are essential. How you structure teaching these things is much much less important than actually getting them across. Whatever your concerns with public and private schools, you can spend some time at home making up for their faults. Homeschooling is a full-time job -- great if you can do it and are good at it, but it requires a tremendous commitment. Unschooling... I'd never heard of before, and it sounds dangerous indeed. There is no way that children will self-directedly learn the basic things they need to learn that we've accumulated over the last few thousand years -- the vast majority children don't even have the organization skills and self-motivation needed for this, and they simply do not and cannot have the perspective needed ("eventually I'll be an adult and will need to be able to provide for myself and my family, and so I need to know all this stuff and more"). To force that perspective on them might work out, but might also ironically deny them the innocence of childhood. At least going by what I see here, "unschooling" seems like the sort of bad idea that the State should throw its weight onto and squash, and I'm not one to think that the State should do that. Think seriously of all the culture you enjoy and all the implied knowledge, and tell me there's a chance that children will learn some equivalent of that on their own, and the only thing that will convince me of is the depth of your ignorance. And I say that even though I have some experience with how schools fail to deal with, e.g., students who are on the autism spectrum, or even those who aren't but who are even somewhat gifted. Maybe it's just that I know nothing about unschooling and it comes across in the worst possible way. Whatever OP has been reading, OP should consider reading other views as well before possibly inflicting a huge own-goal on their children's lives.