7 ms·

Unschooling Is the Parenting Trend That's Pissing Everyone Off

17 points by greenie_beans 2y ago

pjkundert 2y ago
[flagged]
- darthoctopus 2y ago
  is pissing certain people off your primary consideration in deciding how you educate your kids?
  - pjkundert 2y ago
    No; but it is a signal that indicates whether we're going in the right direction, or at least not in the wrong direction. When groups whose primary motivation seems to indoctrinate innocents into a cult are pissed -- then I'm less worried. Demanding mental assent to questionable claims to avoid punishment, regardless of questions about the predictive failure or successful outcomes of testing the hypotheses underlying those claims seems ... culty. And, there's a lot of that in modern public schooling. The first thing I ask my daughter whenever someone tells her to believe something, is "how could you know?". Quite often, the claimant has assiduously avoided informing her about how they "know" their claim is true. It's astonishing.
    - squigz 2y ago
      > No; but it is a signal that indicates whether we're going in the right direction, or at least not in the wrong direction. This is... sadly contrarian, and really makes no logical sense.
      - pjkundert 2y ago
        QED?
    - rhelz 2y ago
      > When groups whose primary motivation seems to indoctrinate innocents into a cult are pissed Sounds to me you are worried that these "groups" won't let you indoctrinate innocents into your own cult.
      - pjkundert 2y ago
        Maybe. Asking “how could you know?” only goes so far. It exposes that much of what you think you believe is actually based on faith.
    - matrix87 2y ago
      do you have any specific examples?
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
dangus 2y ago
I think that too many parents think there’s something wildly wrong with the public school system for a few reasons that include: - Political fear-mongering set up by pro-privatization groups that want to profit off of - The fact that schooling is difficult. Middle school and high school are challenging ages and no school can make the experience go perfectly. - Anti-institution ideology spread through social media. I think a lot of groups online feel empowered to find alternatives and spread the word even if they are not statistically better outcomes. Obviously the public school system isn’t perfect. It’s very inequitable based on your zip code. Not all districts are doing so well. But for the most part, engaged and supportive parents of kids in an average school system results in good outcomes. Un-schooling isn’t the answer. It’s the Un-answer.
- VirusNewbie 2y ago
  >I think that too many parents think there’s something wildly wrong with the public school system for a few reasons that include: By almost any objective metric, there is something wrong with the school system, and the fact that this isn't something people admit is probably a reason there is a lot of pushback against it. People in support of the public school system aren't even willing to educate themselves on its failures and weaknesses. >even if they are not statistically better outcomes. So here once again you're saying there are not statistically better outcomes, but do you have a source? From the data i've seen, you have this baskwards and that public schools do statistically have worse outcomes. >. It’s very inequitable based on your zip code. Again, this is not actually true if you spend time looking at actual data. Most school districts are funded by the state our county, and often the budgets are higher low income areas.
  - runsfromfire 2y ago
    Interesting that you call out his lack of data/sources, assert he is wrong, and don’t provide any sources of your own. It seems like zip code is a good indicator of public education quality, though. Here’s an actual source if you’d like to read about it: https://www.jec.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/republicans/2019/11/zoned-out-how-school-and-residential-zoning-limit-educational-opportunity https://www.jec.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/republicans/2019... If you’re curious about wealth impact on public schooling quality, see table 1 for a clear breakdown.
squigz 2y ago
I think it's notable that when people talk about how "broken" the public school system is, they are almost inevitably talking about America.
cko 2y ago
I spent a month in a co-living community in some village in Austria. They were a diverse group of professionals from a variety of backgrounds (programmers, architect, doctor). They often ate meals together in the community kitchen and we would work in the garden together. I thought before arriving it was a hippy commune but it definitely wasn't. I had a lovely time. Anyways one family with three children were doing this unschooling thing and the kids seemed well-socialized and explored their own interests. The oldest daughter went to Vienna a lot to take acting classes or something. I thought it was a fine idea but that it took a lot of resources - one parent was always home and because of the community it was like the kids were being raised by the whole village. There were other kids to hang out with and plenty of space to do stuff. It seemed like you'd need a certain degree of wealth and structure to make it work. In suburban America, I think it'd be a lot more challenging. The only American homeschoolers I've met were well-off Christians (again, wealth + community).
- moshun 2y ago
  I’m not impressed (or even tolerant) of unschooling without seeing how their uneducation is practically stacking up with their traditional peers. I was homeschooled for part of my education, and even with wealth, it’s easy to miss critical foundations and unschooled kids sound ripe for it. I had to work very hard in some areas to catch up with or surpass my peers, and I think many wouldn’t have the patience to do it. Especially in areas known for permanently losing students like mathematics.
rhelz 2y ago
The germ of truth in the wacky conspiracy theory is that public school teachers have had to stop using a lot of these bottom-up, self-directed techniques, which let the children control how fast the material is presented, and the order in which the material is learned. Even though these kinds of techniques have been shown to be highly effective, it's just too risky for public school teachers to use them anymore. The teacher is so encumbered by top-down standards that they simply cannot let the students pick the pace or order, bottom up. The pace must be set by the teacher top-down, it must be the same pace for every student--and it has to be a pretty fast pace to fulfill all the top-down standards requirements. Public school kids would benefit from more bottom-up, rather than top-down learning experiences. But public school teachers are evaluated on how well their students fill in those bubbles on standard exams. Home schooling parents just don't have this kind of accountability. The desire to have quantitative, objective measurements to "hold teachers accountable" or "get rid of the lazy teachers who have tenure" has had a very unexpected side effect: Every public-school kid has to learn exactly the same things, in the same timeframe, in the same order, at the same pace.
- oceanplexian 2y ago
  > The desire to have quantitative, objective measurements to "hold teachers accountable" or "get rid of the lazy teachers who have tenure" has had a very unexpected side effect The problem is that when you don’t hold students accountable you end up in a situation where China outcompetes the United States in education and pulls ahead economically. China actually does have strict standards and they aren’t worried about hurting some feelings when a kid fails a math test. You could make the argument quantitative measurements aren’t important in social sciences and gender studies, but fields like physics, engineering, and math they are extremely important and aren’t forgiving when people try to take shortcuts.
  - squigz 2y ago
    Taking your first point at face value, why is this a problem, exactly?
  - rhelz 2y ago
glzone1 2y ago
I went to public school for high school - sending my kid to public school. One thing that is interesting to me. If you look at per pupil funding, and the number of kids in a classroom with ONE teacher - where is the money going? We did preschool with a fraction of the cost and the teacher ratio was between 1:4 and 1:6. The the public school (with more per pupil funding per student by a huge margin) is 1:25-1:35! Quick math: An SFUSD fifth grade class might have 32 students. SFUSD does $24K per student lets say. Let's say indirect county / state / federal costs are another 15% so total system spend is $27K. That get's us to $860,000 in funding per year per class. Let's say a teacher is 123K per year. That would be 7 teachers. The question then is how much overhead is reasonable?
- 9659 2y ago
  do it like every other business. double it. that leaves you with 1/2 a million profit per classroom, per year. ripe for disruption! but, that 1 to 32 might not be accurate. special ed is required by law, and the ratio in those classes are probably 5 students, 1 teacher. and then we have the 'additional teachers'. in middle school you might have a gifted and talented teacher, a music teacher, and maybe a PE teacher. they would not count as overhead since they are direct instructional. and, and, and. my point is your model is too simple. in the end you will probably find that the overhead is 400%, and it is there because of principals, assistant principals, curriculum specialists, behavioral interventionists, speech therapists and... we have allocated dealing with a lot of problems to the public schools system, and it costs a lot of money. what is reasonable is determined by your local school board. they levy the taxes, they spend the money.
  - glzone1 2y ago
    1) The local school board is not in charge. I've dealt with school finance. The amount of regulation from feds and state and county and city (non-school) can be huge. This contrasts sharply with charter schools and even more sharply with private schools. I've seen private schools were the "admin" is a math teacher doing work part time as principal and the teachers have a group that meet weekly to make admin decisions usually with a business manager. That's the admin structure. Private schools often have much MORE art / music / etc etc. It's actually a complaint I have with the public school. They have one classroom teacher who is doing everything - and there is no real music program, no real art program, no nature program, no knitting, no woodworking, no metalworking. When you have smaller class sizes, more kids (including kids with needs) can get help / attention / support right there in the class. What is also wild is just how little budget / spending authority the site level school teachers / principles have. At a private school the authority / discretion is enormous. They may have a middle school / lower school director in a big private school (generally also a teacher) to help coordinate, but basically, if the lower school says hey, we need X, head of school says sounds good and literally 2 days later x is there / done. I've worked in public schools were a work order for a facility repair is stuck for a year+, and when on-site folks fixed the issue they got in trouble for fixing it. And by in trouble I mean serious trouble. Only certain union members are allowed to fix things etc, so you literally have to walk by the broken thing every day for a year because you are prohibited from fixing it. The other issue is that many state / county / school board actions make life harder for teachers. The state will have some educational programs analyst (supported by an assistant finance analyst, an HR person, a facilities person for the facilities etc) who will be busy making rules about posters that go in the classroom. That filters to the county who adds more rules (should show nutrious food, should show this type of activity or not this thing). Then the local district adds their stuff. By the time it gets to the teacher multiplied by 100 of these things it is burdensome. Even the PTAs can get in trouble on this stuff. These are volunteers, and instead of thanks for helping its - hey, you used disposable cupcake liners for the cupcakes you baked for the beach trip you offered for the kids - you are going to be shamed and punished for violating district policy XXX. Trust me, those volunteers are not coming back. Anyways, I could go on. It's just remarkable having seen both systems up so close, the public school teacher's life is hard.
sgarland 2y ago
I was homeschooled from K-6th, and unschooled from 7th-12th, circa 90s-2000s. I have thoughts. I wound up fine, by which I mean I managed to get a B.S. and M.S, and have a good-paying job. IME, this is in no way the norm for either group. To be fair, my upbringing was also conservative Christian (but in a weird way, like my mom encouraged me to do a comparative religion study in high school), so many of my peers were on the "college is useless and indoctrinates you" track. I was able to do a lot of self-directed learning, which in retrospect was useful. For example, I showed a strong interest in computers since I was about six years old. As such, I was encouraged to explore them, had books purchased for me on the subject, etc. As a counterpoint, before unschooling, I was forced to learn Latin and Greek roots. I hated it at the time, but these have proven to be remarkably useful in life – turns out a stunning amount of English words have Latin or Greek roots, so you can figure out much of a word's meaning from them. I think there are some things that kids are unlikely to be interested in, but just like being forced to eat a balanced diet, are still the right choice. My wife is a Montessori teacher, and I think it's the best middle ground. Kids are encouraged to learn what they're interested in at a time that they're interested in it, and a love for learning for the sake of learning is encouraged. At the same time, if a kid stubbornly refuses to learn anything, eventually they will be forced to go through lessons, because at some point, you have to have a baseline level of education.
nataliste 2y ago
I was effectively hard-unschooled during my teenage years. I can't really complain about the experience. Most of my time was spent playing video games, reading, or debating people online in forums. I got my GED when I was seventeen and went to college. I had strange ideas about what college was (namely, I thought the PR copy universities provided was the "real thing" and was sorely disappointed to discover what amounted to an adult half-way house for professional employment rather than an actual place of learning). In retrospect and purely on educational and financial grounds, I regret attending college, as I could've obtained the same information by paying for a community borrower's pass from the library to the same effect but without the pedigree. My parents didn't do it for any ideological purpose; we simply lived in a bad area and they couldn't afford the tuition the Catholic schools were charging. My other siblings were sent to the local public high school, which was (and sadly remains) the worst in the state. Their life outcomes were much worse than my own.

17 points by greenie_beans 2y ago

pjkundert 2y ago

[flagged]

darthoctopus 2y ago
is pissing certain people off your primary consideration in deciding how you educate your kids?
- pjkundert 2y ago
  No; but it is a signal that indicates whether we're going in the right direction, or at least not in the wrong direction. When groups whose primary motivation seems to indoctrinate innocents into a cult are pissed -- then I'm less worried. Demanding mental assent to questionable claims to avoid punishment, regardless of questions about the predictive failure or successful outcomes of testing the hypotheses underlying those claims seems ... culty. And, there's a lot of that in modern public schooling. The first thing I ask my daughter whenever someone tells her to believe something, is "how could you know?". Quite often, the claimant has assiduously avoided informing her about how they "know" their claim is true. It's astonishing.
  - squigz 2y ago
    > No; but it is a signal that indicates whether we're going in the right direction, or at least not in the wrong direction. This is... sadly contrarian, and really makes no logical sense.
    - pjkundert 2y ago
      QED?
  - rhelz 2y ago
    > When groups whose primary motivation seems to indoctrinate innocents into a cult are pissed Sounds to me you are worried that these "groups" won't let you indoctrinate innocents into your own cult.
    - pjkundert 2y ago
      Maybe. Asking “how could you know?” only goes so far. It exposes that much of what you think you believe is actually based on faith.
  - matrix87 2y ago
    do you have any specific examples?
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]

dangus 2y ago

I think that too many parents think there’s something wildly wrong with the public school system for a few reasons that include: - Political fear-mongering set up by pro-privatization groups that want to profit off of - The fact that schooling is difficult. Middle school and high school are challenging ages and no school can make the experience go perfectly. - Anti-institution ideology spread through social media. I think a lot of groups online feel empowered to find alternatives and spread the word even if they are not statistically better outcomes. Obviously the public school system isn’t perfect. It’s very inequitable based on your zip code. Not all districts are doing so well. But for the most part, engaged and supportive parents of kids in an average school system results in good outcomes. Un-schooling isn’t the answer. It’s the Un-answer.

VirusNewbie 2y ago
>I think that too many parents think there’s something wildly wrong with the public school system for a few reasons that include: By almost any objective metric, there is something wrong with the school system, and the fact that this isn't something people admit is probably a reason there is a lot of pushback against it. People in support of the public school system aren't even willing to educate themselves on its failures and weaknesses. >even if they are not statistically better outcomes. So here once again you're saying there are not statistically better outcomes, but do you have a source? From the data i've seen, you have this baskwards and that public schools do statistically have worse outcomes. >. It’s very inequitable based on your zip code. Again, this is not actually true if you spend time looking at actual data. Most school districts are funded by the state our county, and often the budgets are higher low income areas.
- runsfromfire 2y ago
  Interesting that you call out his lack of data/sources, assert he is wrong, and don’t provide any sources of your own. It seems like zip code is a good indicator of public education quality, though. Here’s an actual source if you’d like to read about it: https://www.jec.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/republicans/2019/11/zoned-out-how-school-and-residential-zoning-limit-educational-opportunity https://www.jec.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/republicans/2019... If you’re curious about wealth impact on public schooling quality, see table 1 for a clear breakdown.

squigz 2y ago

I think it's notable that when people talk about how "broken" the public school system is, they are almost inevitably talking about America.

cko 2y ago

I spent a month in a co-living community in some village in Austria. They were a diverse group of professionals from a variety of backgrounds (programmers, architect, doctor). They often ate meals together in the community kitchen and we would work in the garden together. I thought before arriving it was a hippy commune but it definitely wasn't. I had a lovely time. Anyways one family with three children were doing this unschooling thing and the kids seemed well-socialized and explored their own interests. The oldest daughter went to Vienna a lot to take acting classes or something. I thought it was a fine idea but that it took a lot of resources - one parent was always home and because of the community it was like the kids were being raised by the whole village. There were other kids to hang out with and plenty of space to do stuff. It seemed like you'd need a certain degree of wealth and structure to make it work. In suburban America, I think it'd be a lot more challenging. The only American homeschoolers I've met were well-off Christians (again, wealth + community).

moshun 2y ago
I’m not impressed (or even tolerant) of unschooling without seeing how their uneducation is practically stacking up with their traditional peers. I was homeschooled for part of my education, and even with wealth, it’s easy to miss critical foundations and unschooled kids sound ripe for it. I had to work very hard in some areas to catch up with or surpass my peers, and I think many wouldn’t have the patience to do it. Especially in areas known for permanently losing students like mathematics.

rhelz 2y ago

The germ of truth in the wacky conspiracy theory is that public school teachers have had to stop using a lot of these bottom-up, self-directed techniques, which let the children control how fast the material is presented, and the order in which the material is learned. Even though these kinds of techniques have been shown to be highly effective, it's just too risky for public school teachers to use them anymore. The teacher is so encumbered by top-down standards that they simply cannot let the students pick the pace or order, bottom up. The pace must be set by the teacher top-down, it must be the same pace for every student--and it has to be a pretty fast pace to fulfill all the top-down standards requirements. Public school kids would benefit from more bottom-up, rather than top-down learning experiences. But public school teachers are evaluated on how well their students fill in those bubbles on standard exams. Home schooling parents just don't have this kind of accountability. The desire to have quantitative, objective measurements to "hold teachers accountable" or "get rid of the lazy teachers who have tenure" has had a very unexpected side effect: Every public-school kid has to learn exactly the same things, in the same timeframe, in the same order, at the same pace.

oceanplexian 2y ago
> The desire to have quantitative, objective measurements to "hold teachers accountable" or "get rid of the lazy teachers who have tenure" has had a very unexpected side effect The problem is that when you don’t hold students accountable you end up in a situation where China outcompetes the United States in education and pulls ahead economically. China actually does have strict standards and they aren’t worried about hurting some feelings when a kid fails a math test. You could make the argument quantitative measurements aren’t important in social sciences and gender studies, but fields like physics, engineering, and math they are extremely important and aren’t forgiving when people try to take shortcuts.
- squigz 2y ago
  Taking your first point at face value, why is this a problem, exactly?
- rhelz 2y ago

glzone1 2y ago

I went to public school for high school - sending my kid to public school. One thing that is interesting to me. If you look at per pupil funding, and the number of kids in a classroom with ONE teacher - where is the money going? We did preschool with a fraction of the cost and the teacher ratio was between 1:4 and 1:6. The the public school (with more per pupil funding per student by a huge margin) is 1:25-1:35! Quick math: An SFUSD fifth grade class might have 32 students. SFUSD does $24K per student lets say. Let's say indirect county / state / federal costs are another 15% so total system spend is $27K. That get's us to $860,000 in funding per year per class. Let's say a teacher is 123K per year. That would be 7 teachers. The question then is how much overhead is reasonable?

9659 2y ago
do it like every other business. double it. that leaves you with 1/2 a million profit per classroom, per year. ripe for disruption! but, that 1 to 32 might not be accurate. special ed is required by law, and the ratio in those classes are probably 5 students, 1 teacher. and then we have the 'additional teachers'. in middle school you might have a gifted and talented teacher, a music teacher, and maybe a PE teacher. they would not count as overhead since they are direct instructional. and, and, and. my point is your model is too simple. in the end you will probably find that the overhead is 400%, and it is there because of principals, assistant principals, curriculum specialists, behavioral interventionists, speech therapists and... we have allocated dealing with a lot of problems to the public schools system, and it costs a lot of money. what is reasonable is determined by your local school board. they levy the taxes, they spend the money.
- glzone1 2y ago
  1) The local school board is not in charge. I've dealt with school finance. The amount of regulation from feds and state and county and city (non-school) can be huge. This contrasts sharply with charter schools and even more sharply with private schools. I've seen private schools were the "admin" is a math teacher doing work part time as principal and the teachers have a group that meet weekly to make admin decisions usually with a business manager. That's the admin structure. Private schools often have much MORE art / music / etc etc. It's actually a complaint I have with the public school. They have one classroom teacher who is doing everything - and there is no real music program, no real art program, no nature program, no knitting, no woodworking, no metalworking. When you have smaller class sizes, more kids (including kids with needs) can get help / attention / support right there in the class. What is also wild is just how little budget / spending authority the site level school teachers / principles have. At a private school the authority / discretion is enormous. They may have a middle school / lower school director in a big private school (generally also a teacher) to help coordinate, but basically, if the lower school says hey, we need X, head of school says sounds good and literally 2 days later x is there / done. I've worked in public schools were a work order for a facility repair is stuck for a year+, and when on-site folks fixed the issue they got in trouble for fixing it. And by in trouble I mean serious trouble. Only certain union members are allowed to fix things etc, so you literally have to walk by the broken thing every day for a year because you are prohibited from fixing it. The other issue is that many state / county / school board actions make life harder for teachers. The state will have some educational programs analyst (supported by an assistant finance analyst, an HR person, a facilities person for the facilities etc) who will be busy making rules about posters that go in the classroom. That filters to the county who adds more rules (should show nutrious food, should show this type of activity or not this thing). Then the local district adds their stuff. By the time it gets to the teacher multiplied by 100 of these things it is burdensome. Even the PTAs can get in trouble on this stuff. These are volunteers, and instead of thanks for helping its - hey, you used disposable cupcake liners for the cupcakes you baked for the beach trip you offered for the kids - you are going to be shamed and punished for violating district policy XXX. Trust me, those volunteers are not coming back. Anyways, I could go on. It's just remarkable having seen both systems up so close, the public school teacher's life is hard.

sgarland 2y ago

I was homeschooled from K-6th, and unschooled from 7th-12th, circa 90s-2000s. I have thoughts. I wound up fine, by which I mean I managed to get a B.S. and M.S, and have a good-paying job. IME, this is in no way the norm for either group. To be fair, my upbringing was also conservative Christian (but in a weird way, like my mom encouraged me to do a comparative religion study in high school), so many of my peers were on the "college is useless and indoctrinates you" track. I was able to do a lot of self-directed learning, which in retrospect was useful. For example, I showed a strong interest in computers since I was about six years old. As such, I was encouraged to explore them, had books purchased for me on the subject, etc. As a counterpoint, before unschooling, I was forced to learn Latin and Greek roots. I hated it at the time, but these have proven to be remarkably useful in life – turns out a stunning amount of English words have Latin or Greek roots, so you can figure out much of a word's meaning from them. I think there are some things that kids are unlikely to be interested in, but just like being forced to eat a balanced diet, are still the right choice. My wife is a Montessori teacher, and I think it's the best middle ground. Kids are encouraged to learn what they're interested in at a time that they're interested in it, and a love for learning for the sake of learning is encouraged. At the same time, if a kid stubbornly refuses to learn anything, eventually they will be forced to go through lessons, because at some point, you have to have a baseline level of education.

nataliste 2y ago

I was effectively hard-unschooled during my teenage years. I can't really complain about the experience. Most of my time was spent playing video games, reading, or debating people online in forums. I got my GED when I was seventeen and went to college. I had strange ideas about what college was (namely, I thought the PR copy universities provided was the "real thing" and was sorely disappointed to discover what amounted to an adult half-way house for professional employment rather than an actual place of learning). In retrospect and purely on educational and financial grounds, I regret attending college, as I could've obtained the same information by paying for a community borrower's pass from the library to the same effect but without the pedigree. My parents didn't do it for any ideological purpose; we simply lived in a bad area and they couldn't afford the tuition the Catholic schools were charging. My other siblings were sent to the local public high school, which was (and sadly remains) the worst in the state. Their life outcomes were much worse than my own.