Unschooling - thoughts?

[Snickerdoodle1]

Recently got back in touch with an old school friend via Facebook, have mostly shared messages but last week we met properly for coffee and was good to see her again.

I'd never heard of it before but apparently she is 'unschooling' her DS - not the same as home ed as they never sit down and dedicate time to work, they just visit the occasional museum and forest school class but mostly just focus on being happy. They go on a lot of holidays and spend time will their fellow unschooling friends.

Her DS seems cheerful and positive so clearly she's doing something right but when I was discussing with DH later at home he said he thinks it's 'not fair' on someone not to equip them for life and work and adulthood.

Just wondering what other people's thoughts/opinions are on it?

Mally100 - not quite the same as my son goes to a special school. But he also learns through gardening. He does things like designs a website for enthusiasts on a particular flower - that might have poetry page, representations of that flower in art and then from that he might look at the historical context of the artist. He might look at medicinal uses of plants and go down the whole history of medicind route. Decide to write his own poem. It takes a lot of skill but its amazing how much you can get from it

I unschool mine in the school holidays 😂 but seriously I had a thread about it HOW does anyone home school, I can't get my DS to do anything school related? He won't even touch a pen other than colouring. His writing is poor.

@Mally100 we'd have Zombie studies, Minecraft weapon counts and I suppose we could do some jumping and rolling like Mario & Sonic 😬

A child who wants to be an architect will need good Maths and good art/design - so they will want to study it.

And for me, this is where it starts to fall down. How many primary or early secondary aged children have picked a career path, and then end up in that line of work? I don’t know anyone whose life worked that way.

A child may not know until they are at least 16 that they want to be an architect. If they haven’t until that point been motivated to want to learn the right things to allow them to go to university on an architecture course, how long will it take for them to acquire all the skills they need? And how will they support themselves while acquiring them? A broad education up to 16 which allows flexibility for the future is surely a much better foundation than one which has large gaps and narrows options.

I think the long and the short of it is, you need to know the rules before you can break them. I hate sending my kids to mainstream school, but as I'll be working full time till I die and they have no inheritance, I have no viable alternative and nor do they.

They'll decide for themselves when they're 18, just how much they got out of it. At least they'll have the qualifications to be able to make choices.

Yes this is exactly it. This is very much what we did when doing HE.

This is exactly it.

I think you misunderstand my post. No one was suggesting a primary-aged child would be choosing their career! I was talking about a KS4 child.

If they want to do Architecture they need high grades, so they will have to be motivated to study. If they have the required GCSEs to get onto the A-level courses they need - what is your issue?

How is that any different than a child at school? A child at school could have dropped Art - and then regret it.

I was for two years. Well, flexi schooled. I loved it and it’s part of the reason I home educate my own dc. I hated school with a passion and begged my parents for years to home educate me. It was only after a suicide attempt at 14, caused by my very traumatic school experience, that I was finally granted it. My parents did it in a school at home, sort of, way. They would get work from the local school, and I would complete it, but I was allowed to complete it how I wanted - so I could do it whatever time I wanted, so long as it was in by the deadline, I could research it using books, the internet, documentaries etc. This is different to complete home education, as I say it was flexi schooling, but I passed my GCSEs with A-C results and went on to do A levels and university.

Utter bollocks. Your DH is correct.

Why? My son learned to read by playing games on his Nintendo switch. Prior to this, he’d been to a mainstream school and they couldn’t teach him to read. They’d also constantly exclude him for having meltdowns - my son has ADHD and is autistic, if that matters. Anyway we couldn’t get him to read conventionally. He likes having books read to him but school had knocked his confidence in trying for himself. But he loves Nintendo games. So we bought him games where there’s no speaking option, as in the characters have speech bubbles. Initially he’d ask us what they said, and he started recognising words. We then got him comic books and poster print outs of his favourite characters, again with words. We built up from there.

DS1 is now 7 and reads for pleasure, fluently at a rate similar to other 7 year olds.

John Holt was writing about this in 1967 so it is nothing new. It seems to work very well for highly intelligent/ gifted children.

I don't agree with unschooling but I can see the argument that for the majority of us, we learn these things to pass the exam and have no use for them afterwards.
Apologies if this has already been said

@AntlerRose

For example

symmetry in nature
the prevalence of ‘e’ in nature
Fibonacci number sequences

elements in soil changing growing conditions
history of genetics
medicinal botany
history of medicines

weather patterns
cad garden design
the rock cycle
plant distribution

ans that’s just off the top of my head

So much ignorance about HE including unschooling on this thread. My kids attend conventional school, they have a friend (age 13) who has always been home schooled. His sisters attended conventional primary but were withdrawn after suffering severe anxiety and bullying. Their mum is highly educated, they are all very pleasant articulate children who have no problems socialising (they do rugby and dance and scouts and a tonne of other activities with their conventionally schooled peers) and all achieving well, they have tutors for some subjects and sit GCSE and Alevel exams (eldest is at uni doing really well). It's not a path I'd choose (can't afford not to work, also haven't the patience) but there's no doubt those kids are receiving/have received a higher quality of education and a more positive learning experience.
A close friend of mine is unschooling after having been let down by schools and local education authority. She's a qualified primary school teacher and has always believed in conventional schooling until her disabled son was struggling and couldn't get help. Her kids have significant LD and invisible disabilities, unschooling has been the making of her kids and they are absolutely thriving. Forcing them to go through conventional schooling to eventually sit GCSEs that they will fail is of no use to them whatsoever.

@baffledcoconut - yep more good suggestion to add to my list of how my son learns through gardening.

@AntlerRose sorry I quoted the wrong person! Apologies. There is a whole world
of learning opportunities aren’t there?

Have you looked at the exploring nature with children curriculum? I’m sure it’d be easy enough to make it more in depth. I do like the seasonality of it.

If they passed the 11+ they must have been taught a fairly standard curriculum. You can’t just guess the answers. Sounds like they have just rebranded homeschooling to make it sound cooler.

Thanks for sharing. That is quite impressive and interesting.

That's exactly my fear. 😂

I think there is such a variety of experiences with HE that it is difficult to generalise about it. Those who have a good level of education and resources themselves can provide a wonderful experience for their children... Unfortunately, since covid more and more families whose children have struggled to return to school have withdrawn them, despite clearly not having any idea how they are going to educate them. It is heartbreaking to see.

What could possibly go wrong, letting a child decide what they do all day, every day?

The Children’s Commissioner’s analysis reveals that in 2018, 98,799 children in England (18% of all school leavers left education at 18 without substantive qualifications (reaching Level 2 attainment)

These are children who will have spent 14 years in compulsory education, often having more than £100,000 of public money spent on their education.
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Unstructured homeschoolers also performed worse than the public school kids did, though not by enough margin to rule out chance.
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These are quotes from UK and US studies.
After a bit of digging around, home schooled children (on average) significantly out perform children at school academically in their peer group. And it would appear that (with the limited research out there) unschooled children (on average) perform similar to those in school who go through the system and fail to achieve the basic qualifications.

Unschooling involves teaching children based on their interests rather than a set curriculum. In principle, the idea of child led learning is a great place to start. It builds a positive attitude towards learning which is absent from many students in traditional schools. IMO Positive attitude/work ethic is more important than academic achievement. For many school is not a happy/enjoyable experience. Some 65% of primary school children rated their school experience as positive, whereas only 27% did so at secondary school. When asked to respond to the statement "School is interesting", only 12% of secondary school pupils strongly agreed, while 65% of primary pupils did. Other questions about how much they enjoyed school followed a similar split and trend.

My conclusion (including other research I have not shared from what I have written/copied and pasted above): some principles of unschooling have benefits. When integrated into other pedagogical approaches it be rather effective.

Read my post again. Carefully.

See the bit that says "home education is a great choice for many"? Now, tell me where the criticism is there? That's right, there's none.

This thread is very clearly not about HOMESCHOOLING it's about UNSCHOOLING which IS airy fairy, let them learn what they feel like nonsense.

But never let the topic of a thread get in the way of a good bit of personal agenda pushing!

Bake a cake; measurements, ratios, heat conductivity.

Groom the cat; mammalian life, different types of hair on animals, which animals make milk, how babies are born.

Play in the garden; pick some wildlife, do leaf art, painting, learn about flora, predators, bees, pollination.

Play with my dolls' house; language, dexterity, learn the word "miniature" and talk about scale.

Face painting; different types of paint, what "toxic" means and how substances can be toxic to skin, what is skin, the layers of skin, artistic skills, imagination.

A lesson can come from every single activity, even sleep.