That was a wonderful read, thank you! I'd like to have kids one day and I'm very interested in unschooling them. If I were to find a woman that was generally open-minded but skeptical of unschooling, do you have any resources, statistics, books, or other evidence in support of unschooling or similar approaches? I plan to do research on this but if you happen to know of anything you'd recommend, I'd appreciate that. It seems most research of alternative schooling is on homeschooling.
Thank you, Professor Friedman, I think this is also very inspiring to Chinese society. Although most of what you said is the status quo in the United States, many Chinese parents are still superstitious about national public education...
Also, my English is not very good, please forgive me.
The idea that public schools are designed to impart academic knowledge is a pretense. The most important things public schools teach is how to endure, and inflict cruelty.
Cruel people are necessary in any society to serve as a buffer against cruel people from other societies. The Prussian education system, upon which the American one is based, was created to remedy the mediocre way Prussian soldiers were fighting in wars. They weren't MEAN enough, and this was and is a security issue.
School shootings are an example of public education working too well too fast. We want them shooting the enemy, not each other.
Knowledge is power, and power in the hands of mean people is a dangerous thing. This is why we are not taught things like critical thinking, or decision theory or finance. It is why they turn learning into a repulsive chore, to be avoided at all costs.
When I was 15, I read "the teenage liberation handbook" which is a book about unschooling aimed at teens. Afterwords I told my Grandparents (my gaurdians at the time) that I planned on getting my GED and leaving school early, going on to community college. My grandmother began to cry and then became angry, telling me that if I graduated early she would force me to get a minimum wage job instead of attending community College. My grandfather became angry, he made up an irrelevant story about how nobody hires people with GEDs and only an actual high school diploma would work. There behavior was shockingly out of character and I was perplexed as I was distraught. I finished up school after switching out of my honors classes and using the extra time available to study on my own, using libraries and the internet.
Meanness is ugly but necessary. It was not my place to be an enlightened, free-spirited intellectual. It was my place to be a mean, nasty, violent-minded person who protects people from other mean, nasty violent-minded individuals. Either by fighting and dying in a war or inventing new ways to kill people and break things that might contribute to our nation's security.
Someday, as a reward for this gross, but necessary task, I hope to be reincarnated as a child who is treated the same way as your children were. I believe now it was God who hardened my grandparents hearts because I was trying to take a shortcut to my reward without paying what I owed.
> In the standard model of schooling, someone else decides what is true and you believe him. Living by that approach is dangerous in the real world and not entirely safe even in school: Many of us remember examples of false information presented to us by teachers or textbooks as true.
An amusing anecdote from my own schooling: We were told to order the Stone, Bronze, and Iron Ages in historical sequence. I put Iron last and was told this couldn't be right, as Bronze took two different ores and was too complicated for Iron societies. I tried to argue that iron is a superior material and they wouldn't switch, but was unable to convince him. To be fair, though, I was confident here primarily because _that's the order in Runescape_, an even more pointless video game than Pokemon. (I was, of course, correct, but couldn't find any citation to prove it, even with time.)
That was a wonderful read, thank you! I'd like to have kids one day and I'm very interested in unschooling them. If I were to find a woman that was generally open-minded but skeptical of unschooling, do you have any resources, statistics, books, or other evidence in support of unschooling or similar approaches? I plan to do research on this but if you happen to know of anything you'd recommend, I'd appreciate that. It seems most research of alternative schooling is on homeschooling.
Thank you!
I very much enjoyed it.
I was wondering if you had a way to help your kids when they were interested in subjects you didn't know very well?
Thank you, Professor Friedman, I think this is also very inspiring to Chinese society. Although most of what you said is the status quo in the United States, many Chinese parents are still superstitious about national public education...
Also, my English is not very good, please forgive me.
The idea that public schools are designed to impart academic knowledge is a pretense. The most important things public schools teach is how to endure, and inflict cruelty.
Cruel people are necessary in any society to serve as a buffer against cruel people from other societies. The Prussian education system, upon which the American one is based, was created to remedy the mediocre way Prussian soldiers were fighting in wars. They weren't MEAN enough, and this was and is a security issue.
School shootings are an example of public education working too well too fast. We want them shooting the enemy, not each other.
Knowledge is power, and power in the hands of mean people is a dangerous thing. This is why we are not taught things like critical thinking, or decision theory or finance. It is why they turn learning into a repulsive chore, to be avoided at all costs.
When I was 15, I read "the teenage liberation handbook" which is a book about unschooling aimed at teens. Afterwords I told my Grandparents (my gaurdians at the time) that I planned on getting my GED and leaving school early, going on to community college. My grandmother began to cry and then became angry, telling me that if I graduated early she would force me to get a minimum wage job instead of attending community College. My grandfather became angry, he made up an irrelevant story about how nobody hires people with GEDs and only an actual high school diploma would work. There behavior was shockingly out of character and I was perplexed as I was distraught. I finished up school after switching out of my honors classes and using the extra time available to study on my own, using libraries and the internet.
Meanness is ugly but necessary. It was not my place to be an enlightened, free-spirited intellectual. It was my place to be a mean, nasty, violent-minded person who protects people from other mean, nasty violent-minded individuals. Either by fighting and dying in a war or inventing new ways to kill people and break things that might contribute to our nation's security.
Someday, as a reward for this gross, but necessary task, I hope to be reincarnated as a child who is treated the same way as your children were. I believe now it was God who hardened my grandparents hearts because I was trying to take a shortcut to my reward without paying what I owed.
> In the standard model of schooling, someone else decides what is true and you believe him. Living by that approach is dangerous in the real world and not entirely safe even in school: Many of us remember examples of false information presented to us by teachers or textbooks as true.
An amusing anecdote from my own schooling: We were told to order the Stone, Bronze, and Iron Ages in historical sequence. I put Iron last and was told this couldn't be right, as Bronze took two different ores and was too complicated for Iron societies. I tried to argue that iron is a superior material and they wouldn't switch, but was unable to convince him. To be fair, though, I was confident here primarily because _that's the order in Runescape_, an even more pointless video game than Pokemon. (I was, of course, correct, but couldn't find any citation to prove it, even with time.)