I think there is a more general issue than the issue of schooling, that is that the vast majority of parents and adults and such feel they have the right to coerce children, this is not simply limited to cases such as a small child running into a busy road, but to almost all instances of adult child interactions. I'm not sure what the wider implications of such treatment is but my suspicion is that it both makes the lives of children and teens significantly worse off and even makes the lives of adults worse off, as I think such treatment probably encourages certain forms of bad behaviour and delays the development of personal responsibility and general maturity and such. I'm also not sure if things are getting better or worse over time, I think some parents have substituted abuse for neglect and education seems to be on the whole getting worse.
A parent's job is to prevent their children from taking risks which have consequences beyond the child's ability to cope. E.g. my father spanked me (once!) because I crossed the road without adult supervision. My justification? "But I didn't get hit!" was insufficient for me to escape the spanking.
This is true for unschooling as well as anything else.
My children were unschooled. My son got a BA and MA in math in four years, and had enough credits for a BS in computer science, but was missing a requirement. My daughter got a PhD in sociology getting 4.0 grades or better (UConn lets professors give a 4.1 presumably for the students who really deserve a 4.0 when the other students didn't -- grade inflation is to blame).
When I was very young, about 7 or 8, (so this would have been about 1990) my teacher for some reason showed our class a movie about an unschooled girl. I remember it as a fairly slow and subtle drama, and therefore I can’t think why she chose to show it to a class of 7 year olds.
It depicted a family that unschooled their kids, and a bureaucracy that tried to prove they were therefore unfit parents. A climactic scene was the teenage girl having to prove in front of a court that she could read. Which she did, but with tears streaming down her face. I can’t recall the resolution - and I guess it’s possible we never finished it!
I’ve never been able to find this movie again. It would have been a UK made-for-TV drama.
I think there is a more general issue than the issue of schooling, that is that the vast majority of parents and adults and such feel they have the right to coerce children, this is not simply limited to cases such as a small child running into a busy road, but to almost all instances of adult child interactions. I'm not sure what the wider implications of such treatment is but my suspicion is that it both makes the lives of children and teens significantly worse off and even makes the lives of adults worse off, as I think such treatment probably encourages certain forms of bad behaviour and delays the development of personal responsibility and general maturity and such. I'm also not sure if things are getting better or worse over time, I think some parents have substituted abuse for neglect and education seems to be on the whole getting worse.
A parent's job is to prevent their children from taking risks which have consequences beyond the child's ability to cope. E.g. my father spanked me (once!) because I crossed the road without adult supervision. My justification? "But I didn't get hit!" was insufficient for me to escape the spanking.
This is true for unschooling as well as anything else.
My children were unschooled. My son got a BA and MA in math in four years, and had enough credits for a BS in computer science, but was missing a requirement. My daughter got a PhD in sociology getting 4.0 grades or better (UConn lets professors give a 4.1 presumably for the students who really deserve a 4.0 when the other students didn't -- grade inflation is to blame).
When I was very young, about 7 or 8, (so this would have been about 1990) my teacher for some reason showed our class a movie about an unschooled girl. I remember it as a fairly slow and subtle drama, and therefore I can’t think why she chose to show it to a class of 7 year olds.
It depicted a family that unschooled their kids, and a bureaucracy that tried to prove they were therefore unfit parents. A climactic scene was the teenage girl having to prove in front of a court that she could read. Which she did, but with tears streaming down her face. I can’t recall the resolution - and I guess it’s possible we never finished it!
I’ve never been able to find this movie again. It would have been a UK made-for-TV drama.