Email of the Day:
How can you cover the 11 required subjects if you unschool?
How can you cover the 11 required subjects if you unschool?
How do they learn how to read and spell, if they don’t care to? How do they learn an advanced math, if they never have a reason to use it? I guess I just don’t understand.
I’m not trying to attack, just trying to understand.
Answer:
It is my deeply held belief that children want to learn.
Humans want to learn.
We want, especially when we’re little, to emulate the adults in our lives, and we want to do meaningful work. We read with and to our daughter from birth — and she wanted to read. We traveled, and she was curious about the peoples, the cultures, and the languages of the places we went to. She wanted to know if she had enough money to buy something at the store, and we helped her calculate the price, figure out the tax, and count the money she had. We didn’t do math (or anything else) for her, but we helped her find what she was looking for.
And here’s the thing: I was an English major and then an English professor — I’ve never been hot on maths. My daughter was never that hot on maths, either, but she’s now a 19yo senior at uni, and one of her majors is computer science. She’s ended up needing more and more math as she’s gone along — some she knew, some she didn’t. She spends time finding the things she doesn’t know in the library, in her professor’s office hours, and in the tutoring center. She knows how to find things, she knows it’s okay to ask, she knows the cure for ignorance is knowledge.
Unschooling’s not for everyone — Pat Farenga defines it as “giving a child as much freedom as the parent can handle” — but if you hold on too tight, scared that your child will grow up to know nothing, you’re liable to miss a lot of really interesting rabbit trails you might have stumbled down, and you’re far more likely to end up with a self-fulfilling prophecy (because you’re pretending to unschool, but you’ve got such a death-grip on what your children are allowed to do, that they stop wandering down their own paths, and attempt to figure out where you want them to go — I’ve watched that be extremely miserable for everyone — you’d be better off with a boxed curriculum and letting the free (to actually be free) when they’ve done the work for the day.
Unschooling takes quite a bit more work than many programs that are already set out. To do it well, you have to be ready to learn things alongside your kidlet that you might not have any interest in. You have to become a master sleuth and researcher; you have to spend a lot of time deep in a lot of things without a road map for what you’re doing or where you’re going. Absolutely, it’s at least partially benign neglect — but all good homeschooling includes that — children need solitude and silence — they need time to be alone and to think deeply — things that they never get during institutional school hours. But a lot of it is working to be the guru, the guide, the nudge, the facilitator, the chauffeur, the cheerleader . . . it’s a really awesome way to spend time with your children and their passions.
Warmly,
~Jen GS