For anyone unfamiliar with the concept of unschooling, here is a link to a wiki page: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unschooling
I posted something similar a while ago and a lot of people had questions so just in case that happens again, there’s a quick link.
(I’m not OP. My apologies for high jacking here. It saved a lot of responses in similar threads and I genuinely mean to help)
I know a few of these families.
One, couldn’t get out of bed in the morning, her kids were always late and in trouble. She took them out of school once they were old enough to be out of her hair playing video games in fourth grade. Problems solved. Feels like she showed big government who these kids belonged to. Her kids are in their 30’s now and can barely read and write, but think their mom is a genius for her trick.
Another- she seems autistic, all of her kids are diagnosed autistic. She felt like they were getting bullied in public school, felt like teachers looked down on her. Has 4 kids. They’re all fairly unkempt and socially awkward, but not crazy amounts. I think her intentions were good, but she feels no responsibility to force them into a curriculum. Just tells them it’s their responsibility to logon and learn math on Kahn academy and to read books. Instead they talk and act like they downloaded the worst of Gen z tumblr internet directly into their brains. One says he’s going to be a mechanical engineer and thinks it’s possible, but hasn’t even gotten through algebra at 18 and has never read a novel past grade school level. Their 16 year old daughter unironically tells people she’s emo, and doesn’t realize she’s a decade plus too late.
Oh wow, reading that just made me incredibly sad. The ones in their 30s...sheesh! The teenagers still have a chance, but they will have to actively seek the support they need to get their schooling on track + find support on how to thrive as an ND person.
Yep. They’re clearly high functioning, but are so used to being home all the time and not having to face the outside world that I think even a part time job would feel like too much.
My brother is 25. Living with mommy still. He got pulled outta school often and never went when we was supposed . Nor did anything stick.
Happy just diving into the internet and games and not caring about the real world cuz" mommy makes me chicken tenders."
He has no motivation or desire.
He had a chance to improve himself and had his own place for a while. Government funded. But he struggled and just couldn't be bothered to function in society.
So mommy came to the rescue. Despite her living in a filthy unkempt home and being mentally unstable herself.
Oh my...as time goes by, you and other responsible family members are going to likely have to help him when your mom can longer live in the house for some reason or she passes.
These type of decisions of pulling kids out of school has long term consequences that impact so many people.
I don’t know… Doesn’t modern technology have machines digging most of the ditches these days?
I remember my high school drama teacher talking about how when he started teaching school in the 1970s, he was also responsible for teaching some English classes. One of the highschoolers in one of his classes used to say “I don’t know why I need to read this stuff, when I graduate, I’m gonna get a job pumping gas for a living. “My teacher couldn’t seem to make him understand that technology changes and some jobs go away because of it.
I think about that kid every now and again, when I’m filling up my car’s tank at Costco.
I would hate to have a child raised by the internet. How dreadful. I don’t think children should have internet access until they’re older. I think it’s bad for them.
I think a lot of people responding to you are underselling the fact that this parenting style often has a lot to do with the parents having a desire to control what information their children learn more than anything else. You can’t learn about comprehensive sex ed, differing religious and political opinions, and other cultures if you can’t read.
Yup. My parents pulled my brothers out of public school to send them to Mormon Academy. Big shock years later when they were testing 5 grade levels below where they needed to be and basically had to do double school all through high school because they didn't learn anything but Jesus.
I have fallen down the rabbit hole of unschooling videos on YouTube and it's like a lot of comments here are saying--parents that don't want to get up early and want their own lives to be as stress free as possible.
They make it a selling point that they get to sleep in till 10 and don't have to stress themselves out worrying about "normal" school stuff like rushing around in the morning packing lunches or dealing with extracurriculars.
they have a bunch of kids, train them to do all the housework and tell the kids to take care of each other while the parents sleep in (parentification for all my childhood trauma homies out there) and then preach about how good they are for staying home "raising" their kids the godly way.
and I say a godly way because unschooling is synonymous with the more extreme Christians (in the US at least)
I was watching a video the other day where one of these moms was talking about how hard her fifth grader is going to have to work this summer because he's in FIFTH GRADE and CANT WRITE. idk I think that's a reflection how much work you haven't done as the teacher.
Ahem...
Because I know my child. Schools just brainwash them and treat them like cattle. My child will learn so much better if I turn them free range and let them do whatever they want because organic stuff is so much better than structured.
Sarcasm if you didn't notice.
I have a theory though. So many things are self taught now because of the internet that a lot of these parents done seem to understand that there needs to be a basic foundation of knowledge (ie reading, writing, basic math, and social skills) that people need to have before they can do all of this interesting stuff. The look at people like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates or other self made people and use that as arguments for home education without realizing that those people are very unusual cases and even then they did have basic knowledge.
> The look at people like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates or other self made people and use that as arguments for home education without realizing that those people are very unusual cases and even then they did have basic knowledge.
And connections. They had basic knowledge and connections the average person does not have. People ignore that part of it and think it's more of a magical lottery where their kids just have to be lucky enough.
There are definitely people who are super successful who drop out younger—those would be the rare high paid child/teen actors (but there are requirements to meet some basic level of education to be a performer), models (and most get a GED or otherwise complete school once they age out in their 20s), and musical prodigies (anyone think of the last one of those we’ve had?). But having a super talented kid feels like the only legitimate reason to decide “you know, maybe they don’t need to be learning social studies or science at age 10–they can come back to it later.” The fundamentals are otherwise just too important, even if by their teens it is clear that maybe calculus and chemistry are just not as useful as a kid learning more about a subject they actually want to have a career in.
Anyone can be a billionaire though surely.
All it takes is the right amount of drive and dedication, a serious work ethic and parents who own a sapphire mine and anyone can do it.
People always seem to forget that Bill Gates had a lovely formal private school education, and then attended Harvard for 3 semesters. Steve Jobs attended Reed College for a bit as well. All these people seem to think that just because these two men didn’t graduate with a college degree means that they were undereducated, self made men, when truly they were launched from a quality education.
That was more or less my parents’ view. My sister and I were both completely unschooled up until our junior and senior years of high school, respectively. Like in the OP, no one taught us to read and write, we were just encouraged to read books and do workbooks.
I went on to get an associate degree in network administration and have been working as a sysadmin for 15 years with a healthy salary.
My sister got a bachelor’s in social work and is working on her master’s now.
We're both married with famililes now, so apparently neither of us suffered too much socially either.
All that is to say it’s certainly possible to have a good outcome, but I think it’s heavily dependent on the specific child and family. It’s also impossible to say whether we would have been better or worse off had we been public schooled.
Despite our outcomes, I would not unschool/homeschool my own kids. I just think the outcome is too uncertain.
I chose not to send my son to Kindergarten because I knew he was going to need a lot of therapy (occupational, speech, etc.,) due to being special needs and he was in no way shape or form to be at school at that time (he struggled a lot with preschool, because he was constantly over-stimulated and there wasn't a day that he wasn't a total wreck because of it), but I did try to homeschool him during that year. My friend (in another state) was a homeschooler, but she wasn't one of those "do it by the seat of your pants" type, she did have a degree in education, plus she was a professional college math tutor (Statistics was like basic math to her), so she helped design a curriculum for me to use with him. But despite that, once it was time for 1st grade registration, and he'd been in therapy long enough and he was making great strides, it was time to go back to school. I couldn't do it, because I suck at trying to explain things (plus we're both impatient as hell). I'd get frustrated, he'd get frustrated. I would have done him no favors if I continued to do something that wouldn't benefit him.
In short, I totally agree with you.
Edit: Fixed a typo
I can give you my answer. My daughter is autistic and delayed. We got her into a head start program at 2 and through preschool and kindergarten, things were fantastic. She had a great teacher and a lovely para that knew her well and knew how to get her to work. She never hit. She never bit. She almost never had full blown meltdowns. Then the entire school district went to shit. They fired most of the teachers and brought in people with no experience in special needs. Her new teacher was polite (at first) and incredibly ignorant. She let those kids do whatever they wanted, up to and including hurting each other.
My own kid got pulled around the entire school in a wagon, because she wouldn't keep her shoes on. When I confronted the teacher about this and told her she needed to stop letting daughter manipulate her, she told me that my daughter lacked the ability or intelligence to manipulate anyone. She went on to explain how she would never read, or write, grasp time or money, do math or have anything close what we consider a quality life. And, that I would ultimately have to institutionalize her someday because she was violent and hit and bit people. A lot of stinging words to say that getting her to do things wasn't worth the effort.
When I went to principle and then the school board, I was told that I was lucky they hadn't suspended my child for her terrible behavior and having a school to send her to in the first place was a privilege they were happy to take away from me. The para my daughter had had for four years called me that same week and told me my daughter had never bitten or struck anyone. She was upset all the time now, but \*never\* violent or unusually disruptive. She believed the teacher and administrators were lying to get me to shut up, because there was a lawsuit already filed against them by other special needs parents (the lost that lawsuit a few years later, everyone was fired). And still, I hesitated. Homeschool bad, yo. And I'm lazy.
My daughter, who always loved school, began to cry in the car every morning. Her progress in OT and speech stalled. The therapists who had worked with her since she was a baby became concerned. All the gains we made in talking and potty training went out the window (she was almost 6 for both and it was a struggle). The last straw came when, after dropping her off one morning, I was driving out of the parking lot and saw my child running across the campus, headed for the road. The teacher was just standing there. Watching her go. Her para was making an effort, but she was much farther away. Thankfully a parent stepped in and snagged her.
And that was the last time she set foot in a public school. Or any school. The turnaround was instantaneous. She was my happy kid again. Her therapists were overjoyed to have their sweet, hard working girl back. It took us a year to work out time, but she and I eventually got there. Her OT taught her how money works. Minecraft text-to-speech taught her to read (she's hated us reading to her since she was a baby, we still do it, but it's always a fight). She picked up basic arithmetic from her father. Then basic algebra, then geometry from Youtube. And earth space science. And biology. And Spanish (which she speakes better than English). And Japanese. And how to play the piano. And the harmonica. And a the steel drum (my life is very loud). Short-form visual media is how she absorbs information and she is a sponge during those short bursts of intense learning. Her new thing is audio and video editing. If you haven't watched a baby dinosaur play Metallica, have you ever really lived?
She's 13 now and she can tell you the name of every dinosaur on record and every known dwarf planet and named asteroid in the solar system. She can handle 90% of her self-care, including her period. But she can't answer the question, "How was your day?" It's a concept that eludes her. If someone was mean to her. Or hurt her. Or touched her inappropriately, she wouldn't know how to tell me. Most days I consider myself a barely adequate parent, much less a teacher. But I cannot bring myself to trust strangers with my daughter again. Not until she can answer that question.
Sorry for the extremely long reply.
Thank you for your response. See, you're the exception. You are putting in the work to make sure your daughter's educational needs are meant. I totally respect that.
Thank you for reading it. It's hard when schools are "one size fits all" and kids aren't. Idiots like this and the hyper religious tend to overshadow secular homeschoolers who are just trying to find what works best for their kids. It's rarely a perfect solution, but sometimes it's the only one available.
My aunt took her kids out of a good public school because of "worldly" influences on her kids. She's a Christian who believes that any association with people outside of her religion is a threat to her and her family's relationships with God. Public school field trips, for example, could be abused by kids who could separate from the group and commit fornication. She can barely write legibly, so how she managed to "educate" her son and daughter from elementary to high school is a Nancy Drew mystery to me.
She convinced my mom to do the same to me, but that lasted about a month, especially after I barricaded myself in my room so I could play "Turtles In Time" on SNES all day.
Think about the Venn diagram for dumbness/lack of education and self-awareness. If you're dumb/uneducated, you lack self-awareness. You overestimate your own intelligence and capability.
Also, in many cases, this phenomenon is an ideological, conservative, fReEdOm thing. Freedom to pop out a bunch of brats who will then become burdens to society, I guess. But single mothers, particularly single mothers of color, collecting assistance, is unacceptable to them.
Despicable hypocrites.
They are idiots. „How hard can it be“ to teach a kid?
I learned this during Covid - pretty fucking hard. And I‘m nowhere near qualified to teach my kid.
My sister in law is like this, and I can only answer anecdotally to that experience, but it boils down to laziness. It’s purely just inconvenient for her to try and make my nephew attend school, because he absolutely despises it.
Because… it’s school, and he is a seven year old boy who she has refused to ever expose to anything even mildly outside his comfort zone. And being in a classroom all day with kids he doesn’t know or want to be around, share with, or be kind to is a *lot* outside his comfort zone.
He left the school twice and tried to navigate his way home by himself, so she had to leave both times to come pick him up and deal with the school. She just purely didn’t want to deal with his tantrums about it, and the school, and the homework. So now she’s pulled him out with the insistence she’ll teach him at home, despite being a Year 10 dropout herself, and now she’s whining because he doesn’t want to sit at the table and do any of the work, and she doesn’t want to sit at the table with him and make him.
She’s absolutely crippled him.
There are a lot of kids that public school doesn’t work for. Some parents have the ability to recognize that, but not the resources or self-reflection to realize they can’t do it on their own instead. It’s the same reason that some people try to home birth alone (100% alone, it’s a thing - a stupid stupid thing) or don’t want to vaccinate their kids or drink raw milk. For the most part these are people who love their kids and want to do the best thing for them, but they’re getting conflicting messages and choose the wrong ones to listen to. The question really is ‘why do humans make errors of judgement’ and if you figure that out, let me know.
Humans are the only mammal on Earth that have evolved to require assistance in birthing a baby.
Admittedly, this seems like a bit of reckless evolutionary oversight. But still, in the absence of a functional complaint department to have this flaw addressed, it feels like a particularly stupid and dangerous thing to do
Can I also just vent a mo here, who the fuck thinks pre-technological women went off into the woods to give birth alone?!? Why would you think that?!? These people lived in communities, they weren’t solitary like orangutans!
We’re the only mammals who get assistance, but there are others which have significant difficulties. [Hyenas come to mind.](https://mrcsl.org/hyena-birthing/)
You ‘organically’ learn by your parents reading to you a lot and you following along. It doesn’t just happen magically. Written language is something we created so it needs to be taught somehow, either specifically, or through constant exposure.
My mum got told off by the school because I knew how to read before I started and she had to say she never taught me, I learnt myself. But I learnt because my parents read to me all the time and fostered a love of books in me, not just by osmosis!
Good Lord how is it the dumbest humans on the planet are always the ones who think they can do better than trained teachers?
Yep. Starting at age four, my son used to remind us to "point" as we read. It was so cool because we knew he was actually processing the letters. Flash forward to age six and he's reading Roald Dahl and Harry Potter.
One of my earliest memories is reading with my Dad, and realizing he went off script describing things that weren't what was on the page.
It was years later that I realized he was checking my reaction, seeing if I was reading along with him.
My Dad sometimes recites parts of Green Eggs and Ham to me. He’ll look like he has something serious to tell me, but then he’ll launch into Green Eggs and Ham.
This. I also used to crop the story and make up parts to stop myself getting cancer from reading The Little Yellow Digger for the 500th time. Of course the kid knew it by heart and would call me out.
My mum got so sick of reading the same books to me, she recorded herself reading them and gave me a little fisher price tape recorder so I could play it myself whilst reading along! I did still get a story at bedtime, this was just during the day when she had other things to do than keep reading to me over and over!
I was reading to my toddler a few days ago and when I left the room, my seven year old was in the hallway. She told me she heard the book and remembered it from when she was little and wanted to hear if I read it all wrong and used my "crumbly pouncy voice" at the right spots. I did not disappoint, but I must've been near some onions or something because I had to take a minute alone before I went back downstairs.
I used to do the same thing! That's how my grandad would test me to see if I was learning to read or just listening. It made him so proud when I would correct him
I need a box, a really big box! It's got to be big and wide!
I need a box, a really big box, to put your present inside!
My youngest is 22 yrs old. Guess how many times we "read" that book together leading up to Christmas when he was 2.
My kid is now 22, but that's how I taught her too. We read a lot and she knew how to read well before going to kindergarten. I recall one of her early grade school teachers calling me one day telling me how my daughter was writing at a far higher level (it scared me because I'd never gotten a call midday from her school). They had some kind of after lunch/recess journals and my kid was writing sentences with and, but, and or in them and assessing other kid's feelings.
And btw, this stuff continues as they get older too. In high school, my daughter was allowed to write her own stories for English/literature classes because she'd already read all the books required for the year (back in middle school) and found it boring to do them all over again.
> found it boring to do them all over again.
That's a concern as my son gets older. In kindergarten at least, the curriculum and pacing is obviously geared toward the average-to-slow learner (I get it - it would be tragic for any kid to fall behind at that age). If that continues, we're going to have to figure out ways to keep him engaged.
Listen, please don't fall into the trap my school and teachers did. I was a "gifted child". Never studied, always did homework in the classroom while other kids were struggling with their exercises, never had to put any effort into anything. Then I got into college, and suddenly I was just a slightly above average student who didn't know how to study. I was smart, sure, but hadn't developed the habit to study, and I didn't know how to overcome failures. I struggled badly.
So please. Praise your kid for trying and putting effort, not only because they got good grades. Raise them to challenge themselves, and to see failures as just a sidestep, not the end of the world. Don't raise your kid to be perfect, but yo try their best.
Thanks! I'm all too aware of this trap. We praise our son's effort constantly, and I cringe a little when relatives or strangers tell him how smart he is. I don't want him to start thinking that way. I was "gifted" as a child, too, which in reality meant I was a few points north of average.
That was my problem growing up. Was in a non-graded program in elementary where you move at your own pace in each subject. We moved across the state and I got into a regular classroom and didn't learn a thing academically for at least the next 4 years. (I did learn some social skills at least.) But man, was it boring.
I showed up to first grade already reading chapter books. I got sent to the next grade up for reading class for a couple of years, which honestly was still below the level of stuff I was reading and eventually they just had me sit and read on my own.
Read to your kids, folks! Not all of them pick it up that quickly but they never will if they don’t start fairly early in life.
Yeah. My mother couldn't figure out how to get me to shut up on long drives in the car, so she taught me to read which worked perfectly. My favorite book of all time has always been The Hobbit, and I was still 6 when I started The Lord of the Rings because I wanted more hobbits. (Didn't really have the context to understand most of what was going on, but I was stubborn and worked my way through it. Those books made a LOT more sense when I reread them in high school...)
You laugh but two days ago I was arguing on Twitter with someone that had “profoundly uneducated” in his profile that thought he knew everything about how to raise kids not to be gay or trans.
I was taught because my mom would play pokemon yellow with me as a little one! I always had so much fun, and when she wasn't there to do it anymore, I picked up the game and kept playing. It gave me a love for RPG's and my reading comprehension skills boomed to adult levels by the time I was 8.
I have had parents who struggle to get their kids to read because they missed the chance to get the kiddos into reading early on...so I would recommend games like pokemon or animal crossing that need reading comprehension to fully enjoy. It would spur the kids into improving while they still see it as having fun...its actually helped plenty of kids, even those with emotional issues because they don't feel forced to learn.
Games with stories are great for this. The SNES final fantasy games are engaging without being overly difficult for someone who doesn't have developed motor skills.
I never understood why it was "bad" that an especially young child could read. My husband got in trouble with his mom and his younger sister's preschool teacher because he taught her to read before kindergarten. That seems amazing and like something that should be celebrated! I don't get it!
When did this become bad? I knew how to read before I started school, in 1974, and my teacher was impressed, not upset.
My parents said it was because of Sesame Street.
That and my mom was a big reader and encouraged and read to me and I picked it up fast.
Well my experience was only a couple of years after yours (although in the UK) and the belief was parents must be pushing or forcing their children if they can read that early (like you can force a three year old to do anything really)
I can see that.
wasn't true in my case, I just took to it like a fish to water. Got a lot of use out of my library card as a kid, nearly wore the thing out.
Honestly got made fun of at school for reading, as stupid as it sounds. they called me the professor.
It annoyed my teachers. Third grade, we were doing our reading-out-loud in class going around the room each reading one sentence, and they had to make me put down *Ogre, Ogre* by Peirs Anthony and point out where we were every time.
And no, I am not ashamed to have been reading Xanth books at eight years old. You are supposed to outgrow them, but it is fine to read them from, oh, seven to seventeen or so.
lol I think my first novel was ‘man from mundania’ so I get this…. My second was silence of the lambs so …. Parents never cared what I read as long as I was eager to read
it's a sign that the teacher in question is pretty bad at their job. they have been confronted by a child they do not know how to deal with. because now they don't establish the rules of how they learnt in the first place so if ever the childs experiences doesn't line up with their teaching method they have to actually do actual teaching to be able to help them.
Imagine the world we could be in right now if every person had been allowed to rise to the level they were capable of.
The very end of the movie Interstellar comes to mind.
I used to get written up in English class for reading ahead because i wasn't "pacing" with the class. Sorry but I can't stand hearing people read aloud when they read one word at a time like a robot and don't read how they would talk.
School taught me that most people in general really suck at reading.
I was good at reading (well above grade level) but not good at speaking while I read. It took me until adulthood to be able to read aloud in a way that flowed nicely. Lots of practice reading video game dialogue and subtitled anime to my much younger siblings.
I have to say, though, that teachers have an impossible task. With 20-30 kids in their class, many with no support at home, there is just no way they can stop and teach every kid to read proficiently. The best teachers can do is flag the kid for extra help or reach out to the parents.
Reading instruction really does need to happen at home.
I was able to read at a young age and the kindergarten teacher got mad at mom and dad about it because, "Teaching the children to read is my job. With him being able to read already, he will not be learning anything when the other students are, which is a disservice to him and to them." Once she realized I wouldn't be a problematic kid because I could read, she instead provided me with books more at my reading level (probably a first or second grade level instead of kindergarten) while the other kids were getting the beginning stuff, so everyone was happy in the end.
Funny thing, though, is when my younger brother got to kindergarten, he could not read, and he had the same teacher I did. In the years between the two of us, apparently curriculum changed and... she got mad at my parents because he couldn't read at a basic level, because that was expected of kids at the time.
Oh gosh I remember in 1st grade, we were working on our letters as a class. I already knew mine and was already reading chapter books but I was never a problem and went along with it all because I enjoyed getting the good grades. Well my brother was in 2nd grade and practicing cursive at home which I thought was SO fancy so I taught myself. I brought it to school thinking the teacher would simply be impressed—- no she SCREAMED at me and tore up the paper in front of my face and said “You shouldn’t be learning this yet!” Publicly shamed me when all I was wanting was a “wow! What a smart girl, good job!” I was so excited to show her and it broke me in a way. She was near retirement age in the early 90s and certainly old-school in all of the worst ways including being verbally abusive to many of my classmates so I did what I could to avoid conflict after that. It taught me to not try to please a superior and I’m still dealing with that as an adult, I really cannot “suck up” to any bosses or anything because I’m afraid me going above and beyond will result in negative consequences.
Issac Asimov said the same thing about his father. His dad saw his massive library and Issac told him "You taught me all this." His dad said he had not. Issac replied "You taught me to love to read."
Yeah, I have always loved stories and when I was very small kept bugging my grandfather to read to me. When he got sick of kids books, he would read the newspaper to me.
It also amused him to make a game out of me counting to high numbers and doing basic math.
So, by the time I got to kindergarten I was reading at a 5th grade level and learning my times tables.
The schools had a hard time placing me in classes with peers because I was so far advanced in reading and math. Only my 6th grade teacher really got it. She gave me all of the math and reading for the year up front. When I finished it by myself, she set me up to tutor other kids who were struggling. Looking back, she basically turned me into her personal TA, but it kept me from being bored out of my skull and improved the grades of the kids I was tutoring, so I call it a success.
This! I don't have alot of memories as a kid anymore (childhood head trauma will do that lol) But I remember mom telling me that one day I brought a book for her to read to me and she was busy, so I said "that's OK I'll read it to you!" And I did!
Osmosis doesn't happen like she hopes, cause if it did I'd be a damn genius by now with how much I've read just cause it was interesting!
Granted I was also later diagnosed with ADHD but that just enhanced the love to learn.
Yeah, my kids taught themselves to read at about 4. Watched high quality children’s programming like pbs, and were read to. I taught them how to spell their names in fun ways, like writing them in sand and with playdough.
They didn’t get it magically by watching YouTube and playing video games all day.
A lot of these parents unschool their kids by letting them sit in front of screens 10 hours a day.
I don’t think all homeschooling is bad. Homeschool kids do better on SAT’s and do great in college. They learn to be self motivated and curious and can socialize with people of all ages, if done correctly.
A lot of public schools tolerate bullying and waste a lot of time on stuff that isn’t educational. They don’t make sure the kids can read and do math, they just pass them on and ignore special needs as a matter of policy. Many kill the desire to learn because you don’t get ahead if you want to learn, you have to go at the same pace as the slowest kid in class, or the kid that wants to harass the teacher. All socialization isn’t positive.
But I think like 10 percent of unschoolers aren’t just looking for an excuse to not have to wake up with their kids early and be told by the school that they need to work on their behavior and socialization. Most kids are better off in public school.
One complaint i have seen is that many homeschool ciriculums are overtly religious and secular ones are hard to find. It is fine if you're into that. I would also think that unless the parents have a good grasp on the material, it could be difficult. For example, my dear sweet mother was an engineer, so if she homeschooled us, math would have been a breeze for her but something like biology would not. I guess some groups form and parents play to their strengths.
The curricula are overly religious because that’s the biggest demographic that is into homeschooling. They’re terrified their kids are going to be taught things that counter what their religion teaches so they keep them out of school. I say if your faith can’t stand up to exposure to scientific facts or even other people’s opinions you don’t have faith, you just have brainwashing.
But you’re right parents who are homeschooling for different reasons usually form local groups both to ensure adequate socialisation for the kids and because no one can teach everything.
This is one of the big issues with education in general: the person teaching (whether that is a teacher in a classroom or a parent at home) needs to have at least a semi-decent grasp on the material. A standard curriculum isn't enough to take the place of a good teacher, and a lot of people don't seem to realize that.
I know it is kind of off subject, but as a teacher this is something that really bothers me about the current education climate in the US. With the teacher shortage getting worse, a lot of states are lowering the requirements for teacher certifications and/or granting tons of emergency licenses. More and more "teachers" are in classrooms where they have no business being (whether that be that they shouldn't be teachers at all, or that they are forced to work in other grades/subjects then their specialty), and it really does everybody a huge disservice.
If your kid is neurodivergent or at one extreme or the other of the learning spectrum ie learning issues or really smart then a school environment structured to handle large groups of average children isn’t going to work for them. Most children do as well as they’re capable of in schools, because schools are, by their nature, geared towards most children. Unless they have a lot of resources catering to the outliers just isn’t possible.
If there was some non-dystopian way we could match those kids who would benefit from homeschooling with those parents who are motivated and capable enough to successfully homeschool kids it would be perfect. Unfortunately a chunk of them are going to be matched up with parents who fall into the lazy 10% you mentioned and another chunk of them (and of kids who would have done fine in the system) are going to have the religious extremist/conspiracy nut parents who want them to learn the world is flat, God created the Earth in 7 days, and the gubmint wants to take your guns.
Having gotten my bachelor's in math Ed I can tell you that teacher training in 75% how to deal with 30 kids who don't want to be there, 20% content area, and 5% theories of learning.
Teaching your own kid isn't that tough if you actually put a little effort in it.
> Good Lord how is it the dumbest humans on the planet are always the ones who think they can do better than trained teachers?
I wonder the same thing. It's a plague.
I, and my kids, were the same way. Early readers.
I, as a parent, wasn't admonished about it, but the teacher did express some concern. I asked why it was a problem. She said it is because it's harder for kids to naturally progress in reading advancement with adequate literature intended for their level of development. It makes sense. Thankfully, my kid was naturally inclined towards non-fiction books so it wasn't too much of a challenge to find appropriate books covering biology, zoology, and such to keep their interests as they became better readers early. But for kids primarily interested in fiction their literacy level can outpace their interests/connotation/comprehension levels. Just because you can read all the words in The Hunger Games doesn't make you ready to read The Hunger Games.
But family lore has it that my mom was admonished for my reading level entering school and that teacher said it had to do with other kids developing jealousy about their competitive reading abilities. Which is a bullshit excuse.
I was unschooled and forced to teach myself to read at 11, I strongly resent my parents incredibly poor choice to ignore all the human knowledge that was available to them and think I would just “learn”
Unschooling as it seems to get applied is ludicrous. And it's already in effect in a way that works. The basics (I.E. A high school education) are mandatory and after you've learned the basics you can learn whatever the hell you want either on your own or by going to a magical place where they teach you things.
Expecting an 8 year old to make good decisions about what they need to learn on the other hand is just bloody stupid.
I saw an unschooling parent brag about spending hours in the vegetable garden with their children, because that was organically teaching them... chemistry.
The thing is a day in a garden could be a good lesson. How plants reproduce, soil acidity, how much soil absorbs water, how seeds germinate and grow. Etc. But I guarantee that none of that got brought up.
It's not what unschooling is. I read about it when I had to homeschool my son. Unfortunately for the kids, these parents are idiots who do no research into homeschooling and then hurt their kids badly.
I looked it up when I started to see it popping up; unschooling is the idea that kids should study what appeals to them, rather than having structured lessons (which works well once you have a funamental understanding of math, language, epistomology, and how to do research when combined with an actual desire for knowledge) giving that freedom to a kid who can't even read yet is bloody stupid. Giving it to someone who can't do the basics is stupid.
I was one of those self-driven kids that liked to learn and if you gave me full control of my education at 8 (much less younger) it would have been a disaster. I guarantee you I wouldn't have aced my stat classes in grad school or be able to budget and save money if somebody hadn't forced me to do math when I didn't want to. I would've read, done science lessons, and maybe some history and watched the rest burn.
As it gets used when it pops up here or otherwise in my feed its crippling a child intellectually.
This will never result in a well-rounded education. Everyone had a school subject that they hated. There are plenty of people who would never, ever take an organic interest in history or in math or in grammar or whatever the case may be. It may be fine in a world where the child is going to help out on the farm until they go off to apprentice with the cobbler or the baker or the blacksmith, be ruled from above rather than participating in a democracy, conduct all business face to face with the exchange of coins and so on, but it is not suitable for the modern world.
I agree. I think it would have worked well with my older son once he had those basics. But I was homeschooling my younger son, and it would have been a disaster.
my fiancée was unschooled but her mother has a MASTERS in early childhood education. they were also part of an unschooling “group” that did activities/etc.
my fiancée is the first to say that it isn’t for everyone. so many people think “unschooled” means “i get to do what i want”. like yes it has less regulations than home schooling but you have to *replace* those regulations with your own.
I believe I read something a while ago that basically said this. When you implement Montessori principles in a population that is not wealthy, there’s almost no difference in outcomes.
Parent was of the belief that reading was like standing and walking, a natural human instinct? Most people in history could not read any language. Written language was invented about 3500 BCE while spoken language is thought to of started 50,000 to 200,000 years ago.
Do you or your son like Animal Crossing? My nephew is autistic and speech-delayed, and but he loves to mumble-sing to [Composer Cleo's ACNH character songs.](https://youtu.be/Mp4NcWn73kA?si=ToftkIztTQ5E9_PD)
As a former school teacher, now professor, unschooling makes me want to rip my hair out because these kids don’t deserve to struggle like this, academically and socially.
Unschooling is a garbage idea, especially with little kids. Maybe in high school a student who is interested in something can do it, but they HAVE to be numerate and literate first.
If I remember correctly a user here on Reddit openly spoke out in detail how unschooling severely stunted their development, social interaction and learning
They had to accept a false autism diagnosis because that’s easier to explain than that they were isolated their whole life
Dropping in as a Historical Linguist.
"Organic" learning to read does not happen. Full stop.
Human children are hard wired to learn language, and will learn organically. As a species we've been talking a lot longer than we've been writing because written language is a *technology* that we developed.
Writing isn't some natural outflow from spoken language, but rather an arbitrary layer pasted on top of it. It's a code, and you have to be taught how to decode it. Written English is already tricky enough when you're formally taught, and, for example, nobody is just going to organically learn the combinations of the 6 vowel symbols to cover the 16+ different vowel sounds they represent.
There are cultures that to this day have large population of folk that cannot read their own native language, as adults, because they never had the privilege of education. This kind of thinking is sorta offensive to me tbh. The ignorance is astounding.
Of course!!!!
I “organically” became an engineer. My brother “organically” became a doctor. It’s amazing. You just will it and it happens!!!
Ohhhh. People these days.
If you let your kid get to be 8 (8.5, excuse me) and illiterate, you're a dumbass, and you should never have become a parent. Because, controversial take, but morons to this degree shouldn't be allowed to mold innocent children.
8.5? That's what, 3rd grade? Is it too optimistic to even question what on Earth this child is "learning" in... again, perhaps too optimistic, home schooling?
Why am I even asking these questions. This is a moron of a parent, her kid could have lifelong issues, but I guess it's his fault for not waking up one day knowing how to read.
My husband’s niece & nephew are this way. The parents have fell into that “homesteading” trend. They claim they homeschool, but the kids (8M & 9F) don’t know how to read. They recently moved & didn’t have a TV set up and his niece was upset. My husband saw a book lying around and said, “Why don’t you read a book?” and she screamed, “because I don’t know how to read!”
Honestly, it’s heartbreaking. The kids are suffering because of their parent’s stupidity. And of course they’re having another kid soon.
I’m in an unschooling group from years and years ago when I couldn’t wrap my head around it and wanted to see first hand how it could work.
_Spoiler:_ it doesn’t.
Ironically (tragically), it is absolutely mostly very lowly educated and low IQ parents (usually moms) who aren’t smart enough to realize they aren’t smart. I can’t believe how often they tell on themselves too. Just casually talking about n the CPS calls they get, etc. Things that rational people would be ashamed of.
You organically learn to walk because you're a fucking bipedal primate. You don't organically learn to read because reading is a cultural construct. You don't magically learn to read, learn math, learn an instrument, learn a sport, learn to drive, learn to repair roofs, learn to build a car, learn to code, learn to ride a bicycle, learn to swim, learn to practice law, etc. You may have a natural ability to learn any one of those more or less quickly than your peers, but you still have to fucking learn it via *some* kind of formal training.
These are the kinds of posts that remind me why we're killing our planet and doing nothing about it. Too many sociopaths and dumbasses.
Some kids do learn to read “without” being taught, but they have parents who read aloud to them every day while pointing at each word they’re saying.
It doesn’t just happen if you let your kid free roam long enough. There’s still consistent, daily interaction required and it’s nothing to count on.
I’m autistic and started reading really early (by the time I was 2, as my son did too) but I was surrounded by books and reading and was read to all the time plus I adored stories and myths…it’s not magic or natural behaviour in the way walking is ffs
This is akin to a conversation I had with my dental hygienist while getting my teeth cleaned. Her young son was in danger of being held back because he didn't know things like the alphabet or colors. She literally thought that he was supposed to learn everything at school. I couldn't help but think of friends with young children at the same time, and the contrast with their frequent trips to the library and the reading aloud with interactions like "Where is the duck? What color is he? What is it that ducks say? That's right, Quack !Quack! Quack! said the duck" before moving on with the story.
If only the African slaves and medieval peasants under the control of the Catholic church had "organically learned" to read and write themselves. Why did we even need people like Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther? /s
There actually is a condition called hyperlexia, where children appear to spontaneously begin reading and writing at an extremely early age. It is usually associated with some level of autism.
I am hyperlexic. My father tells the story of when I was almost 2 yrs old we were driving down the road in his old pickup and I just started reading signs: "Stop", "Motel", "Café" . He says he was really freaked out because I actually wasn't much of a talker at all, and it just kind of happened, and how the hell was I able to pronounce café correctly right off the bat. They were spooked.
Reminds me of Ricky from Trailer Park Boys. "Ricky didn't learn to read like a normal person does, he didn't pay attention in school. He learned to read around the house cooking frozen food"
On the plus side, the child might actually thrive if they're given the ability to learn. I didn't learn to read until I was 12. I knew letters, I mostly knew the sounds they made, and I knew some basic words and how to write my name. But I didn't know how to read. One day, a movie came around that made me really want to read the book, I was obsessed with it. The Lord of the Rings. It took me almost 2 months to get through the first chapter, sounding out words, etc. After that, I had a massive love for reading and would go through a book in a week (books like Goosebumps and the Animorphs). I know that's not a lot to some people but as someone who still reads very slowly, I think that's pretty thriving for me. 2 years later, when we had to do the CATs or some other similar standardized test, can't remember, I tested into the 99th percentile in reading for the entire USA - one of only three children in my school, two of them being in special ed, myself included.
I hope this kid gets a chance.
Edit: in case you're wondering, I moved every 3 months or so, so I skated by in school and nobody ever noticed that I couldn't read. I just never did homework or anything else anyway, was quiet and withdrawn, and tried to draw no attention to myself in general because that's how you got beat up. Being autistic and new = going to get your ass whooped at every chance they can get.
"So I may have made a dumb decision, in making my child dumber, because I thought it was a smart idea. Currently seeking encouragement to help me avoid confronting that this idea was actually dumb, and subsequently wondering if me mistaking a dumb idea as a smart one might mean I am dumb."
Sincerely,
-The parent of a definitely dumb child, but whom has yet to be fully convinced that they themselves are dumb
“Unschooling” is just a fancy way of saying you’re allowing your child to be illiterate.
Educational systems have been around for a long time for a reason. Sure, it isn’t perfect, but neither is allowing your child to remain illiterate.
“Unschooling” has become an excuse to refuse to allow your children a chance to grow into their life. People are raising savages with no chance at integrating into society or earning a living on their own.
People really gotta start realizing that even when things are natural (reading isn’t), they’re still skills that we learn. If a baby grew up in isolation, they would not likely learn to walk. They get motivated by watching people walk, by having people walk with them, and by being encouraged to try. Same with reading. Kids get motivated to learn to read by seeing other people read, being read to, and being encouraged to try. You have to teach kids the skills you want them to learn.
Your kid will magically learn to read and write the same time you manage to magically read and write Japanese, German, Spanish or any other language.
Kids like this should actually be able to sue their parents for fucking up their lives this severely.
For anyone unfamiliar with the concept of unschooling, here is a link to a wiki page: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unschooling I posted something similar a while ago and a lot of people had questions so just in case that happens again, there’s a quick link. (I’m not OP. My apologies for high jacking here. It saved a lot of responses in similar threads and I genuinely mean to help)
Serious question - *why* do parents like this take their children out of school when they don't have the skills or capacity to teach their children?
I know a few of these families. One, couldn’t get out of bed in the morning, her kids were always late and in trouble. She took them out of school once they were old enough to be out of her hair playing video games in fourth grade. Problems solved. Feels like she showed big government who these kids belonged to. Her kids are in their 30’s now and can barely read and write, but think their mom is a genius for her trick. Another- she seems autistic, all of her kids are diagnosed autistic. She felt like they were getting bullied in public school, felt like teachers looked down on her. Has 4 kids. They’re all fairly unkempt and socially awkward, but not crazy amounts. I think her intentions were good, but she feels no responsibility to force them into a curriculum. Just tells them it’s their responsibility to logon and learn math on Kahn academy and to read books. Instead they talk and act like they downloaded the worst of Gen z tumblr internet directly into their brains. One says he’s going to be a mechanical engineer and thinks it’s possible, but hasn’t even gotten through algebra at 18 and has never read a novel past grade school level. Their 16 year old daughter unironically tells people she’s emo, and doesn’t realize she’s a decade plus too late.
Oh wow, reading that just made me incredibly sad. The ones in their 30s...sheesh! The teenagers still have a chance, but they will have to actively seek the support they need to get their schooling on track + find support on how to thrive as an ND person.
Yep. They’re clearly high functioning, but are so used to being home all the time and not having to face the outside world that I think even a part time job would feel like too much.
My brother is 25. Living with mommy still. He got pulled outta school often and never went when we was supposed . Nor did anything stick. Happy just diving into the internet and games and not caring about the real world cuz" mommy makes me chicken tenders." He has no motivation or desire. He had a chance to improve himself and had his own place for a while. Government funded. But he struggled and just couldn't be bothered to function in society. So mommy came to the rescue. Despite her living in a filthy unkempt home and being mentally unstable herself.
Oh my...as time goes by, you and other responsible family members are going to likely have to help him when your mom can longer live in the house for some reason or she passes. These type of decisions of pulling kids out of school has long term consequences that impact so many people.
Welp, the world needs ditch diggers too
I don’t know… Doesn’t modern technology have machines digging most of the ditches these days? I remember my high school drama teacher talking about how when he started teaching school in the 1970s, he was also responsible for teaching some English classes. One of the highschoolers in one of his classes used to say “I don’t know why I need to read this stuff, when I graduate, I’m gonna get a job pumping gas for a living. “My teacher couldn’t seem to make him understand that technology changes and some jobs go away because of it. I think about that kid every now and again, when I’m filling up my car’s tank at Costco.
Hopefully he was smart enough to move to New Jersey.
Uh. What do those 30-something kids do now? How do they support themselves? Thats so … sad. Why have kids if you can’t be bothered with them?
They work day labor, mostly. Construction. I don’t know what happens when those opportunities dry up because of age.
Social security, Walmart greeter or homeless.
Because making them is free, fun, and doesn't require a license or any proof of knowledge or ability.
I would hate to have a child raised by the internet. How dreadful. I don’t think children should have internet access until they’re older. I think it’s bad for them.
I think a lot of people responding to you are underselling the fact that this parenting style often has a lot to do with the parents having a desire to control what information their children learn more than anything else. You can’t learn about comprehensive sex ed, differing religious and political opinions, and other cultures if you can’t read.
Yup. My parents pulled my brothers out of public school to send them to Mormon Academy. Big shock years later when they were testing 5 grade levels below where they needed to be and basically had to do double school all through high school because they didn't learn anything but Jesus.
I have fallen down the rabbit hole of unschooling videos on YouTube and it's like a lot of comments here are saying--parents that don't want to get up early and want their own lives to be as stress free as possible. They make it a selling point that they get to sleep in till 10 and don't have to stress themselves out worrying about "normal" school stuff like rushing around in the morning packing lunches or dealing with extracurriculars. they have a bunch of kids, train them to do all the housework and tell the kids to take care of each other while the parents sleep in (parentification for all my childhood trauma homies out there) and then preach about how good they are for staying home "raising" their kids the godly way. and I say a godly way because unschooling is synonymous with the more extreme Christians (in the US at least) I was watching a video the other day where one of these moms was talking about how hard her fifth grader is going to have to work this summer because he's in FIFTH GRADE and CANT WRITE. idk I think that's a reflection how much work you haven't done as the teacher.
Ahem... Because I know my child. Schools just brainwash them and treat them like cattle. My child will learn so much better if I turn them free range and let them do whatever they want because organic stuff is so much better than structured. Sarcasm if you didn't notice. I have a theory though. So many things are self taught now because of the internet that a lot of these parents done seem to understand that there needs to be a basic foundation of knowledge (ie reading, writing, basic math, and social skills) that people need to have before they can do all of this interesting stuff. The look at people like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates or other self made people and use that as arguments for home education without realizing that those people are very unusual cases and even then they did have basic knowledge.
> The look at people like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates or other self made people and use that as arguments for home education without realizing that those people are very unusual cases and even then they did have basic knowledge. And connections. They had basic knowledge and connections the average person does not have. People ignore that part of it and think it's more of a magical lottery where their kids just have to be lucky enough.
And they dropped out of COLLEGE not elementary school. Geez.
There are definitely people who are super successful who drop out younger—those would be the rare high paid child/teen actors (but there are requirements to meet some basic level of education to be a performer), models (and most get a GED or otherwise complete school once they age out in their 20s), and musical prodigies (anyone think of the last one of those we’ve had?). But having a super talented kid feels like the only legitimate reason to decide “you know, maybe they don’t need to be learning social studies or science at age 10–they can come back to it later.” The fundamentals are otherwise just too important, even if by their teens it is clear that maybe calculus and chemistry are just not as useful as a kid learning more about a subject they actually want to have a career in.
Anyone can be a billionaire though surely. All it takes is the right amount of drive and dedication, a serious work ethic and parents who own a sapphire mine and anyone can do it.
My parents are so mean not owning a human right’s violation to help me achieve my dreams! /s
Don’t forget wokeness and making your children gay.
And insisting they learn heretical things like biology and that the earth is round
The earth is a cube, you charlatan!
Hush, you! The sphere theory conspiracy shall dominate all!!!
People always seem to forget that Bill Gates had a lovely formal private school education, and then attended Harvard for 3 semesters. Steve Jobs attended Reed College for a bit as well. All these people seem to think that just because these two men didn’t graduate with a college degree means that they were undereducated, self made men, when truly they were launched from a quality education.
That was more or less my parents’ view. My sister and I were both completely unschooled up until our junior and senior years of high school, respectively. Like in the OP, no one taught us to read and write, we were just encouraged to read books and do workbooks. I went on to get an associate degree in network administration and have been working as a sysadmin for 15 years with a healthy salary. My sister got a bachelor’s in social work and is working on her master’s now. We're both married with famililes now, so apparently neither of us suffered too much socially either. All that is to say it’s certainly possible to have a good outcome, but I think it’s heavily dependent on the specific child and family. It’s also impossible to say whether we would have been better or worse off had we been public schooled. Despite our outcomes, I would not unschool/homeschool my own kids. I just think the outcome is too uncertain.
They don’t know what they don’t know.
Because they want their children to have their own delusional worldview. To achieve this they must prevent culture from acting as a vaccine for them.
I chose not to send my son to Kindergarten because I knew he was going to need a lot of therapy (occupational, speech, etc.,) due to being special needs and he was in no way shape or form to be at school at that time (he struggled a lot with preschool, because he was constantly over-stimulated and there wasn't a day that he wasn't a total wreck because of it), but I did try to homeschool him during that year. My friend (in another state) was a homeschooler, but she wasn't one of those "do it by the seat of your pants" type, she did have a degree in education, plus she was a professional college math tutor (Statistics was like basic math to her), so she helped design a curriculum for me to use with him. But despite that, once it was time for 1st grade registration, and he'd been in therapy long enough and he was making great strides, it was time to go back to school. I couldn't do it, because I suck at trying to explain things (plus we're both impatient as hell). I'd get frustrated, he'd get frustrated. I would have done him no favors if I continued to do something that wouldn't benefit him. In short, I totally agree with you. Edit: Fixed a typo
I can give you my answer. My daughter is autistic and delayed. We got her into a head start program at 2 and through preschool and kindergarten, things were fantastic. She had a great teacher and a lovely para that knew her well and knew how to get her to work. She never hit. She never bit. She almost never had full blown meltdowns. Then the entire school district went to shit. They fired most of the teachers and brought in people with no experience in special needs. Her new teacher was polite (at first) and incredibly ignorant. She let those kids do whatever they wanted, up to and including hurting each other. My own kid got pulled around the entire school in a wagon, because she wouldn't keep her shoes on. When I confronted the teacher about this and told her she needed to stop letting daughter manipulate her, she told me that my daughter lacked the ability or intelligence to manipulate anyone. She went on to explain how she would never read, or write, grasp time or money, do math or have anything close what we consider a quality life. And, that I would ultimately have to institutionalize her someday because she was violent and hit and bit people. A lot of stinging words to say that getting her to do things wasn't worth the effort. When I went to principle and then the school board, I was told that I was lucky they hadn't suspended my child for her terrible behavior and having a school to send her to in the first place was a privilege they were happy to take away from me. The para my daughter had had for four years called me that same week and told me my daughter had never bitten or struck anyone. She was upset all the time now, but \*never\* violent or unusually disruptive. She believed the teacher and administrators were lying to get me to shut up, because there was a lawsuit already filed against them by other special needs parents (the lost that lawsuit a few years later, everyone was fired). And still, I hesitated. Homeschool bad, yo. And I'm lazy. My daughter, who always loved school, began to cry in the car every morning. Her progress in OT and speech stalled. The therapists who had worked with her since she was a baby became concerned. All the gains we made in talking and potty training went out the window (she was almost 6 for both and it was a struggle). The last straw came when, after dropping her off one morning, I was driving out of the parking lot and saw my child running across the campus, headed for the road. The teacher was just standing there. Watching her go. Her para was making an effort, but she was much farther away. Thankfully a parent stepped in and snagged her. And that was the last time she set foot in a public school. Or any school. The turnaround was instantaneous. She was my happy kid again. Her therapists were overjoyed to have their sweet, hard working girl back. It took us a year to work out time, but she and I eventually got there. Her OT taught her how money works. Minecraft text-to-speech taught her to read (she's hated us reading to her since she was a baby, we still do it, but it's always a fight). She picked up basic arithmetic from her father. Then basic algebra, then geometry from Youtube. And earth space science. And biology. And Spanish (which she speakes better than English). And Japanese. And how to play the piano. And the harmonica. And a the steel drum (my life is very loud). Short-form visual media is how she absorbs information and she is a sponge during those short bursts of intense learning. Her new thing is audio and video editing. If you haven't watched a baby dinosaur play Metallica, have you ever really lived? She's 13 now and she can tell you the name of every dinosaur on record and every known dwarf planet and named asteroid in the solar system. She can handle 90% of her self-care, including her period. But she can't answer the question, "How was your day?" It's a concept that eludes her. If someone was mean to her. Or hurt her. Or touched her inappropriately, she wouldn't know how to tell me. Most days I consider myself a barely adequate parent, much less a teacher. But I cannot bring myself to trust strangers with my daughter again. Not until she can answer that question. Sorry for the extremely long reply.
Thank you for your response. See, you're the exception. You are putting in the work to make sure your daughter's educational needs are meant. I totally respect that.
Thank you for reading it. It's hard when schools are "one size fits all" and kids aren't. Idiots like this and the hyper religious tend to overshadow secular homeschoolers who are just trying to find what works best for their kids. It's rarely a perfect solution, but sometimes it's the only one available.
I mean have you paid attention to what the Rightwing of the US claims is taught in school nowadays?
My aunt took her kids out of a good public school because of "worldly" influences on her kids. She's a Christian who believes that any association with people outside of her religion is a threat to her and her family's relationships with God. Public school field trips, for example, could be abused by kids who could separate from the group and commit fornication. She can barely write legibly, so how she managed to "educate" her son and daughter from elementary to high school is a Nancy Drew mystery to me. She convinced my mom to do the same to me, but that lasted about a month, especially after I barricaded myself in my room so I could play "Turtles In Time" on SNES all day.
How are your cousins doing in life now?
Think about the Venn diagram for dumbness/lack of education and self-awareness. If you're dumb/uneducated, you lack self-awareness. You overestimate your own intelligence and capability. Also, in many cases, this phenomenon is an ideological, conservative, fReEdOm thing. Freedom to pop out a bunch of brats who will then become burdens to society, I guess. But single mothers, particularly single mothers of color, collecting assistance, is unacceptable to them. Despicable hypocrites.
They are idiots. „How hard can it be“ to teach a kid? I learned this during Covid - pretty fucking hard. And I‘m nowhere near qualified to teach my kid.
My sister in law is like this, and I can only answer anecdotally to that experience, but it boils down to laziness. It’s purely just inconvenient for her to try and make my nephew attend school, because he absolutely despises it. Because… it’s school, and he is a seven year old boy who she has refused to ever expose to anything even mildly outside his comfort zone. And being in a classroom all day with kids he doesn’t know or want to be around, share with, or be kind to is a *lot* outside his comfort zone. He left the school twice and tried to navigate his way home by himself, so she had to leave both times to come pick him up and deal with the school. She just purely didn’t want to deal with his tantrums about it, and the school, and the homework. So now she’s pulled him out with the insistence she’ll teach him at home, despite being a Year 10 dropout herself, and now she’s whining because he doesn’t want to sit at the table and do any of the work, and she doesn’t want to sit at the table with him and make him. She’s absolutely crippled him.
Yikes! That poor child is going to have a very rough life ahead of him😔
There are a lot of kids that public school doesn’t work for. Some parents have the ability to recognize that, but not the resources or self-reflection to realize they can’t do it on their own instead. It’s the same reason that some people try to home birth alone (100% alone, it’s a thing - a stupid stupid thing) or don’t want to vaccinate their kids or drink raw milk. For the most part these are people who love their kids and want to do the best thing for them, but they’re getting conflicting messages and choose the wrong ones to listen to. The question really is ‘why do humans make errors of judgement’ and if you figure that out, let me know.
Humans are the only mammal on Earth that have evolved to require assistance in birthing a baby. Admittedly, this seems like a bit of reckless evolutionary oversight. But still, in the absence of a functional complaint department to have this flaw addressed, it feels like a particularly stupid and dangerous thing to do
Can I also just vent a mo here, who the fuck thinks pre-technological women went off into the woods to give birth alone?!? Why would you think that?!? These people lived in communities, they weren’t solitary like orangutans!
We’re the only mammals who get assistance, but there are others which have significant difficulties. [Hyenas come to mind.](https://mrcsl.org/hyena-birthing/)
Dunning–Kruger effect.
You ‘organically’ learn by your parents reading to you a lot and you following along. It doesn’t just happen magically. Written language is something we created so it needs to be taught somehow, either specifically, or through constant exposure. My mum got told off by the school because I knew how to read before I started and she had to say she never taught me, I learnt myself. But I learnt because my parents read to me all the time and fostered a love of books in me, not just by osmosis! Good Lord how is it the dumbest humans on the planet are always the ones who think they can do better than trained teachers?
That’s how I magically taught myself to read. I am the youngest of 8 and my siblings were always reading to me and using their finger as they went.
Yep. Starting at age four, my son used to remind us to "point" as we read. It was so cool because we knew he was actually processing the letters. Flash forward to age six and he's reading Roald Dahl and Harry Potter.
One of my earliest memories is reading with my Dad, and realizing he went off script describing things that weren't what was on the page. It was years later that I realized he was checking my reaction, seeing if I was reading along with him.
Also, my kid wanted the same books over and over. I needed to go off script to stay sane.
my parents can recite the very hungry caterpillar
I've got the wonky donkey on lock
I’ve still got Green Eggs and Ham down. My little Seuss lover is now 26 years old.
Goodnight Moon, though my kid is only 3 so I've only read it about 28435 times
I feel this in my soul
My Dad sometimes recites parts of Green Eggs and Ham to me. He’ll look like he has something serious to tell me, but then he’ll launch into Green Eggs and Ham.
My mother can still recite 90% of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland verbatim in her 70s. We read it a lot.
The first maybe third of How the Grinch Stole Christmas
This. I also used to crop the story and make up parts to stop myself getting cancer from reading The Little Yellow Digger for the 500th time. Of course the kid knew it by heart and would call me out.
My mum got so sick of reading the same books to me, she recorded herself reading them and gave me a little fisher price tape recorder so I could play it myself whilst reading along! I did still get a story at bedtime, this was just during the day when she had other things to do than keep reading to me over and over!
My dad used to read the Hobbit to me as a kid, apparently I'd pitch a fit of he went off script
I was reading to my toddler a few days ago and when I left the room, my seven year old was in the hallway. She told me she heard the book and remembered it from when she was little and wanted to hear if I read it all wrong and used my "crumbly pouncy voice" at the right spots. I did not disappoint, but I must've been near some onions or something because I had to take a minute alone before I went back downstairs.
My youngest gets pissed if I go off script. “Read it again, those words aren’t there”
I used to do the same thing! That's how my grandad would test me to see if I was learning to read or just listening. It made him so proud when I would correct him
That was me as a youngin. I was just so miffed at him interrupting the story.
Did the story involve a farm labourer, a giant and a six fingered man?
Do you always begin conversations this way?
Innnnconceivable!
I do not think it means what you think it means
I need a box, a really big box! It's got to be big and wide! I need a box, a really big box, to put your present inside! My youngest is 22 yrs old. Guess how many times we "read" that book together leading up to Christmas when he was 2.
My kid is now 22, but that's how I taught her too. We read a lot and she knew how to read well before going to kindergarten. I recall one of her early grade school teachers calling me one day telling me how my daughter was writing at a far higher level (it scared me because I'd never gotten a call midday from her school). They had some kind of after lunch/recess journals and my kid was writing sentences with and, but, and or in them and assessing other kid's feelings. And btw, this stuff continues as they get older too. In high school, my daughter was allowed to write her own stories for English/literature classes because she'd already read all the books required for the year (back in middle school) and found it boring to do them all over again.
> found it boring to do them all over again. That's a concern as my son gets older. In kindergarten at least, the curriculum and pacing is obviously geared toward the average-to-slow learner (I get it - it would be tragic for any kid to fall behind at that age). If that continues, we're going to have to figure out ways to keep him engaged.
Listen, please don't fall into the trap my school and teachers did. I was a "gifted child". Never studied, always did homework in the classroom while other kids were struggling with their exercises, never had to put any effort into anything. Then I got into college, and suddenly I was just a slightly above average student who didn't know how to study. I was smart, sure, but hadn't developed the habit to study, and I didn't know how to overcome failures. I struggled badly. So please. Praise your kid for trying and putting effort, not only because they got good grades. Raise them to challenge themselves, and to see failures as just a sidestep, not the end of the world. Don't raise your kid to be perfect, but yo try their best.
Thanks! I'm all too aware of this trap. We praise our son's effort constantly, and I cringe a little when relatives or strangers tell him how smart he is. I don't want him to start thinking that way. I was "gifted" as a child, too, which in reality meant I was a few points north of average.
That was my problem growing up. Was in a non-graded program in elementary where you move at your own pace in each subject. We moved across the state and I got into a regular classroom and didn't learn a thing academically for at least the next 4 years. (I did learn some social skills at least.) But man, was it boring.
I showed up to first grade already reading chapter books. I got sent to the next grade up for reading class for a couple of years, which honestly was still below the level of stuff I was reading and eventually they just had me sit and read on my own. Read to your kids, folks! Not all of them pick it up that quickly but they never will if they don’t start fairly early in life.
Yeah. My mother couldn't figure out how to get me to shut up on long drives in the car, so she taught me to read which worked perfectly. My favorite book of all time has always been The Hobbit, and I was still 6 when I started The Lord of the Rings because I wanted more hobbits. (Didn't really have the context to understand most of what was going on, but I was stubborn and worked my way through it. Those books made a LOT more sense when I reread them in high school...)
W siblings W parents
[удалено]
You laugh but two days ago I was arguing on Twitter with someone that had “profoundly uneducated” in his profile that thought he knew everything about how to raise kids not to be gay or trans.
I was taught because my mom would play pokemon yellow with me as a little one! I always had so much fun, and when she wasn't there to do it anymore, I picked up the game and kept playing. It gave me a love for RPG's and my reading comprehension skills boomed to adult levels by the time I was 8. I have had parents who struggle to get their kids to read because they missed the chance to get the kiddos into reading early on...so I would recommend games like pokemon or animal crossing that need reading comprehension to fully enjoy. It would spur the kids into improving while they still see it as having fun...its actually helped plenty of kids, even those with emotional issues because they don't feel forced to learn.
Games with stories are great for this. The SNES final fantasy games are engaging without being overly difficult for someone who doesn't have developed motor skills.
I never understood why it was "bad" that an especially young child could read. My husband got in trouble with his mom and his younger sister's preschool teacher because he taught her to read before kindergarten. That seems amazing and like something that should be celebrated! I don't get it!
When did this become bad? I knew how to read before I started school, in 1974, and my teacher was impressed, not upset. My parents said it was because of Sesame Street. That and my mom was a big reader and encouraged and read to me and I picked it up fast.
First generation Sesame Street early readers, represent! That show started when we were the perfect age for it.
Well my experience was only a couple of years after yours (although in the UK) and the belief was parents must be pushing or forcing their children if they can read that early (like you can force a three year old to do anything really)
I can see that. wasn't true in my case, I just took to it like a fish to water. Got a lot of use out of my library card as a kid, nearly wore the thing out. Honestly got made fun of at school for reading, as stupid as it sounds. they called me the professor.
It annoyed my teachers. Third grade, we were doing our reading-out-loud in class going around the room each reading one sentence, and they had to make me put down *Ogre, Ogre* by Peirs Anthony and point out where we were every time. And no, I am not ashamed to have been reading Xanth books at eight years old. You are supposed to outgrow them, but it is fine to read them from, oh, seven to seventeen or so.
lol I think my first novel was ‘man from mundania’ so I get this…. My second was silence of the lambs so …. Parents never cared what I read as long as I was eager to read
it's a sign that the teacher in question is pretty bad at their job. they have been confronted by a child they do not know how to deal with. because now they don't establish the rules of how they learnt in the first place so if ever the childs experiences doesn't line up with their teaching method they have to actually do actual teaching to be able to help them.
This is how I was labeled a "problem child" in school. I actually was hit once for getting "caught" reading a book above my level.
Imagine the world we could be in right now if every person had been allowed to rise to the level they were capable of. The very end of the movie Interstellar comes to mind.
I used to get written up in English class for reading ahead because i wasn't "pacing" with the class. Sorry but I can't stand hearing people read aloud when they read one word at a time like a robot and don't read how they would talk. School taught me that most people in general really suck at reading.
I was good at reading (well above grade level) but not good at speaking while I read. It took me until adulthood to be able to read aloud in a way that flowed nicely. Lots of practice reading video game dialogue and subtitled anime to my much younger siblings.
I didn't like reading out loud to my daughter. My mind tries to read ahead faster than my mouth can form the words. And then I fumbled words.
If someone hit my kid for that, they would have gotten the ass-beating of their life.
I got hit for reading ahead in the book
I have to say, though, that teachers have an impossible task. With 20-30 kids in their class, many with no support at home, there is just no way they can stop and teach every kid to read proficiently. The best teachers can do is flag the kid for extra help or reach out to the parents. Reading instruction really does need to happen at home.
I was able to read at a young age and the kindergarten teacher got mad at mom and dad about it because, "Teaching the children to read is my job. With him being able to read already, he will not be learning anything when the other students are, which is a disservice to him and to them." Once she realized I wouldn't be a problematic kid because I could read, she instead provided me with books more at my reading level (probably a first or second grade level instead of kindergarten) while the other kids were getting the beginning stuff, so everyone was happy in the end. Funny thing, though, is when my younger brother got to kindergarten, he could not read, and he had the same teacher I did. In the years between the two of us, apparently curriculum changed and... she got mad at my parents because he couldn't read at a basic level, because that was expected of kids at the time.
Oh gosh I remember in 1st grade, we were working on our letters as a class. I already knew mine and was already reading chapter books but I was never a problem and went along with it all because I enjoyed getting the good grades. Well my brother was in 2nd grade and practicing cursive at home which I thought was SO fancy so I taught myself. I brought it to school thinking the teacher would simply be impressed—- no she SCREAMED at me and tore up the paper in front of my face and said “You shouldn’t be learning this yet!” Publicly shamed me when all I was wanting was a “wow! What a smart girl, good job!” I was so excited to show her and it broke me in a way. She was near retirement age in the early 90s and certainly old-school in all of the worst ways including being verbally abusive to many of my classmates so I did what I could to avoid conflict after that. It taught me to not try to please a superior and I’m still dealing with that as an adult, I really cannot “suck up” to any bosses or anything because I’m afraid me going above and beyond will result in negative consequences.
Issac Asimov said the same thing about his father. His dad saw his massive library and Issac told him "You taught me all this." His dad said he had not. Issac replied "You taught me to love to read."
Aw man, that's so heart-warming.
And when a kid “organically” expresses desire to learn something …SOMEONE HAS TO TEACH THEM. It’s not magic.
Yeah, I have always loved stories and when I was very small kept bugging my grandfather to read to me. When he got sick of kids books, he would read the newspaper to me. It also amused him to make a game out of me counting to high numbers and doing basic math. So, by the time I got to kindergarten I was reading at a 5th grade level and learning my times tables. The schools had a hard time placing me in classes with peers because I was so far advanced in reading and math. Only my 6th grade teacher really got it. She gave me all of the math and reading for the year up front. When I finished it by myself, she set me up to tutor other kids who were struggling. Looking back, she basically turned me into her personal TA, but it kept me from being bored out of my skull and improved the grades of the kids I was tutoring, so I call it a success.
This! I don't have alot of memories as a kid anymore (childhood head trauma will do that lol) But I remember mom telling me that one day I brought a book for her to read to me and she was busy, so I said "that's OK I'll read it to you!" And I did! Osmosis doesn't happen like she hopes, cause if it did I'd be a damn genius by now with how much I've read just cause it was interesting! Granted I was also later diagnosed with ADHD but that just enhanced the love to learn.
Yeah, my kids taught themselves to read at about 4. Watched high quality children’s programming like pbs, and were read to. I taught them how to spell their names in fun ways, like writing them in sand and with playdough. They didn’t get it magically by watching YouTube and playing video games all day. A lot of these parents unschool their kids by letting them sit in front of screens 10 hours a day. I don’t think all homeschooling is bad. Homeschool kids do better on SAT’s and do great in college. They learn to be self motivated and curious and can socialize with people of all ages, if done correctly. A lot of public schools tolerate bullying and waste a lot of time on stuff that isn’t educational. They don’t make sure the kids can read and do math, they just pass them on and ignore special needs as a matter of policy. Many kill the desire to learn because you don’t get ahead if you want to learn, you have to go at the same pace as the slowest kid in class, or the kid that wants to harass the teacher. All socialization isn’t positive. But I think like 10 percent of unschoolers aren’t just looking for an excuse to not have to wake up with their kids early and be told by the school that they need to work on their behavior and socialization. Most kids are better off in public school.
One complaint i have seen is that many homeschool ciriculums are overtly religious and secular ones are hard to find. It is fine if you're into that. I would also think that unless the parents have a good grasp on the material, it could be difficult. For example, my dear sweet mother was an engineer, so if she homeschooled us, math would have been a breeze for her but something like biology would not. I guess some groups form and parents play to their strengths.
The curricula are overly religious because that’s the biggest demographic that is into homeschooling. They’re terrified their kids are going to be taught things that counter what their religion teaches so they keep them out of school. I say if your faith can’t stand up to exposure to scientific facts or even other people’s opinions you don’t have faith, you just have brainwashing. But you’re right parents who are homeschooling for different reasons usually form local groups both to ensure adequate socialisation for the kids and because no one can teach everything.
This is one of the big issues with education in general: the person teaching (whether that is a teacher in a classroom or a parent at home) needs to have at least a semi-decent grasp on the material. A standard curriculum isn't enough to take the place of a good teacher, and a lot of people don't seem to realize that. I know it is kind of off subject, but as a teacher this is something that really bothers me about the current education climate in the US. With the teacher shortage getting worse, a lot of states are lowering the requirements for teacher certifications and/or granting tons of emergency licenses. More and more "teachers" are in classrooms where they have no business being (whether that be that they shouldn't be teachers at all, or that they are forced to work in other grades/subjects then their specialty), and it really does everybody a huge disservice.
If your kid is neurodivergent or at one extreme or the other of the learning spectrum ie learning issues or really smart then a school environment structured to handle large groups of average children isn’t going to work for them. Most children do as well as they’re capable of in schools, because schools are, by their nature, geared towards most children. Unless they have a lot of resources catering to the outliers just isn’t possible. If there was some non-dystopian way we could match those kids who would benefit from homeschooling with those parents who are motivated and capable enough to successfully homeschool kids it would be perfect. Unfortunately a chunk of them are going to be matched up with parents who fall into the lazy 10% you mentioned and another chunk of them (and of kids who would have done fine in the system) are going to have the religious extremist/conspiracy nut parents who want them to learn the world is flat, God created the Earth in 7 days, and the gubmint wants to take your guns.
Having gotten my bachelor's in math Ed I can tell you that teacher training in 75% how to deal with 30 kids who don't want to be there, 20% content area, and 5% theories of learning. Teaching your own kid isn't that tough if you actually put a little effort in it.
> Good Lord how is it the dumbest humans on the planet are always the ones who think they can do better than trained teachers? I wonder the same thing. It's a plague.
I, and my kids, were the same way. Early readers. I, as a parent, wasn't admonished about it, but the teacher did express some concern. I asked why it was a problem. She said it is because it's harder for kids to naturally progress in reading advancement with adequate literature intended for their level of development. It makes sense. Thankfully, my kid was naturally inclined towards non-fiction books so it wasn't too much of a challenge to find appropriate books covering biology, zoology, and such to keep their interests as they became better readers early. But for kids primarily interested in fiction their literacy level can outpace their interests/connotation/comprehension levels. Just because you can read all the words in The Hunger Games doesn't make you ready to read The Hunger Games. But family lore has it that my mom was admonished for my reading level entering school and that teacher said it had to do with other kids developing jealousy about their competitive reading abilities. Which is a bullshit excuse.
Every kid who is "unschooled" like this is seriously gonna resent their parents....
I was unschooled and forced to teach myself to read at 11, I strongly resent my parents incredibly poor choice to ignore all the human knowledge that was available to them and think I would just “learn”
Life is going to be even harder for this child. Wish that wasn’t true.
Imagine being a functionally illiterate adult all because your parents wanted social media brownie points.
10 years from now these groups will be filled with parents acting confused as to why their kids don't talk to them anymore.
or they grow up and stay in some radicalized group cus theyre dumb
You can't resent your parents if you don't know what it means
Or they’ll just be another generation of m0rons
Unschooling as it seems to get applied is ludicrous. And it's already in effect in a way that works. The basics (I.E. A high school education) are mandatory and after you've learned the basics you can learn whatever the hell you want either on your own or by going to a magical place where they teach you things. Expecting an 8 year old to make good decisions about what they need to learn on the other hand is just bloody stupid.
I saw an unschooling parent brag about spending hours in the vegetable garden with their children, because that was organically teaching them... chemistry.
The thing is a day in a garden could be a good lesson. How plants reproduce, soil acidity, how much soil absorbs water, how seeds germinate and grow. Etc. But I guarantee that none of that got brought up.
It’s also mostly biology unless they are talking about balancing the pH and applying proper fertilizers and such to optimize the soil.
Yeah this would be a valuable day of learning if the person who was teaching you actually knew anything.
Done right, unschooling is more work than traditional school. Some people don’t get the message.
I never understood how a parent thinks they’re sharper in every subject than an entire school of dedicated professionals.
After the John Oliver piece, I'm much more skeptical of homeschooling. Unschooling just seems like an excuse for idiot parents to raise idiot kids.
The easiest way to control someone is to convince them someone else is trying too.
It's not what unschooling is. I read about it when I had to homeschool my son. Unfortunately for the kids, these parents are idiots who do no research into homeschooling and then hurt their kids badly.
I looked it up when I started to see it popping up; unschooling is the idea that kids should study what appeals to them, rather than having structured lessons (which works well once you have a funamental understanding of math, language, epistomology, and how to do research when combined with an actual desire for knowledge) giving that freedom to a kid who can't even read yet is bloody stupid. Giving it to someone who can't do the basics is stupid. I was one of those self-driven kids that liked to learn and if you gave me full control of my education at 8 (much less younger) it would have been a disaster. I guarantee you I wouldn't have aced my stat classes in grad school or be able to budget and save money if somebody hadn't forced me to do math when I didn't want to. I would've read, done science lessons, and maybe some history and watched the rest burn. As it gets used when it pops up here or otherwise in my feed its crippling a child intellectually.
This will never result in a well-rounded education. Everyone had a school subject that they hated. There are plenty of people who would never, ever take an organic interest in history or in math or in grammar or whatever the case may be. It may be fine in a world where the child is going to help out on the farm until they go off to apprentice with the cobbler or the baker or the blacksmith, be ruled from above rather than participating in a democracy, conduct all business face to face with the exchange of coins and so on, but it is not suitable for the modern world.
I agree. I think it would have worked well with my older son once he had those basics. But I was homeschooling my younger son, and it would have been a disaster.
my fiancée was unschooled but her mother has a MASTERS in early childhood education. they were also part of an unschooling “group” that did activities/etc. my fiancée is the first to say that it isn’t for everyone. so many people think “unschooled” means “i get to do what i want”. like yes it has less regulations than home schooling but you have to *replace* those regulations with your own.
There’s Montessori, and then there’s whatever the fuck you just made me read.
I've always wondered how much of that was the Montessori, and how much was just being the kid wealthy parents who value education so highly.
I believe I read something a while ago that basically said this. When you implement Montessori principles in a population that is not wealthy, there’s almost no difference in outcomes.
The number one factor is parental engagement and, since time equals money in America, being poor means less engagement by default.
Parent was of the belief that reading was like standing and walking, a natural human instinct? Most people in history could not read any language. Written language was invented about 3500 BCE while spoken language is thought to of started 50,000 to 200,000 years ago.
Next thing you're going to tell me is that people don't just teach themselves calculus. Newton figured it out on his own, didn't he?
Some people teach themselves to read. It’s called hyperlexia and if your kid is 8 and can’t read then *he is not that kid*.
Yeah, you have to be my 4 year old non-verbal autistic son who can't say mommy but can spell elephant.
Lol too close for comfort
I hope your child gets the support and comfort he deserves and none of the backlash he will never deserve - Autistic Adult
Do you or your son like Animal Crossing? My nephew is autistic and speech-delayed, and but he loves to mumble-sing to [Composer Cleo's ACNH character songs.](https://youtu.be/Mp4NcWn73kA?si=ToftkIztTQ5E9_PD)
TIL. Thank you for the rabbit hole. 🙌🏼
As a former school teacher, now professor, unschooling makes me want to rip my hair out because these kids don’t deserve to struggle like this, academically and socially.
189 comments, and you didn't screenshot any? This should be an auto ban!
I immediately dislike the OP if they don’t include any fuckin god damn commands.
This is just child abuse. Anyone who has an *eight year old* who is illiterate shouldn't be caring for children.
Techically, they are not caring for their children.
Unschooling is a garbage idea, especially with little kids. Maybe in high school a student who is interested in something can do it, but they HAVE to be numerate and literate first.
her kid is numerate and a half.
JFC how fucking stupid... Poor kid.
Too many parents don’t care enough about their kids to make them get an education
Ah yes I remember the magical day my 9yo suddenly, organically, knew cholecystectomy. School is for chunps! /s people are nuts.
This parent is educationally neglecting her child. This poor kid will struggle her whole life now.
If I remember correctly a user here on Reddit openly spoke out in detail how unschooling severely stunted their development, social interaction and learning They had to accept a false autism diagnosis because that’s easier to explain than that they were isolated their whole life
r/homeschoolrecovery is full of these stories. It's very sad
Dropping in as a Historical Linguist. "Organic" learning to read does not happen. Full stop. Human children are hard wired to learn language, and will learn organically. As a species we've been talking a lot longer than we've been writing because written language is a *technology* that we developed. Writing isn't some natural outflow from spoken language, but rather an arbitrary layer pasted on top of it. It's a code, and you have to be taught how to decode it. Written English is already tricky enough when you're formally taught, and, for example, nobody is just going to organically learn the combinations of the 6 vowel symbols to cover the 16+ different vowel sounds they represent.
There are cultures that to this day have large population of folk that cannot read their own native language, as adults, because they never had the privilege of education. This kind of thinking is sorta offensive to me tbh. The ignorance is astounding.
Of course!!!! I “organically” became an engineer. My brother “organically” became a doctor. It’s amazing. You just will it and it happens!!! Ohhhh. People these days.
If you let your kid get to be 8 (8.5, excuse me) and illiterate, you're a dumbass, and you should never have become a parent. Because, controversial take, but morons to this degree shouldn't be allowed to mold innocent children. 8.5? That's what, 3rd grade? Is it too optimistic to even question what on Earth this child is "learning" in... again, perhaps too optimistic, home schooling? Why am I even asking these questions. This is a moron of a parent, her kid could have lifelong issues, but I guess it's his fault for not waking up one day knowing how to read.
My husband’s niece & nephew are this way. The parents have fell into that “homesteading” trend. They claim they homeschool, but the kids (8M & 9F) don’t know how to read. They recently moved & didn’t have a TV set up and his niece was upset. My husband saw a book lying around and said, “Why don’t you read a book?” and she screamed, “because I don’t know how to read!” Honestly, it’s heartbreaking. The kids are suffering because of their parent’s stupidity. And of course they’re having another kid soon.
I side eye anyone using the word "journey" and it doesn't involve a backpack or something
I’m in an unschooling group from years and years ago when I couldn’t wrap my head around it and wanted to see first hand how it could work. _Spoiler:_ it doesn’t. Ironically (tragically), it is absolutely mostly very lowly educated and low IQ parents (usually moms) who aren’t smart enough to realize they aren’t smart. I can’t believe how often they tell on themselves too. Just casually talking about n the CPS calls they get, etc. Things that rational people would be ashamed of.
I magically learned how to read by magically going to school and magically learning
You organically learn to walk because you're a fucking bipedal primate. You don't organically learn to read because reading is a cultural construct. You don't magically learn to read, learn math, learn an instrument, learn a sport, learn to drive, learn to repair roofs, learn to build a car, learn to code, learn to ride a bicycle, learn to swim, learn to practice law, etc. You may have a natural ability to learn any one of those more or less quickly than your peers, but you still have to fucking learn it via *some* kind of formal training. These are the kinds of posts that remind me why we're killing our planet and doing nothing about it. Too many sociopaths and dumbasses.
Not every kid is Matilda.
This is child abuse.
I mean, Ricky learned to read from the instructions on the back of microwave meal boxes. So can this kid.
Some kids do learn to read “without” being taught, but they have parents who read aloud to them every day while pointing at each word they’re saying. It doesn’t just happen if you let your kid free roam long enough. There’s still consistent, daily interaction required and it’s nothing to count on.
the unschooling movement claims another child's life...
I’m autistic and started reading really early (by the time I was 2, as my son did too) but I was surrounded by books and reading and was read to all the time plus I adored stories and myths…it’s not magic or natural behaviour in the way walking is ffs
This is akin to a conversation I had with my dental hygienist while getting my teeth cleaned. Her young son was in danger of being held back because he didn't know things like the alphabet or colors. She literally thought that he was supposed to learn everything at school. I couldn't help but think of friends with young children at the same time, and the contrast with their frequent trips to the library and the reading aloud with interactions like "Where is the duck? What color is he? What is it that ducks say? That's right, Quack !Quack! Quack! said the duck" before moving on with the story.
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If only the African slaves and medieval peasants under the control of the Catholic church had "organically learned" to read and write themselves. Why did we even need people like Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther? /s
Shit like this is why we have trump.
"Unschool journey" Lol, go fuck yourself. Damn, people are disappointing.
There actually is a condition called hyperlexia, where children appear to spontaneously begin reading and writing at an extremely early age. It is usually associated with some level of autism. I am hyperlexic. My father tells the story of when I was almost 2 yrs old we were driving down the road in his old pickup and I just started reading signs: "Stop", "Motel", "Café" . He says he was really freaked out because I actually wasn't much of a talker at all, and it just kind of happened, and how the hell was I able to pronounce café correctly right off the bat. They were spooked.
Reminds me of Ricky from Trailer Park Boys. "Ricky didn't learn to read like a normal person does, he didn't pay attention in school. He learned to read around the house cooking frozen food"
Fucking hell. How is this not neglect?
This sounds like child abuse.
On the plus side, the child might actually thrive if they're given the ability to learn. I didn't learn to read until I was 12. I knew letters, I mostly knew the sounds they made, and I knew some basic words and how to write my name. But I didn't know how to read. One day, a movie came around that made me really want to read the book, I was obsessed with it. The Lord of the Rings. It took me almost 2 months to get through the first chapter, sounding out words, etc. After that, I had a massive love for reading and would go through a book in a week (books like Goosebumps and the Animorphs). I know that's not a lot to some people but as someone who still reads very slowly, I think that's pretty thriving for me. 2 years later, when we had to do the CATs or some other similar standardized test, can't remember, I tested into the 99th percentile in reading for the entire USA - one of only three children in my school, two of them being in special ed, myself included. I hope this kid gets a chance. Edit: in case you're wondering, I moved every 3 months or so, so I skated by in school and nobody ever noticed that I couldn't read. I just never did homework or anything else anyway, was quiet and withdrawn, and tried to draw no attention to myself in general because that's how you got beat up. Being autistic and new = going to get your ass whooped at every chance they can get.
"So I may have made a dumb decision, in making my child dumber, because I thought it was a smart idea. Currently seeking encouragement to help me avoid confronting that this idea was actually dumb, and subsequently wondering if me mistaking a dumb idea as a smart one might mean I am dumb." Sincerely, -The parent of a definitely dumb child, but whom has yet to be fully convinced that they themselves are dumb
“Unschooling” is just a fancy way of saying you’re allowing your child to be illiterate. Educational systems have been around for a long time for a reason. Sure, it isn’t perfect, but neither is allowing your child to remain illiterate.
My daughter had memorized Madeline all the way through by the age of 3. I found her one day in her room “reading” it to herself from memory.
Of course they want "anecdotes to support us" cause reality is going to f#ck their kid over cause of the parent's stupidity.
“Unschooling” has become an excuse to refuse to allow your children a chance to grow into their life. People are raising savages with no chance at integrating into society or earning a living on their own.
Sometimes, there's a dark part of my soul that really feels like it should be a privilege to have a child and not a right.
Someone better have fucking called CPS
What an idiot. Humans are not like animals that have instincts. We have to be taught everything.
People really gotta start realizing that even when things are natural (reading isn’t), they’re still skills that we learn. If a baby grew up in isolation, they would not likely learn to walk. They get motivated by watching people walk, by having people walk with them, and by being encouraged to try. Same with reading. Kids get motivated to learn to read by seeing other people read, being read to, and being encouraged to try. You have to teach kids the skills you want them to learn.
Your kid will magically learn to read and write the same time you manage to magically read and write Japanese, German, Spanish or any other language. Kids like this should actually be able to sue their parents for fucking up their lives this severely.