I can't accept your assertion about outmoded methodologies and not knowing what the world will look like in 20 years meaning that, therefore, you must unschool. confused What does this mean? Is it another idea that sounds good until you dig into it? How is teaching kids to read/write, and expecting them to learn fractions outmoded? Sure, the world is changing, but I'd bet money that people who can work outside their comfort zones and who know lots of math will be at an advantage over the ones who don't fit this description in 2030, because this has always been the case (see the mortgage mess for proof of what happens when you don't understand math).
Kids learn to read and write and do fractions by living. It's a part of life surely? You have to try really hard to NOT expose your children to these things. Unschooling parents (by and large) are not negligent - they read with their kids, play with them, bake and cook with them - most likely how most of our kids here picked up the reading, the ability to form letters and the concept of fractions, measurements etc.
I think unschooling is really against the concept that a child has to go a special place and be taught these life skills by someone qualified to teach it - meaning that the parents are therefore NOT qualified to do so.
We don't need standardised tests to see if our children can read, can write, can type, can *insert skill of choice here*. We know if they can or can't, simply because we are living with them. I certainly never needed a teacher to tell me at the age of 4 that my child could (still) count to 20. He'd been comfortably doing that since he could talk really. So why did I need to spend all that time to get a report telling me what I already knew about him?
Unschooling is all about being outside comfort zones too - the drive to learn new things is present all around us, in a way that really is real world and not the pseudo-world of school. In reality when you learn something to use it, you learn it better - it's not for a grade or a test, you are learning it to use it. right there and then. It just makes it more fun. From my perspective it's not limiting, but taking away the limits that school/preset curriculae set. We are not limited to learning chess only in Kindergarten, we are not having to wait for 11th grade to do genetics. We don't have to finish learing all multiplication facts by rote before tackling fractions. We can read shakespeare at the age of 5. We can also learn how to bricklay, milk a cow etc. So many MORE possibilities than are offered in a traditional school setting.
The way school exists today is a model based on an industrial need level. We manufacture students by batches - largely based on their date of manufacture (credit to Sir Ken Robinson). We have all experienced the frustration that comes with that thinking. It does not do our children's natural talents any good.
Do I feel there is value in learning the things that have to be learnt? absolutely - I do not personally know of one unschooling family who do not ensure there is writing, reading, maths and other essential life skills within their children's framework. Our day may not have timetable-esque structure, but it does have structure. We do have rules, we do have requirements, we definitely need boundaries. Unschooling does not negate any of that. Not at all. Those, like I said previously are parental choices, not educational ones.
Perhaps that is what I mean really. unschooling tries to say that instead of segregating life from learning, they are one and the same thing - we learn as part of our lives, because that is what learning affects: our everyday lives.
