Actually, I do. I was trying to be polite.
I think the points about nurturing talent/gifts and putting your child in a situation where their college ready does happen rather quickly and are valid points. However, it doesn't mean every gifted parent should be bearing calculus in mind for their 3-8-yr-olds or that every gifted child is destined for a STEM career. That's hardly the case.
Remember, too, the situation with what college can offer/provide is rapidly changing and nothing is a guarantee today (no school, no training, no job, no pension, no benefits, etc.). There's tons of people who have PhDs and are unemployed, saddled with debt, and are unhappy with their lot. Life is short.
True-- but you do, IMO, have to be willing to go to outsiders for what may seem to be quite regimented formal instruction when your own ability to act as a guide is at an end. I can't teach my daughter art very well, and I'd be a lousy piano teacher.
I'm pretty good with history and the sciences. Tolerable with literature up to about second-year college level, but not so much with composition. Math, I'm not confident enough beyond Algebra II (aside from stats) to actually
teach the material well, or to critically offer guidance to an autodidact.
In my observations of radical unschoolers, though, none of them see that as any kind of problem whatsoever, because they don't really believe in manipulating the process
at all. The ones that do tend to think of their method as something more like "eclectic" or "unschooly" rather than pure John Holt and free-range education.
I think that you're right, cdfox, about this:
Others, such as Csikszentmihalyi, have said that the key is to create a nurturing environment where their child's interests can be taken seriously and be assisted with opportunities, resources, and/or a mentor.
I agree with that as well. I'm not sure that Robinson is necessarily correct to tar ALL educational institutions as little more than factories, though.
I think that
appropriate formalized,
directed schoolwork
shouldn't take up more than 20% of a child's waking hours. Period. Whatever pacing the child achieves within that framework seems fine to me. I think, anyway-- though it's hard to put myself in the shoes of a student with an FSIQ of 90, who has to work HARD and needs a lot of repetition to master academic concepts and skills.
Anyway. Once that 20% of the day is done, I'm a HUGE fan of child-led discovery and of encouraging children to follow their passions (within the guidelines of the law, safety, etc.). Whatever that looks like, I mean. So I definitely get the positives behind unschooling as a philosophy of parenting with an eye toward nurturing creativity, initiative, and intrinsic motivation.
I just don't think that it's so great as a rigid philosophy that HAS to work as a primary educational strategy. Yes, it's educational to do stuff in that way-- and likely beneficial in ways that formal learning of topics OTHERS set for us is not-- but I don't see why being a dilettante is necessarily a great idea, either, and I've known quite a few unschooled kids who wind up
there, too.
