unschooling is...helping them find the tools/resources they need to meet those goals. It's the same as for adults. If I'm not good at anything new that I need to do, I find someone who is good at that who can teach me, guide me in my learning of that thing. That is the ideal for children surely? That they do not have a view of "my teacher said" or "my mother said", but that they understand the best places to go to find the resources they need. I truly believe that unschooling is more a way of saying that we need to stop believing in a largely failing system and we need to understand that the way we find information changes more rapidly with every passing year - that therefore the way in which we prepare children to exist in a world that largely is not yet in existence cannot be done by using outmoded methodologies and ideas.
Honestly, I don't know what you're trying to say here. Well, I do, but I don't think it means much.
Really:
I'm going to gently ask if maybe you've been influenced by some good marketing spin.
I think you're saying that teaching kids how to find information is a major benefit of unschooling. I don't see how typical schools or homeschools fail to do this. The schools I attended and the ones my kids have attended have ALL emphasized this skill.
Unschoolers often emphasize
learning to learn (MANY instances of this phrase found online). Again, this statement strikes me as being content-free, but it sounds deep if you don't look too hard. How do you
learn to learn? Learning is more than reading an encyclopedia entry or an internet page. Serious learning involves a lot of hard work that's often outside your comfort zone (I see it as expanding my comfort zone, one uncomfortable minute at a time). It happens in a
structured way (see MegMeg's point about annoying autodidacts, who stick with the stuff they like). I don't see unschooling as pushing kids outside of their comfort zones --- unschooling, by definition,
doesn't push and tacitly tells kids to stay inside the comfy areas.
I agree that the US education system is failing in many ways, and accept your word that the South African system has problems. But rejecting everything about either system and opting for an unstructured approach is jumping way ahead in the proof (i.e. making assumptions and drawing a conclusion in the absence of evidence).
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.
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).
More importantly, how is letting a 10-year-old set the direction of his education better than giving that responsibility to an adult? Adults who pay attention can make some pretty good predictions (e.g. environmental disaster in what became the Dust Bowl, Paul Krugman and the housing bust, etc.). Contrast with a child, who has
no clue about how the world works.* Which one of the two is in a better position to make good decisions about education?
*Well, children living in very difficult circumstances probably have a decent idea of how hard life can be, but I suspect these kids aren't in the unschooling crowd.
