Exactly, Bluemagic.
And truly, what works and seems fine (no assessment) for 3-8yo children, is
not a good idea for children who need college-level resources and instruction to keep learning.
There's a point at which you have to admit that taking a college vector calculus course is probably BETTER and more effective than, say... spending four years coming up with it all one's self, even if one were completely capable. Newton only did it that way because nobody else had already DONE so, see...
But lacking the kinds of credentialling that matter to the gatekeeping machinery, well, that becomes a HUGE problem at that point.
That particular point is a lot sooner chronologically for most parents reading here than it is for those with NT kids who unschool/homeschool.
A twelve year old unschooler who has never sat any exams at all and wants access to the local Uni's molecular biology course-- ask yourself what some of the hurdles would be, there, and then compare that with either
traditional (eclectic or school-at-home) homeschool, or with some more official kind of schooling, in which that child is a "tenth" grade student.
That's why I am pretty insistent that this is not such a bad idea at 3-8yo
if it works for the child in question-- and it DID NOT work for my DD, by the way-- she didn't even learn to read purely osmotically the way my radically unschooling friends thought she "should" have. They would have said that she just "wasn't ready" yet. We sort of believed that, but intervened because she was using whole language methods to start learning, and I knew what problems that can lead to because of having ECE, developmental psych experts, and elementary educators in the family to
ask it of... so was she "ready" to learn??
Less than 20 hours of decoding instruction, using a single set of phonetically controlled readers would argue an emphatic YES, particularly when one takes into account the meteoric progress she made within days and weeks. But my radical unschooling friends were HORRIFIED that we
forced our daughter to participate in this activity. And oh-yes-we-did force her. She wasn't entirely "willing" and "eager." She was quite oppositional even at four, looking back on it, and extrinsic rewards were very little inducement. She regarded opposing parental suggestions as a LOVELY game. Her response to any "suggestion" then-- and now-- is a narrowing of the eyes and a brief flash of "YOU're not the boss of ME!!"
I guess when I think back on it, we were really crappy unschoolers right from the beginning, because we intervened like that, or corrected her "understanding" of things that she had WRONG, like a sense of multiplication being "repeating addition." We provided resources, and she would choose to lay on the floor rather than use them-- even if it had been a "passionate interest" only hours or days before.
Deliberate GUIDING and lack of any assessment only works with some kids-- kids who are happy to make mistakes and be wrong, and still willing to demonstrate the extent of their ability on a regular basis, and
those who accept input from others around them. Some kids like to be comfortable, or are so strongly oppositional that they won't do ANYTHING that someone else "provides" for them, and for those kids, unschooling is unequivocally a BAD idea. I don't often make that kind of statement about something, but in this instance, I'm making an exception.
Unschooling works tolerably well for kids who are extraverted, non-oppositional, self-motivated, and
willing to make themselves uncomfortable in the pursuit of a goal. Some kids aren't like that.
Even in those families for whom it works well, though, "school" starts to look at LOT more typical at middle school, for the simple reason that you have to set kids up so that they CAN choose to go to college or not.
I am NOT getting the impression that Madoosa's family is anything like the radical unschoolers that we know that make me cringe. For them, they truly "trust" that their kids will come to THEM whenever they need anything in particular, and believe in "life as education" to such a degree that they refuse to provide educational resources at all. They truly believe that providing an internet connection and a gaming console (if that's what the child asks for) is dandy as "education." Or offering a child 8-10yo a twenty dollar bill and sending them into the thrift store alone to purchase a winter wardrobe. THAT is the kind of thinking that makes me cringe.
Every homeschooling (and virtual schooling) family that we know regards learning as a whole-life activity. School curricula are very definitely about this kind of pedagogy now, too-- it's ALL about the kind of thing that unschooling families tout at learning opportunities-- games, cooking, etc. The notion that there would be firewalls between "learning" and everything else... that's just nonsense, honestly. I know
no parents who think that way. Not one.
