“teach your own”: objections to homeschooling

[responses to] common objections to homeschooling

“Human beings have been sharing information and skills, and passing along to their children whatever they knew, for about a millions years now…” p. 40

“For a long, long time, people who were good at sharing what they knew hae realized certain things:

1. to help people learn something, you must first understand what they already know;
2. showing people how to do something is better than telling them, and letting the do it themselves is best of all;
3. you mustn’t tell or show too much at once, since people digest new ideas slowly and must feel secure with new skills or knowledge before they are ready for more;
4. you must give people as much time as they want and need to absorb what you have shown or told them;
5. instead of testing their understanding with questions you must let them show how much or little they understand by the questions they ask you;
6. you must not get impatient or angry when people don’t understand;
7. scaring people only blocks learning, and so on. These are clearly not thing that one has to spend three years talking about [in teacher schools/college].” p. 41

“Above all else, be sure that in your eagerness to make them learn, you do not frighten, offend, insult, or humilate those you are teaching.” p. 45

in response to the question: How are children going to learn what they need to know [if someone doesn’t teach them?]
“Of course, a child may not know what he may need to kow in ten years (who does?), but he knows, and much better than anyone else, what he wants and needs to know right now, what his mind is ready and hungry for. If we help him, or just allow him, to learn that, he will remember it, use it, build on it. If we try to make him learn something else, that we think is important, the chases are that he won’t learn it, or will learn very little of it, that he will soon forget most of what he learned, and what is worst of all, will before long lose most of his appetite for learning anything.” p. 49

politics of unschooling

“Today, in the U.S., many people in the fast-growing field of solar energy do not have college degrees in it…Ten years from now many (but still not all) of the people in the field will have these degrees. When there are enough of them, they, and the colleges and universities which gave them their degrees, will begin to try to get laws passed and arrangements made sayin that you can’t do important work in solar energy unless you have a degree. They will, in short, try to turn one more field of human invention and action into a “profession,” a legal monopoly, which only those can do who have had a lot of expensive schooling…This has already happened in the law, as in many other fields. Abraham Lincoln, and many others, did not learn law by going to law school, but by reading law books.” p. 69

“Schools like to say that they create and spread knowledge. It would be closer to the truth to say that they ollect and hoard knowledge, corner the market on it if they can, so that they can sell it at the highest possible price.” p. 70

“The best incentive to learn how to do good work, and to do it, is to know that the work has to be done, that is is going to be of real use to someone.” p. 73