Sandra Dodd

-=- When a "leader" can have the gall to tell someone that 'they don't love their child enough' for being concerned over something like watching tv 24h/day & no one bats an eyelid, we've got a problem.-=-

This was posted in a discussion about radical unschooling, by someone who has misunderstood things in public before. By "misunderstood," I think I mean willfully misrepresented.

Hostility and defensive anger poison unschooling to the core. Not "the movement," but the family.

I won't think the "we" in the quote above is a "we."

If 80% of unschoolers have a problem the other 20 % might be doing quite well anyway, but "we" don't share our problems OR our successes. Each family takes what they can understand and incorporate and what makes their children happier and more whole (or they fail, to some degree, in some ways, to do that), but we're not operating in shared-resources mode, or consensus, or living at the average-of-all-unschoolers point.

I've seen families doing it VERY well, and families not getting it so well (some are calm about it, and some like to blame others for their failure to understand, or for their false starts or for their children's wild behavior).

While it's a little dismaying that there are parents who are inflexible and negative, the dismay isn't that it will harm my own family, but that those families won't have the peace and joy they might have otherwise.

Sandra

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