Sandra Dodd

-=-If it had to be child-led in any way, my son would watch tv all day.-=-

That quote is a solid wad of confusion.
It has "has to." It has "if I let him he would..." It has evidence of someone not having read what she's commenting on.

There's a huge rash of people posting without reading and without thinking over on facebook. One might say "Well, DUH!" and one would be right, no doubt. When I was upset about the ignorant, rude, HORRIBLE comments attached to a video of Holly talking about unschooling on youtube, Kirby laughed and said they were youtube comments. They were GOING to be that way, and I shouldn't have read them. I think he meant "Well, DUH!"

There are a couple of people there whom I was tempted to put on read-only, which I could do if they were here, but can't do on a facebook group. There, it's either let them continue to froth and spew, or remove them completely.

That made me miss this group with its walls and its trapdoor (and its couple of trolls, but they're more harmless than they would like to be) :-)

-=-If it had to be child-led in any way, my son would watch tv all day.-=-

Nothing "has to be" child led, and in glowing fact that response was on a blog post of Pam Sorooshian's which begins (in black words on a white background, in normal English):

-=-I do not refer to unschooling as “child-led learning” and I encourage others not to use that term because I think overuse of it has led to some pretty serious misunderstanding of what unschooling is really like.-=-

I think perhaps just as dozens of people have read six words of http://sandradodd.com/joyce/yes and gone off to screw up some lives, some people will read the beginning of Pam's article and feel justified in telling their kids what to do.

I also think I don't feel guilty about that.

Someone was complaining about strewing, and suggesting (I think) that if people misunderstood it, it was because I hadn't been clear enough.
Really? I clarified something I wrote casually fifteen years or more ago. I expanded on it. I have twenty webpages about it, and someone thinks it would be helpful if she explained to me that if people don't understand it, it's because I didn't phrase it well?

One of the correspondents in that musicless mosh pit said her son was lazy, but because she wrote "lazy" wanted us not to suggest she had said lazy, because she put quotation marks.

Some people won't mess with wild discussions like that at all, and I don't blame them, but sometimes it's a great contrast to the relative peace and calm here. :-) And every single time, someone is jarred into a new understanding of some aspect of what some of us have been trying to explain in various ways for a long time. And sometimes one of them is someone who can help clarify it for others. At the point that someone *gets it* (some aspect of it), all the dust settles around some sparkly learning, regardless of how many people willfully created more output than they were worth, in that context.

It's a frenzy of weirdness, but even in that, people are learning.

Sandra

references
http://sandradodd.com/strewing (some explanation of and ideas about strewing)
http://learninghappens.wordpress.com/2011/09/24/unschooling-is-not-child-led-learning/ (Pam's blog post)
http://www.facebook.com/groups/303347574750/ Radical Unschooling Info • 1,117 Members (the melee)