A good bad example
Sandra Dodd
I saved this for over a week so it would be cold. It's not by an unschooler, but by a mainstream parent commenting on a mutual facebook friend's wall. I hope it will be (for everyone who reads it) an example of how far one can move away from what is acceptable mainstream parenting:
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I always told my children that I never speculate about things that don't pertain to anything right here and now, but they were welcome to be philosophical all they wanted, as long as their rooms were clean & homework was done.
My kids always wanted to have deep, philosophical conversations when there were "boring" things to be done, hahaha! Little smarties!
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There was a book I had and read a couple of time when Marty was little, so 1989, 1990, by Gareth Matthews called Philosophy and the Young Child.
http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674666061
Marty was my example. He's always been a deep thinkier, but in a light-hearted way. Just last week he complained that his art history professor has no imagination. If it's not in the book, she doesn't want to discuss it. When he speculated, to a question about an Egyptian sculpture, that it might have been propaganda, she said "No, all sculptures were approved." To Marty (and to me, when he told me) that wasn't even NEARLY a decent answer. :-) Just because a sculpture wasn't approved doesn't mean it was destroyed. And there surely were practice things, goofs, private pieces. But she doesn't care what anyone thinks if they don't have a PhD. Marty will never have that prejudice, and she's just given him cause to hesitate about listening just because someone DOES have one.
In California last October when I was speaking at HSC's unschooling symposium, someone asked me to say what books I liked. I kind of understood the question, but at the age of 60, I have read a LOT of books that influenced me. And if another person were to read those same books, they wouldn't get the same messages or information I had, because I read them from my own curiosity and made my own connections as I was reading, and later. The order of reading them probably mattered. Being who I was, from where I was, with my moods probably mattered.
So the book above might be great for some people, not interesting to others, might be the portal to a rest-of-life interest to someone.
I think putting a child's desire to speak of deep philosophical things should be put ahead of just about everything else, and never laughed at or belittled.
Sandra
________________________
I always told my children that I never speculate about things that don't pertain to anything right here and now, but they were welcome to be philosophical all they wanted, as long as their rooms were clean & homework was done.
My kids always wanted to have deep, philosophical conversations when there were "boring" things to be done, hahaha! Little smarties!
________________________
There was a book I had and read a couple of time when Marty was little, so 1989, 1990, by Gareth Matthews called Philosophy and the Young Child.
http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674666061
Marty was my example. He's always been a deep thinkier, but in a light-hearted way. Just last week he complained that his art history professor has no imagination. If it's not in the book, she doesn't want to discuss it. When he speculated, to a question about an Egyptian sculpture, that it might have been propaganda, she said "No, all sculptures were approved." To Marty (and to me, when he told me) that wasn't even NEARLY a decent answer. :-) Just because a sculpture wasn't approved doesn't mean it was destroyed. And there surely were practice things, goofs, private pieces. But she doesn't care what anyone thinks if they don't have a PhD. Marty will never have that prejudice, and she's just given him cause to hesitate about listening just because someone DOES have one.
In California last October when I was speaking at HSC's unschooling symposium, someone asked me to say what books I liked. I kind of understood the question, but at the age of 60, I have read a LOT of books that influenced me. And if another person were to read those same books, they wouldn't get the same messages or information I had, because I read them from my own curiosity and made my own connections as I was reading, and later. The order of reading them probably mattered. Being who I was, from where I was, with my moods probably mattered.
So the book above might be great for some people, not interesting to others, might be the portal to a rest-of-life interest to someone.
I think putting a child's desire to speak of deep philosophical things should be put ahead of just about everything else, and never laughed at or belittled.
Sandra