[email protected]

This is most of an old post (what wasn't reference to earlier stuff, in a
discussion about what was unschooling) by me. I found it moving files from
one computer to another.

Date: Wednesday, October 31, 2001 7:46:24 AM
To: [email protected]



Newer homeschoolers/unschoolers often have a vision of schoolwork in their
heads, and they're hoping for an alternate way to get that small set of
knowledge (which probably seems big from their point of view, at first) into their
kids.

Older homechoolers realize that the "set of knowledge" is as much as can be
gathered from interaction, experience and discussion in the whole world, for
the rest of one's life.

So to the newer people here, since we're not talking about children and
math/English/science/history, we're not talking about unschooling. But we ARE
talking about history. Don't you expect people born in 1930 to be able to tell
you something about WWII? Our kids will be called on by their grandkids to
tell them what they remember about the war that began in their childhoods. It
won't be, I hope, "I don't remember anything except people put flags on their
cars and my mom kept singing 'God Bless America.'"

And we ARE talking English, and political science. How is a nation informed
and made supportive of a war? Why will soldiers happily go to war? Why
will the families back home happily accept it? There are motivations in
historical movements. "Why?" will lead to why when the kids are coming across the
history of Poland, of South Africa, of the Moors in medieval Spain, of the
Roman Empire.

The sooner a family cuts loose from the school model where kids learn certain
things and parents consider they are "through with school" and don't have to
learn, the sooner unschooling will actually work instead of just being a model
which isn't quite fitting the family.

Sandra
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(end of 10/31/02 post)


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