Re: [Unschooling-dotcom] Digest Number 1281
[email protected]
In a message dated 05/30/2001 12:27:52 PM Central Daylight Time,
[email protected] writes:
<<
Sandra, I am surprised you did not send your children to school. It always
seems like the people that loved school send their own kids, as they see in
only a positive light. What was the turning point in your life that lead you
to homeschooling and then unschooling? >>
I'm not Sandra, but I loved school, too.....I was that skipping,
ankle-socked child of Popular Culture, pigtails flying, lunch box clanking,
happy to go off to a place where you could learn Spanish, paint pictures,
play the cello, run the 50 yd dash, and inhale the library...... ;-)
But.....I was lucky. I went to "experiemental schools" for much of my
grade school years, and I had the benefit of a fabulous "talented and gifted"
program (want to spend hours in the darkroom, learning photography? No
problem. Study Shakespeare and Plato and Dante, in a symposium? Sure! Spend
half the summer at a FREE "camp" for other kids like you, sponsored by the
state of Virginia? Go for it!).
And I was a great "test-taker" and fit in and got elected to Student Body
President and made Newspaper Editor and stuff like that and had the "run" of
the halls and more freedom that 95% of the other students--unfairly so.
BUT, very few schools are like that....the 60's and early 70's were the
heyday of academic experimentation in "alternative public learning" and Free
Schools and other early Holt-ian concepts. And, my firstborn was not rough
and tough and bold and left-brained; she was sensitive and timid and dreamy
and right-brained and thus I *knew* that not only were the schools I had the
opportunity to inflict upon here nowhere near as benign as mine had been, but
she was a personality type that would be *shredded* by the System. When we
moved the sofa to vacuum after her first few months traumatized in First
Grade, and saw the PILES of blonde, curly hair that she had twisted and
knotted and yanked out and tossed back there, in her post-traumatic,
after-school, stressed television viewing sessions, we internalized what we'd
already suspected: that School and Ellie were a deadly mix.
And, I'd not had my first child till I was 32, she was the light of our
lives, and I never had adjusted to the "notion" that ripping a 4 yr. old
child (she wasn't even 5 went I first, insanely, placed her on the bus for
the 40 minute ride to kindergarden!) away from her family to insure her
"socialization" was a Good Thing. I wanted her back. We brought her back.
And after that, I began reading and reading and researching and meeting other
homeschoolers and my list of justifications for homeschooling grew and
grew......
But that was the *initial*, deciding ephiphany. :-)
*** Becky***
"Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and
conscientious stupidity."
Martin Luther King Jr. (1929 - 1968), Strength to Love, 1963
[email protected] writes:
<<
Sandra, I am surprised you did not send your children to school. It always
seems like the people that loved school send their own kids, as they see in
only a positive light. What was the turning point in your life that lead you
to homeschooling and then unschooling? >>
I'm not Sandra, but I loved school, too.....I was that skipping,
ankle-socked child of Popular Culture, pigtails flying, lunch box clanking,
happy to go off to a place where you could learn Spanish, paint pictures,
play the cello, run the 50 yd dash, and inhale the library...... ;-)
But.....I was lucky. I went to "experiemental schools" for much of my
grade school years, and I had the benefit of a fabulous "talented and gifted"
program (want to spend hours in the darkroom, learning photography? No
problem. Study Shakespeare and Plato and Dante, in a symposium? Sure! Spend
half the summer at a FREE "camp" for other kids like you, sponsored by the
state of Virginia? Go for it!).
And I was a great "test-taker" and fit in and got elected to Student Body
President and made Newspaper Editor and stuff like that and had the "run" of
the halls and more freedom that 95% of the other students--unfairly so.
BUT, very few schools are like that....the 60's and early 70's were the
heyday of academic experimentation in "alternative public learning" and Free
Schools and other early Holt-ian concepts. And, my firstborn was not rough
and tough and bold and left-brained; she was sensitive and timid and dreamy
and right-brained and thus I *knew* that not only were the schools I had the
opportunity to inflict upon here nowhere near as benign as mine had been, but
she was a personality type that would be *shredded* by the System. When we
moved the sofa to vacuum after her first few months traumatized in First
Grade, and saw the PILES of blonde, curly hair that she had twisted and
knotted and yanked out and tossed back there, in her post-traumatic,
after-school, stressed television viewing sessions, we internalized what we'd
already suspected: that School and Ellie were a deadly mix.
And, I'd not had my first child till I was 32, she was the light of our
lives, and I never had adjusted to the "notion" that ripping a 4 yr. old
child (she wasn't even 5 went I first, insanely, placed her on the bus for
the 40 minute ride to kindergarden!) away from her family to insure her
"socialization" was a Good Thing. I wanted her back. We brought her back.
And after that, I began reading and reading and researching and meeting other
homeschoolers and my list of justifications for homeschooling grew and
grew......
But that was the *initial*, deciding ephiphany. :-)
*** Becky***
"Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and
conscientious stupidity."
Martin Luther King Jr. (1929 - 1968), Strength to Love, 1963