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My feelings are that homeschooling (or unschooling) is just another choice--I
still have one kid in ps and she wouldn't have it any other way. She is very
active in extracirricular activities and an honor roll student. She's a
"social butterfly" and very well-liked--by people of every type. She has been
taught never to judge people by their looks, so she enjoys the company of
nearly every person she encounters. She has never been "damaged" by her
choice of education--she has thrived on it.
What a sad world this would be if our choices were taken away from us--even
those that are not appropriate for some of us. (including my son)

Nicki Clark

<<What a sad world this would be if our choices were taken away from
us--even
those that are not appropriate for some of us>>

Ok, but I still don't entirely understand this. I mean, school *is* an
environment lacking in choice. Someone else makes ALL your choices - what
you do, how you do it, when you do it, even what you eat sometimes, when you
go to the bathroom a lot of times, when you "get to" exercise, sing, do art.
I mean the lack of choices is horrifying! Your entire day is controlled for
you in almost every way. Except for the (20 minutes here) of recess twice a
day when you (hopefully) get to decided what you want to do and how to do
it, school is the place devoid of choice by it's vary nature.

I often wonder if adults who feel that they thrive on structure, that they
need a very segmented and structure day and life are those we just suffered
at the hands of the institutionalized educational system. Once they left and
had no one telling them what to do all day, they had no idea how to function
so had to create their own rigid structure.

What reminded me of this is that my son has always loved our carefree
lifestyle and now is suddenly "booooored" if there is not someone telling
him what to do all day. This is obviously a result of PS (even in daycare he
could create his own days). I've been trying to decide how to best de-school
him: whether to just go cold-turkey or to do some modified curriculum and
slowly decrease it until it's normal for him to conjure his own days. In the
end, I decided to just make a calendar for the summer (as much for his good
as mine - to try to keep up with the pre-registrations for different things
we'd all like to do) and let the kids fill it in. But now I wonder if that
was just supporting this theory that he's unnecessarily structured and rigid
and in need of being told what's next all the time and I wonder if I'm doing
him a disservice by inadvertently supporting that?

Nicki

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Although school is regimented, some schools are moving away from that. I
managed to have lots of choices in school because I would propose things and
pull them off (a friend and I designed a current-events class where the kids
did the presentations and the teacher was just kind of a class sponsor, and
we got history credit), and I took lots of music, which has its own kind of
structure-traditions (group music has to), but I was in there because I
really wanted to be and so the structure was of my own choosing.

I believe there are people whose joy and imagination are snuffed out by
school. Lots of people. I believe there are some who use school as a drab
background on which to play out their imaginations, and they use the extra
time the structure saddles them with to be creative in their heads, or on
paper.

I also believe that off all the people in the world there are more followers
than leaders, and there are more who need social attention than there are
loners. And so some seem to crave and appreciate school, or the military, or
jobs so structured there is NO question what to do or when or where--you go
to work and you follow the procedures and your work is inspected for you.
There are some brain-damaged druggies who prefer prison to being out and
trying to find a place to live and something to eat without the convenience
of robbing convenience stores.

It's sad to me, but it seems objectively and really true that some people are
followers and they really want to be told what to do and how. I'm sure that
was happening before schools were created.

We went to a historical museum the other day. It has existed here for over
20 years, but I had never gone. They're collecting and re-creating buildings
from around the state. I saw a museum in Salt Lake City which was similar,
and they had gathered buildings from around the valley. But theirs are of a
closer range of time, being all late 19th century. The one here ranged in
intent and such from early 17th century to the late 18th. They had brought a
schoolhouse from Raton (a couple of hundred miles away, from a town near the
border of SE Colorado, in post-railroad, coal-mining days.

Putting that school near the older buildings was a heck of an anachronism.
The way the inside was set up was 1915, 1920. But it didn't seem to matter.

Maybe I'm just too picky, but it seemed to me that the illusion was being
created (and certainly will be for young impressionable kids who aren't clear
about the difference between "built in 1880" and "built in 1710" or in "the
building up the hill was here when they were using wooden oxcarts" and "this
building was moved from a distant town that was railroad-based."

I haven't read the Josefina Montoya books, but I sincerely hope they don't
have her going to that one-room schoolhouse in the 1820's. If so, the
schoolbus might as will pick her up and take her down there, it will be so
thoroughly anachronistic.

For one thing, there's a picture of Abraham Lincoln on the wall! <g>

Sandra