Bridget E Coffman

>I'm struggling right now with fine-tuning my philosophy of
>education. It would be tremendously helpful if anyone is willing to
>share why they believe unschooling is the best way to go. Why not
>the Charlotte Mason approach? Or the Moore Formula? Why do you
<believe what you believe?
>Thanks!
>Sheila

I personally believe this: Nobody's 'approach' is right for my family
except ours. We run pretty much as a democracy with a few exceptions.
This description is all general and subject to fluidity on any given day.
My personal input into the family is as organizer. I keep us all on
track and moving. The kids each have different jobs. Rachel is in
charge of outside stuff for the most part although some of the gardens
are mine. Jenni is in charge of books (becasue she has read them all)
and a lot of inside stuff. Wyndham is in charge of making Wyndham grow
up. When the girls were his age they went through similar albeit less
troublesome phases. We have a job list and some basic guidelines for
getting the housework done fairly. But none of that has anything to do
with 'education'. As for learning and schoolwork, our lifestyle is a
little less easy to explain. I do require that my girls be doing
something. I have some basic suggestions loosely attached to the
jobslist but they can and often do fly out the window. Rachel has a
violin she is learning to play and if she is doing that, I'm happy with
it. If she were vegging out and not doing ANYTHING for a prolonged
period of time, I would worry and check into her allergy and depression
levels. So the list and the requirement for 'something' is more a
medical watch thing than it is about school work.
But then the dynamics here are a bit odd too. Rachel and Wyndham (oldest
and youngest) have most of the medical problems and are most physically
active. The middle one, Jenni, often ends up holding things together and
helping me the most but for anyone looking in from the outside it appears
she is not doing much.
The so called basic school stuff, math, history, english, etc. are so
meshed into our lives that I can't even say this is what we do to teach
that. I just know that my uncle was astounded at Rachel's knowledge of
history and politics a week or so ago. I didn't 'teach' her that. She
just 'is' that.

So my best advice is to figure out what works for you. Don't try to
assign names to it (because someone somewhere will try to tell you that
that isn't what you are doing) and just do it and don't look back.

Bridget


~~~~~~~~~~~~ F u cn rd ths u cnt spl wrth a dm! ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

If electricity comes from electrons . . .
. . . does that mean that morality comes from morons?