THANK YOU, Joylyn, and other business
[email protected]
In a message dated 12/23/03 11:04:53 PM, joylyn@... writes:
<< You really wouldn't want them to sugar
coat the answer just to not offend insecure people? >>
Clearly she did, and after a little flurry of insults on the side, she has
left the list.
But Joylyn, what you wrote was beautiful and calm, and just as you were once
an undecided lurker, there are dozens to hundreds who will read your words and
see the peace and confidence you exude when you're talking about loving
children.
There are trade-offs in life, and there are trade-offs in deciding how to
keep an e-mail list peaceful. There's more learning for some people when it's
heated up. Some people fritz out when there's disagreement and they shut down
(for reasons of personal history or their own stress-responses). So if the
list is too peaceful it's boring, and if it's too confrontational some people
complain of too much mail.
We have several moderators, and some will let messages through that others
would have rejected and vice versa. That's fine with the list owners. A couple
of people have complained and said all the moderators must agree, or they've
said "Oh HUH" to one moderator because another allowed something the first one
wouldn't have. We don't have to agree. We just all need to care about
keeping the list useful for a large number of people. We can't have a list that
every person loves equally, because different people want different things.
One person who left expressed disappointment because we were talking about
parenting instead of about homeschooling resources.
The best UNschooling resource any family can have involves good parenting.
So I'm not apologetic to people who say "I came here to be told I was a good
mom, not to be criticized." As Joylyn wrote:
<<[I]t would be very
silly for me to say "good job for sending your son to his room" when I
don't feel that way. >>
I can't say "good job" to moms who want us to tell them that punishing their
bad kids is a good idea, but to suggest that they might be a factor in that
behavior or unhappiness is a STUPID idea, and we're just mean to suggest that
they look at themselves.
La Leche League with all their radical attachment parenting ideas probably
gave me the main kernel of what became unschooling for me. They said "You and
your baby are partners."
When a parent and a child are adversaries, whether about nursing, what to
wear, when to sleep, what to eat, how to play, what to think, up and through
"school years" and young adulthood, we end up seeing all the problems in some of
the worst families where parents try to control the children to become some
vision of an idea child of thirty years before. Instead of living on the
cutting edge of now, they try to rein their kids in so that they specifically do NOT
live now, they live in a past fashion for a fantasy future.
That will be "affirmed" by many non-thinking people, agencies, businesses,
magazine covers, back-to-school ads, etc. That will not, though, lead to
unschooling.
Sandra
<< You really wouldn't want them to sugar
coat the answer just to not offend insecure people? >>
Clearly she did, and after a little flurry of insults on the side, she has
left the list.
But Joylyn, what you wrote was beautiful and calm, and just as you were once
an undecided lurker, there are dozens to hundreds who will read your words and
see the peace and confidence you exude when you're talking about loving
children.
There are trade-offs in life, and there are trade-offs in deciding how to
keep an e-mail list peaceful. There's more learning for some people when it's
heated up. Some people fritz out when there's disagreement and they shut down
(for reasons of personal history or their own stress-responses). So if the
list is too peaceful it's boring, and if it's too confrontational some people
complain of too much mail.
We have several moderators, and some will let messages through that others
would have rejected and vice versa. That's fine with the list owners. A couple
of people have complained and said all the moderators must agree, or they've
said "Oh HUH" to one moderator because another allowed something the first one
wouldn't have. We don't have to agree. We just all need to care about
keeping the list useful for a large number of people. We can't have a list that
every person loves equally, because different people want different things.
One person who left expressed disappointment because we were talking about
parenting instead of about homeschooling resources.
The best UNschooling resource any family can have involves good parenting.
So I'm not apologetic to people who say "I came here to be told I was a good
mom, not to be criticized." As Joylyn wrote:
<<[I]t would be very
silly for me to say "good job for sending your son to his room" when I
don't feel that way. >>
I can't say "good job" to moms who want us to tell them that punishing their
bad kids is a good idea, but to suggest that they might be a factor in that
behavior or unhappiness is a STUPID idea, and we're just mean to suggest that
they look at themselves.
La Leche League with all their radical attachment parenting ideas probably
gave me the main kernel of what became unschooling for me. They said "You and
your baby are partners."
When a parent and a child are adversaries, whether about nursing, what to
wear, when to sleep, what to eat, how to play, what to think, up and through
"school years" and young adulthood, we end up seeing all the problems in some of
the worst families where parents try to control the children to become some
vision of an idea child of thirty years before. Instead of living on the
cutting edge of now, they try to rein their kids in so that they specifically do NOT
live now, they live in a past fashion for a fantasy future.
That will be "affirmed" by many non-thinking people, agencies, businesses,
magazine covers, back-to-school ads, etc. That will not, though, lead to
unschooling.
Sandra