You’ve hit on a good point. When is a kid going to suddenly “need” history? And it’s exactly my point. If a kid (or adult) doesn’t need history, then why should he have to learn it? History was my weak topic in school and I dreaded it. I memorized facts to pass tests. I’m fifty-three years old and have never “needed” history, but there have been certain aspects of history that have interested me, so I’ve found the information in books or online. I remember what I learned on my own, because I wanted to know it. I’m sure I was “taught” the same things as a child, but I wasn’t interested at that time, so I faked my way through the tests then let the information fly from my mind. I don’t feel that any level of breadth in education ~can~ be guaranteed. Making books about history available for your child can’t hurt. But forcing him to learn about history when he doesn’t care about history isn’t a productive use of your time or his.

You’re right. Someone is going to be working those jobs. But do you want it to be your child? It’s a sad fact, but there are parents who don’t seem to care about their children. Whether they’re schooled, homeschooled or unschooled, the parents are the key. When kids are allowed to pursue their passions, they don’t settle for these types of jobs. They go for what interests them.

And as you said, “some people are just dumb.” These are the people who will accept the slave wage jobs and spend their lives unfulfilled by their inner passions. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if each worker could believe in himself and find his niche, leave those jobs and once again furnish us with quality products? Btw, with the economic recession, there are skilled and intelligent people also needing and working in those jobs.

Not all children can be unschooled and learn to choose their own paths. But it’s not because of the children; it’s because of the parents.

The systems that are in place; the big money that controls the government and the sheep that follow along and mindlessly obey, are why the Walmarts of this world are getting away with it. By unschooling our children, we remove them from that system and give them the freedom to figure out what they really want to do instead of what they have to do to survive.

Pauline – I also get lots of happiness from doing for others, but it’s something I choose to do. That’s a lot different than working for minimum wage as a service provider because it’s your ~only~ choice.

Being a “people pleaser” isn’t always a good thing. Ask any therapist. Some people don’t know they can say “no.”

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My sister is more than 5 years older than I am, so she helped take care of me right from the start and remembers what I was like as a very young child. (She also taught me to read, when I was three, then to write, long before I started school, and taught me a lot of things later on years before they came up in school.) She tells me that I was a “people pleaser” right from the start. I never wanted to be in charge.

There were things I was happy to go off and do on my own. For instance, I started my own “business” painting and selling notepaper when I was in elementary school, when our father had to cut out our allowance after a bad car accident, and I wanted decided to find a way to make money on my own.

But I was also perfectly happy to do what other people directed me to do, and loved to be able to fulfill – and usually exceed – their expectations. I got – and still get – as much or more satisfaction from that as from working out difficult problems on my own.

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While I agree that the results of that study are sad, I also think you’re exaggerating them. Check out page xvi in the Executive Summary here:

http://nces.ed.gov/pubs93/93275.pdf

Adults in the lowest level ~could~ read, just not at a high level. There was also a high prevalence of extenuating circumstances for adults at that level:

* 25% of those at this level were immigrants who may still be learning English.
* 62% of those at this level terminated their education before completing high school.
* 33% were 65 or older.
* 26% had physical, mental or health conditions that kept them from fully participating in work, school, housework or other activities.

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Your description of unschooling seems to be “teach a child ‘how’ to learn, and let him naturally pursue things he’s interested in. Then, when he needs the other stuff, he’s equipped to learn it.”

My point is that some subjects don’t have the “utility” of something like Math. History, for example. Or literature. When is a kid going to suddenly “need” history? I’m all for freeing kids up to pursue their interests at a much deeper level, but I feel like you need to “guarantee” some level of breadth in education.

When it comes to my employment situation you’re right. If I had no skills and wasn’t particularly intelligent, I’d probably be working in one of those jobs. When you tout unschooling as a means of people escaping these jobs, though, I think you’re ignoring some facts. Namely, those jobs aren’t just going to vanish overnight. So someone is going to be in those positions. It’s naturally going to be the least skilled, least intelligent, least motivated, etc. segment of the population. That, or people who are in the process of obtaining skills but just haven’t acquired them yet, e.g. a high school student working as a checkout boy at a supermarket.

The other fact is that not everyone is as intelligent as everyone else. Some people are just dumb. That doesn’t make them worth any less as human beings, but it means there are some skills that are probably out of reach for them, and it means there will be limits on their employment opportunities.

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The census of 1820 revealed a total american population of around 9.5 million. A million were slaves. By 1820 five million copies of Noah Webster’s Speller had sold, no color by number, fill in the blanks, Dick and Jane work that. Consider that almost everyone was married and had more than two children. A family only needed one book for all of them to read it. There were more of Webster’s Spellers than families in the American nation. The Census of 1820 did not record literacy and we had, as you pointed out, by 1840 doubtlessly improved.

It gets better.

By 1820 five million of James Fenimore Cooper’s novels had sold. Those were exceedingly complex works of art that only today’s best readers could penetrate. Again there were more of them in print than there were families. If we allow exxageration of these numbers (possible but not certain) we are still faced with the conclusion that America, with no compulsion from the State, taught herself to read.

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1) Forty two million Americans over the age of sixteen cannot read or write. Some of this group can write their names on social security cards and fill in height, weight, and birth spaces on applications.

2) Fifty million can recognize printed words on a fourth and fifth grade level. They cannot write simple messages or letters.

3) Fifty five to sixty million are limited to Junior high level reading. A majority of this group could not calculate the price per ounce of a 20 ounce jar of peanut butter costing $1.99 when told they could round the answer off to a whole number.

4) Thirty million Americans with ninth and tenth grade reading ablities (and all previous groups) cannot understand a simplified explanation of jury selection proceedures.

5) 3.5% of the 26,000 person sample showed literary skills necessary for traditional college study. This group stood at thirty percent in 1940 and stands at thirty percent in other devoloped countries today.

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I understand your concern because I have heard it expressed hundreds of times. The way it works in unschooling, is that the child pursues whatever interest he/she has. While pursuing something he really wants to learn, he learns how to learn. Let’s say the student has no interest in math and spends all of his time developing his language skills. He’s passionate about it and absorbing everything he can on the topic because he finds it interesting. When the time comes that he needs math, he will have the ability to grasp knowledge and use it as it applies to his life. I’m sure it’s difficult to believe, but I’ve seen it repeatedly. My daughter detested anything to do with math. She never memorized her multiplication tables. Yet, when she decided she wanted a degree in sociology, she knew she’d need college algebra (and chemistry, history, geography, etc). The sociology degree was important to her, so she learned the unrelated topics that were required. She aced them all. She’s now a statistician and thinks statistics courses are fun! When something is important to us, we do what we need to do to get it. Kids who are allowed the freedom to learn what they choose, end up with a life-enhancing skill of grasping whatever they need to learn.

Good for you not doing whatever your boss tells you to do. But what if you were without the skills that you obviously possess? Let’s say you were one of the unfortunate kids in school that got labeled stupid (with name-calling or grades or whatever) and you had no marketable skills? No self confidence? What if your boss was the department manager in Walmart and following his orders was the only way you could keep your job? (I don’t mean to keep picking on Walmart, but they’re the most obvious). If you left that job, your next job will pretty much be more of the same. There are hundreds of thousands of people in that situation. Most, if not all of them would not be stuck in those jobs if they had been able to pursue their passions all of their lives. Talk to just about any of them and you’ll find a hidden dream that will go unfulfilled because of fear of failure. Talk to them a little more and they’ll tell you that the school system let them down; left them clueless as to what they wanted to do in life – much less how to pursue that dream.

I communicated poorly if I gave the impression that I look down on the people that work those jobs. I look down on the jobs, not the people. I look down on the system that forces people to accept the limitations of those jobs. I’ve become friends with way too many people working in those situations to believe that they see what they do as having the “ability to work under authority”. They are angry, exhausted, deflated and humiliated…but they have to work. I’ve been one of them myself.

Having said that, we all answer to someone else in our work. Even the store owner has to answer to the customers. As a publisher, I have to answer to the authors, the printers, even the bar code manufacturer. But it’s a position I have chosen – therein lies the difference.

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNsN9ysq7wQ

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Christians must obey anyone in authority over them unless they are being told to sin, in which case they must “obey God rather than man”.

Being entrepreneurial is different than questioning authority at all levels.

One of my most important jobs as a parent is to teach my children to obey me. As they mature, my prayer is that they will choose to obey God, as well.

That does NOT mean that they should obey robotically. I want them to think critically, but I don’t want that to lead to insubordination or an uncooperative spirit.

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