You know I'm a fan of your project, but I think there are several nuances missing here. The first is that there is no singular "education." No matter how many attempts have been made to standardize K-12, kids get very different experiences depending on the wealth of their school districts, the size of their communities, and even just individual decisions that teachers make. It's kind of like Ron Bieber's meaningless statement that Berkeley should be able to explain why it costs $X more than Cal Davis, even though there is wide variability in quality within both schools.
I wonder if there is a "both and" option here rather than an either/or. I know you have personal reasons for your choice. But my three kids all love public school, as I did. They have the benefit of having lived in two college towns with a very buoyant peer group. Maybe they could be progressing faster in some areas with customized learning, but they already do some of that with podcasts and independent reading, not to mention casual conversations with me (a PhD). I am aware that my attitude would be very different if we lived in my hometown, where resources are considerably diminished and the peer group largely doesn't aspire to go to college. And special needs complicate the picture, too.
But do we know how Fermi achieved his mastery of physics? Presumably there was a lot of rote learning involved in the early stages, before he could improvise as he did. I'm mindful of how these repetitive forms of learning are baked into even ancient traditions, like martial arts, where the student often performs tasks that seem mundane and meaningless until their teacher's method one day comes plain. See "The Taste of Banzo's Sword," for instance, or the cheesier (but still true to form) version in "The Karate Kid."
Thank you Josh for starting a very powerful discussion.
To your first point, I was recently reading "The Smartest Kids In the World: And how they got that way." I haven't fully digested it yet, but she made an observation that really struck me. In the US, we focus on factors like wealth disparity, home situation, etc. and talk about it a lot as driving disparity in outcomes. In other countries she studied (Finland, South Korea, Poland), no one talks about such factors. They expect children to be in school to learn, and they've set up their systems to support that expectation. And in those countries, such disparities don't account for differences in educational outcomes (as measured by acceptance to college, exit exam scores, etc.). I thought it was really interesting and is making me question some assumptions about what drives different experiences. And I didn't mean to imply we should have 1 specific K-12 education, but I think the resources available, though they have differences, all seem to set up one single K-12 education. I've tried a number of different curricula, but they all kind of rest on similar assumptions that follow common core standards. Trying to do something wildly different isn't really supported or even talked about. Which is kind of my rant.
I'm sure there is a "both and" option here. I suspect your kids are outside of the norm of public schools. I remember being bored in school, and couldn't wait to graduate. I thought college might be better, but it largely wasn't for me. I strongly believe in creating intellectual milieus for learning and love of the world. It sounds like maybe your children are getting that in public schools. Mine certainly aren't/weren't. Even in private schools, and in one case in a classical school that professes to be designed for intellectual development and excellence. And then there is a whole relationship aspect in schools that I always felt lacking. But those are almost all lessons I've had to learn the hard way over this last year. Which is to say, some of my rant was simply that I wish I had known different and I wish it were easier to find others who hold the same goals I do for my kids' education.
Regarding Fermi, I think there was a lot of rote learning (said another way, learning by heart), even in the later stages. He had to have memorized the energy stored in an atom before he could ever do those estimations. If I said that I think all memorization is a waste of time, I sorely mistyped (I did write this in a bit of a flash). I work with my kids to memorize songs, facts, vocabulary, and even equations. But what I'm finding really hard is figuring out how to build the world around those. I wish we didn't believe memorizing was enough, or that by memorizing we would suddenly make a leap to true understanding/knowing. I wish that's what more people talked about and explore. I believe there is SO MUCH value in memorizing things by heart, so that we have access to them later. I almost think we're aligned on this point, which makes me think I need to go back and revisit what I wrote and make sure I didn't misspeak. Or expand in the next exploration.
I appreciate your engagement. It makes me a stronger thinker and learner. And as such, hopefully a stronger coach/teacher for my children.
I agree with a lot of what you're saying about standardized curriculum. This culture of "alignment" and the assessments that go with it is part of what drove me out of higher ed.
However, the curriculum is just one piece of the puzzle. European countries show different outcomes, in part, because there are different social safety nets built into them and the cost of college is not prohibitive. The cultural attitude toward education is also far less anti-intellectual in Europe. This is part of what I mean about peer group. I had an excellent education in a town of <1000 largely because I happened to grow up during an economically buoyant time, when a large silver mine employed a lot of high-end professionals whose children were my classmates. Take the same curriculum, plop it in that same school now, and the outcomes would be vastly different. This goes to the relationship aspect you describe. I'm sure there are toxic school environments in wealthy communities, too. But the overall vibe of a place, whether people feel you can go anywhere from there or that you're stuck in a backwater, dramatically affects how even a standardized curriculum gets taught. In some schools, behavioral issues are all a teacher can manage, and students basically sleep all day.
I think when you have that trust between a teacher and student and enough prevailing belief in the educational enterprise for a teacher's expectations to hold, then repetitive learning can bear fruit. You don't learn to write beautiful sentences, except by writing and rewriting hundreds of them. But just as with parenting, if a child stops believing in the teacher or questions authority rebelliously enough, then the whole apprenticeship falls apart. Banzo can't work his magic without respect.
It's funny to me how much sharing a ranty, unpolished, thinking in public piece has helped me think more clearly through the comments. I really appreciate that.
I think we're all at risk of overgeneralizing from our own experience, so I'll go ahead and do it anyways. 🤣. One of the aspects of home education that I am finding really challenging is actually creating the peer group aspect, which is cultural attitude, relationships, values, and even to some extent goals. I haven't found that culture here in my hometown (even though it is arguably very affluent). I'm actively working hard to build it for my family, even as it's geographically dispersed. But I also wish there were more people here, as physical contact and physical friends do so much for both of us. I've noticed a change in my own attitude as I've been homeschooling: I kind of think it's insane that we don't do more to create active intellectual and spiritual cultures for our children. Instead, we accept what comes to the school. I think religious schools used to have a leg up in this respect, but I'm not so sure if that's true anymore. I am still trying to figure out if creating that aspirational, intellectual culture will be able to overcome the local vibe in the long run. And of course, I only have my children, so the sample size is too small to generalize anyways.
It's always a struggle to me to read research that says parents actually matter far less than we think we do in the outcomes of our children and then to try so hard to set a culture of intellectual exploration, educational value, etc. To some extent though, I'm hoping that my apprenticeship building our airplane will help insulate that. Give him a job he's excited about and hopefully it keeps him motivated form more jobs.
I was thinking last night that there's no "professional development" for home educators like me. And I wish there was. Not to focus on Piaget's development (I have my doubts anyways), but to focus on building and maintaining that relationship, on creating the environment and culture to invite genuinely deep learning, and to have the confidence to guide your child towards mastery (and who knows, maybe yourself).
I think there will be tradeoffs in every educational model. Many very smart people were either self-taught or tutored at home by a parent. There are also advantages to having many teachers rather than just one, so if you’re able to create some collaborations, that will likely help. I can imagine the challenges of creating a cohort — that, too, can have tradeoffs.
I was thinking of you yesterday while listening to this report. It’s a good reminder to find ways of releasing some of your own pressure. It’s not going to be perfect. It’s not always going to be amazing. Showing up consistently is the best you can do, and creating some release valves is important for long-term endurance.
I love the call out here to embrace and encourage intellectual risks in others. It seems like what we call "instinct" in many cases is actually a highly intelligent form of sub-calculation we do in the basement of our thinking that has real genius to it if we don't demand a 20-hour powerpoint from our own brain in order to prove that the information is trustworthy. And it seems like kids already have a relationship to and trust in that. If we can only stop from breeding it out of them!
Do you think wisdom can be taught or one has to come into it with age? I say this as someone who went through the soviet education system for the bulk of my schooling. There was NO stepping out of line there, no variations, no homeschooling, no wisdom learning from your elders there. There was a lot of repetitive learning of a very particular way. And it's interesting to watch my own brain now, my own experience of what I've gained since then, and what I choose to gain on a daily basis.
AND I say this as someone who pulled my kid out of regular school and am, in many ways, making up his education as I go along, too. Suddenly becoming his teacher during covid showed me where the regular school was and will keep failing him, so we made radical changes. But I cannot help but worry, because to play an instrument, you have to practice the boring stuff, again and again, even when it seems stupid, even when you don't want to. Until the technique becomes so second nature that you can put your attention on the art.
How does one combine the 'do this until it becomes habit so you can THEN focus on other stuff' with 'let's learn what you want to learn and encourage you to be a better human'?
(and if you ever decide to do various zooms with likeminded 'how the hell do we educate our kids' parents, I'm sooooo in!)
So many great questions in this comment. The short and long of it is "I don't know"
On the point of the Soviet education system, have you read (https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-math-from-three-to-seven-by)? I found the idea that so much success comes from interesting people having a culture of being curious about things to be really appealing. I want to figure out how to start a math circle as part of my kids' future, but I'm also VERY intimidated by it.
I am thinking through how to get the repetitive processes down pat with my children, how to teach them the value of hard work and imprinting a movement or a technique so deep in their psyche that it happens pre-thought, while not killing their joy of learning. I don't really know how to do it yet. If you've got advice for what has worked for you, please share. Or even what hasn't worked, as those are valuable too.
To the Zoom calls, that's a great idea. I'll figure it out
I just read that linked article. It's interesting, though it fundamentally gets soviet life wrong -- which is, admittedly, something plenty of Westerners do, basing *that* life on the values and morals of *this* one.
I don't think I yet have the words to fully describe Just How oppressive soviet life was. Sure, we found moments of happiness amongst all the shit, but shit it was. The math circles were not how they seem in that review. They weren't a bunch of interested kiddos gathered with their peers and possibly a knowledgeable adult. They were more akin to 'omigod, at two years old you're really flexible, so off to do gymnastics for 8 hours a day you go, the goal now is Olympic gold before the age of 14'. Which, we can agree, is the opposite of 'encouraging curiosity'.
For me and everyone around me, it was instilled from well before elementary school that higher education was THE only way to go. It was THE only way one was considered educated -- and, therefore, of the higher class. Because it was only on paper that USSR was a classless society, the reality was much different -- villagers and peasants were not even eligible for documents and status until well into the late 60s-early 70s. So if you found something, anything remotely academic that you were marginally good at, you HAD to develop those skills or become a lesser-class citizen.
This is why I struggle with this for my kid's education. I see the value of 'boring' repetitive stuff to learn the basics. I still know how to play violin, a decade after I last picked it up, because from the age of 5 to 13, I practiced daily, despite my wants. But I also do not want to do any hard work that goes into actually learning a piece, because from the age of 5 to 13, I practiced daily, with no autonomy of quitting.
So yeah...
Current thing that works for my kid? Duolingo. He does NOT want to break the streak, so he's learning German and math via that app. Gameificiation of learning is our current thing... :-)
'It was the intellectual version of taking a massive risk."
I love what you are doing in this exploration, Latham, and I'm coming back to this essay for a deeper read a few hours from now, allowing the concepts to marinate in my brain while I Thanksgiving-shop.
Yes. Education is out-dated. Or rather, I think we should return to an older style of education, where it was about exploration rather than parchment paper degrees and no wisdom.
I believe this nextGen will be the Explorer Generation, so the skill set they need is not perfectly calculated paths forward but a huge helping of Risk. And critical thinking. And community building and communication. And ... all the heirloom skills I talk about having been passed down through the generations that got us to here. To me, these are the Latin and Greek of skills development. As you say, the future of our kids is at stake.
I realize looking back that line wasn't really clear or necessarily indicative of my thinking.
What I was trying to get at is that following most curriculums feels a lot like giving up my own agency. When I was following textbooks regularly, I became good at teaching the material in front of me, but I never really learned how to create a plan that flowed with my child's interests. I never truly understood how he was learning, only what I was teaching.
What I was also trying to say is that many of the parents I've met who tell me they unschool haven't taken action to support and even improve their child's development. There is a strong "children know best and I don't want to interfere" vibe. But also I am realizing how small my sample size was to generalize.
What I really was frustrated about is that much of the literature seems stuck between "follow our expert advice" and "just get out of the way." And I don't feel like I learn more or grow from either of those viewpoints.
Thank you for pointing out some sloppy thinking. I'm grateful, especially as the point of this post was kind of to think in public.
I struggle with this balance, and end up leaning too far in the unschooling angle I think.
Its easy, as my elders is a natural intellectual, and will read and inquire by himself. My hunch is that my other kids will both need and appreciate more guidance.
I'm always conflicted about the me in the curriculum too. Sometimes I fear that I am educating my own strengths, but that means I'm also giving my children my weaknesses too.
It's funny, when I saw your original question, my first reaction was to say "I know you say you're an unschooler, but from what I've seen I don't think the label fits." I held back because I thought it was more valuable to dissect my own thinking.
I'm learning that being conflicted seems to be the only universal truth in homeschooling. Maybe in parenting in general. But I also wonder how much of that is because we don't explicitly have a theory of what will make the outcome we desire. I'm realizing that I have disagreements with what the mass school system views as the end goal of education (okay, I always knew it but never really articulated it as it was more of a gut feeling), but I haven't explicitly thought through why I disagree and what my own goals of education (what does an educated person look like in my view). Without doing that, it's probably pretty hard to figure out if I'm doing the right things for my kid. I might have to write more about this one.
"what does an educated person look like in my view"
this sounds to me like the wrong question. I know it's strange, but I think education should be very careful not to be self-referential. The question should be more like "what does the perfect human look like?" or it's variants. (Human excellence and the like).
And part of the problem is that without enough constraints this questions becomes shallow. a perfect prophet is not the same as a perfect engineer, is not the same as the perfect explorer, etc. And that's only one layer of identity. One must also be a perfect son/daughter, brother/sister, and so on. And nationality. And religion. And more.
Without that northstar (which the Western world, and perhaps the whole modern world is struggling to identify) we are left with meta-tools.
"The question should be more like "what does the perfect human look like?" or it's variants. (Human excellence and the like)." I wonder if you could tell me more. I'm not sure I understand the difference.
I would think the answers would have similar veins, maybe on different levels of understanding though. For instance, if I think about what the aims of education might be (I'm spitballing here because I haven't yet written about this), it would like be to cultivate the capacities for human excellence in a specific set of potentials that I (and hopefully the culture I am a part of) value. It is almost increasing optionality towards the pursuit of human excellence. Then I think when you impose those constraints, you have made a choice and eliminated optionality. But hopefully because you have become an educated person, you're prepared to chase excellence in your constrained identity.
I do think the question of how to become excellent in the various layers of our identity is interesting. I don't know if that can ever be separate from our ideals of education or of human excellence. But I'd be curious if you've thought much about it.
You know I'm a fan of your project, but I think there are several nuances missing here. The first is that there is no singular "education." No matter how many attempts have been made to standardize K-12, kids get very different experiences depending on the wealth of their school districts, the size of their communities, and even just individual decisions that teachers make. It's kind of like Ron Bieber's meaningless statement that Berkeley should be able to explain why it costs $X more than Cal Davis, even though there is wide variability in quality within both schools.
I wonder if there is a "both and" option here rather than an either/or. I know you have personal reasons for your choice. But my three kids all love public school, as I did. They have the benefit of having lived in two college towns with a very buoyant peer group. Maybe they could be progressing faster in some areas with customized learning, but they already do some of that with podcasts and independent reading, not to mention casual conversations with me (a PhD). I am aware that my attitude would be very different if we lived in my hometown, where resources are considerably diminished and the peer group largely doesn't aspire to go to college. And special needs complicate the picture, too.
But do we know how Fermi achieved his mastery of physics? Presumably there was a lot of rote learning involved in the early stages, before he could improvise as he did. I'm mindful of how these repetitive forms of learning are baked into even ancient traditions, like martial arts, where the student often performs tasks that seem mundane and meaningless until their teacher's method one day comes plain. See "The Taste of Banzo's Sword," for instance, or the cheesier (but still true to form) version in "The Karate Kid."
https://ashidakim.com/zenkoans/91thetasteofbanzossword.html
I don't mean to be difficult, but part of learning is point/counterpoint. Curious about your thoughts.
Thank you Josh for starting a very powerful discussion.
To your first point, I was recently reading "The Smartest Kids In the World: And how they got that way." I haven't fully digested it yet, but she made an observation that really struck me. In the US, we focus on factors like wealth disparity, home situation, etc. and talk about it a lot as driving disparity in outcomes. In other countries she studied (Finland, South Korea, Poland), no one talks about such factors. They expect children to be in school to learn, and they've set up their systems to support that expectation. And in those countries, such disparities don't account for differences in educational outcomes (as measured by acceptance to college, exit exam scores, etc.). I thought it was really interesting and is making me question some assumptions about what drives different experiences. And I didn't mean to imply we should have 1 specific K-12 education, but I think the resources available, though they have differences, all seem to set up one single K-12 education. I've tried a number of different curricula, but they all kind of rest on similar assumptions that follow common core standards. Trying to do something wildly different isn't really supported or even talked about. Which is kind of my rant.
I'm sure there is a "both and" option here. I suspect your kids are outside of the norm of public schools. I remember being bored in school, and couldn't wait to graduate. I thought college might be better, but it largely wasn't for me. I strongly believe in creating intellectual milieus for learning and love of the world. It sounds like maybe your children are getting that in public schools. Mine certainly aren't/weren't. Even in private schools, and in one case in a classical school that professes to be designed for intellectual development and excellence. And then there is a whole relationship aspect in schools that I always felt lacking. But those are almost all lessons I've had to learn the hard way over this last year. Which is to say, some of my rant was simply that I wish I had known different and I wish it were easier to find others who hold the same goals I do for my kids' education.
Regarding Fermi, I think there was a lot of rote learning (said another way, learning by heart), even in the later stages. He had to have memorized the energy stored in an atom before he could ever do those estimations. If I said that I think all memorization is a waste of time, I sorely mistyped (I did write this in a bit of a flash). I work with my kids to memorize songs, facts, vocabulary, and even equations. But what I'm finding really hard is figuring out how to build the world around those. I wish we didn't believe memorizing was enough, or that by memorizing we would suddenly make a leap to true understanding/knowing. I wish that's what more people talked about and explore. I believe there is SO MUCH value in memorizing things by heart, so that we have access to them later. I almost think we're aligned on this point, which makes me think I need to go back and revisit what I wrote and make sure I didn't misspeak. Or expand in the next exploration.
I appreciate your engagement. It makes me a stronger thinker and learner. And as such, hopefully a stronger coach/teacher for my children.
I agree with a lot of what you're saying about standardized curriculum. This culture of "alignment" and the assessments that go with it is part of what drove me out of higher ed.
However, the curriculum is just one piece of the puzzle. European countries show different outcomes, in part, because there are different social safety nets built into them and the cost of college is not prohibitive. The cultural attitude toward education is also far less anti-intellectual in Europe. This is part of what I mean about peer group. I had an excellent education in a town of <1000 largely because I happened to grow up during an economically buoyant time, when a large silver mine employed a lot of high-end professionals whose children were my classmates. Take the same curriculum, plop it in that same school now, and the outcomes would be vastly different. This goes to the relationship aspect you describe. I'm sure there are toxic school environments in wealthy communities, too. But the overall vibe of a place, whether people feel you can go anywhere from there or that you're stuck in a backwater, dramatically affects how even a standardized curriculum gets taught. In some schools, behavioral issues are all a teacher can manage, and students basically sleep all day.
I think when you have that trust between a teacher and student and enough prevailing belief in the educational enterprise for a teacher's expectations to hold, then repetitive learning can bear fruit. You don't learn to write beautiful sentences, except by writing and rewriting hundreds of them. But just as with parenting, if a child stops believing in the teacher or questions authority rebelliously enough, then the whole apprenticeship falls apart. Banzo can't work his magic without respect.
It's funny to me how much sharing a ranty, unpolished, thinking in public piece has helped me think more clearly through the comments. I really appreciate that.
I think we're all at risk of overgeneralizing from our own experience, so I'll go ahead and do it anyways. 🤣. One of the aspects of home education that I am finding really challenging is actually creating the peer group aspect, which is cultural attitude, relationships, values, and even to some extent goals. I haven't found that culture here in my hometown (even though it is arguably very affluent). I'm actively working hard to build it for my family, even as it's geographically dispersed. But I also wish there were more people here, as physical contact and physical friends do so much for both of us. I've noticed a change in my own attitude as I've been homeschooling: I kind of think it's insane that we don't do more to create active intellectual and spiritual cultures for our children. Instead, we accept what comes to the school. I think religious schools used to have a leg up in this respect, but I'm not so sure if that's true anymore. I am still trying to figure out if creating that aspirational, intellectual culture will be able to overcome the local vibe in the long run. And of course, I only have my children, so the sample size is too small to generalize anyways.
It's always a struggle to me to read research that says parents actually matter far less than we think we do in the outcomes of our children and then to try so hard to set a culture of intellectual exploration, educational value, etc. To some extent though, I'm hoping that my apprenticeship building our airplane will help insulate that. Give him a job he's excited about and hopefully it keeps him motivated form more jobs.
I was thinking last night that there's no "professional development" for home educators like me. And I wish there was. Not to focus on Piaget's development (I have my doubts anyways), but to focus on building and maintaining that relationship, on creating the environment and culture to invite genuinely deep learning, and to have the confidence to guide your child towards mastery (and who knows, maybe yourself).
I think there will be tradeoffs in every educational model. Many very smart people were either self-taught or tutored at home by a parent. There are also advantages to having many teachers rather than just one, so if you’re able to create some collaborations, that will likely help. I can imagine the challenges of creating a cohort — that, too, can have tradeoffs.
I was thinking of you yesterday while listening to this report. It’s a good reminder to find ways of releasing some of your own pressure. It’s not going to be perfect. It’s not always going to be amazing. Showing up consistently is the best you can do, and creating some release valves is important for long-term endurance.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/09/podcasts/the-daily/parenting-stress.html
I love the call out here to embrace and encourage intellectual risks in others. It seems like what we call "instinct" in many cases is actually a highly intelligent form of sub-calculation we do in the basement of our thinking that has real genius to it if we don't demand a 20-hour powerpoint from our own brain in order to prove that the information is trustworthy. And it seems like kids already have a relationship to and trust in that. If we can only stop from breeding it out of them!
Thanks for pointing that out Rick. It's a great point, and something I need to think more about.
I don’t have the answers but what little I know is that when you build confidence in a child you open the world to them.
Seems like you’re on the right track.
Thank you Paul. I'm trying.
Do you think wisdom can be taught or one has to come into it with age? I say this as someone who went through the soviet education system for the bulk of my schooling. There was NO stepping out of line there, no variations, no homeschooling, no wisdom learning from your elders there. There was a lot of repetitive learning of a very particular way. And it's interesting to watch my own brain now, my own experience of what I've gained since then, and what I choose to gain on a daily basis.
AND I say this as someone who pulled my kid out of regular school and am, in many ways, making up his education as I go along, too. Suddenly becoming his teacher during covid showed me where the regular school was and will keep failing him, so we made radical changes. But I cannot help but worry, because to play an instrument, you have to practice the boring stuff, again and again, even when it seems stupid, even when you don't want to. Until the technique becomes so second nature that you can put your attention on the art.
How does one combine the 'do this until it becomes habit so you can THEN focus on other stuff' with 'let's learn what you want to learn and encourage you to be a better human'?
(and if you ever decide to do various zooms with likeminded 'how the hell do we educate our kids' parents, I'm sooooo in!)
So many great questions in this comment. The short and long of it is "I don't know"
On the point of the Soviet education system, have you read (https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-math-from-three-to-seven-by)? I found the idea that so much success comes from interesting people having a culture of being curious about things to be really appealing. I want to figure out how to start a math circle as part of my kids' future, but I'm also VERY intimidated by it.
I am thinking through how to get the repetitive processes down pat with my children, how to teach them the value of hard work and imprinting a movement or a technique so deep in their psyche that it happens pre-thought, while not killing their joy of learning. I don't really know how to do it yet. If you've got advice for what has worked for you, please share. Or even what hasn't worked, as those are valuable too.
To the Zoom calls, that's a great idea. I'll figure it out
I just read that linked article. It's interesting, though it fundamentally gets soviet life wrong -- which is, admittedly, something plenty of Westerners do, basing *that* life on the values and morals of *this* one.
I don't think I yet have the words to fully describe Just How oppressive soviet life was. Sure, we found moments of happiness amongst all the shit, but shit it was. The math circles were not how they seem in that review. They weren't a bunch of interested kiddos gathered with their peers and possibly a knowledgeable adult. They were more akin to 'omigod, at two years old you're really flexible, so off to do gymnastics for 8 hours a day you go, the goal now is Olympic gold before the age of 14'. Which, we can agree, is the opposite of 'encouraging curiosity'.
For me and everyone around me, it was instilled from well before elementary school that higher education was THE only way to go. It was THE only way one was considered educated -- and, therefore, of the higher class. Because it was only on paper that USSR was a classless society, the reality was much different -- villagers and peasants were not even eligible for documents and status until well into the late 60s-early 70s. So if you found something, anything remotely academic that you were marginally good at, you HAD to develop those skills or become a lesser-class citizen.
This is why I struggle with this for my kid's education. I see the value of 'boring' repetitive stuff to learn the basics. I still know how to play violin, a decade after I last picked it up, because from the age of 5 to 13, I practiced daily, despite my wants. But I also do not want to do any hard work that goes into actually learning a piece, because from the age of 5 to 13, I practiced daily, with no autonomy of quitting.
So yeah...
Current thing that works for my kid? Duolingo. He does NOT want to break the streak, so he's learning German and math via that app. Gameificiation of learning is our current thing... :-)
Your “crazy ass endeavor” is how the world is changed for the better.
'It was the intellectual version of taking a massive risk."
I love what you are doing in this exploration, Latham, and I'm coming back to this essay for a deeper read a few hours from now, allowing the concepts to marinate in my brain while I Thanksgiving-shop.
Yes. Education is out-dated. Or rather, I think we should return to an older style of education, where it was about exploration rather than parchment paper degrees and no wisdom.
I believe this nextGen will be the Explorer Generation, so the skill set they need is not perfectly calculated paths forward but a huge helping of Risk. And critical thinking. And community building and communication. And ... all the heirloom skills I talk about having been passed down through the generations that got us to here. To me, these are the Latin and Greek of skills development. As you say, the future of our kids is at stake.
I love the idea of the Explorer Generation. What kid doesn't dream of being an explorer anyways?
I don't understand this line: Both extremes of the spectrum have removed the most important element. ME.
can you expand?
I realize looking back that line wasn't really clear or necessarily indicative of my thinking.
What I was trying to get at is that following most curriculums feels a lot like giving up my own agency. When I was following textbooks regularly, I became good at teaching the material in front of me, but I never really learned how to create a plan that flowed with my child's interests. I never truly understood how he was learning, only what I was teaching.
What I was also trying to say is that many of the parents I've met who tell me they unschool haven't taken action to support and even improve their child's development. There is a strong "children know best and I don't want to interfere" vibe. But also I am realizing how small my sample size was to generalize.
What I really was frustrated about is that much of the literature seems stuck between "follow our expert advice" and "just get out of the way." And I don't feel like I learn more or grow from either of those viewpoints.
Thank you for pointing out some sloppy thinking. I'm grateful, especially as the point of this post was kind of to think in public.
I struggle with this balance, and end up leaning too far in the unschooling angle I think.
Its easy, as my elders is a natural intellectual, and will read and inquire by himself. My hunch is that my other kids will both need and appreciate more guidance.
I'm always conflicted about the me in the curriculum too. Sometimes I fear that I am educating my own strengths, but that means I'm also giving my children my weaknesses too.
It's funny, when I saw your original question, my first reaction was to say "I know you say you're an unschooler, but from what I've seen I don't think the label fits." I held back because I thought it was more valuable to dissect my own thinking.
I'm learning that being conflicted seems to be the only universal truth in homeschooling. Maybe in parenting in general. But I also wonder how much of that is because we don't explicitly have a theory of what will make the outcome we desire. I'm realizing that I have disagreements with what the mass school system views as the end goal of education (okay, I always knew it but never really articulated it as it was more of a gut feeling), but I haven't explicitly thought through why I disagree and what my own goals of education (what does an educated person look like in my view). Without doing that, it's probably pretty hard to figure out if I'm doing the right things for my kid. I might have to write more about this one.
"what does an educated person look like in my view"
this sounds to me like the wrong question. I know it's strange, but I think education should be very careful not to be self-referential. The question should be more like "what does the perfect human look like?" or it's variants. (Human excellence and the like).
And part of the problem is that without enough constraints this questions becomes shallow. a perfect prophet is not the same as a perfect engineer, is not the same as the perfect explorer, etc. And that's only one layer of identity. One must also be a perfect son/daughter, brother/sister, and so on. And nationality. And religion. And more.
Without that northstar (which the Western world, and perhaps the whole modern world is struggling to identify) we are left with meta-tools.
End of rant, which is half-coherent.
"The question should be more like "what does the perfect human look like?" or it's variants. (Human excellence and the like)." I wonder if you could tell me more. I'm not sure I understand the difference.
I would think the answers would have similar veins, maybe on different levels of understanding though. For instance, if I think about what the aims of education might be (I'm spitballing here because I haven't yet written about this), it would like be to cultivate the capacities for human excellence in a specific set of potentials that I (and hopefully the culture I am a part of) value. It is almost increasing optionality towards the pursuit of human excellence. Then I think when you impose those constraints, you have made a choice and eliminated optionality. But hopefully because you have become an educated person, you're prepared to chase excellence in your constrained identity.
I do think the question of how to become excellent in the various layers of our identity is interesting. I don't know if that can ever be separate from our ideals of education or of human excellence. But I'd be curious if you've thought much about it.