I can speak to the pros and cons of homeschooling as a current unschooling dad.
Pros: You get to spend more time with your kid: For many homeschoolers, this is big. I enjoy spending time with my daughter. She enjoys spending time with me. The time we have together as parent and child is limited and the relationship we build now will last well into her adult years. Sending her to school would severely limit the potential of that relationship. You get to learn: What I mean by this is that the emphasis in homeschooling is about learning not preparing for exams and drilling. We spend time learning about various things. Learning is part of our life not separate from it as it is in school. You have flexibility: In school when it’s time for math you have to do the math. When it’s time for recess you do recess. If you want to do more math or more recess you don’t have that option. With homeschooling we do. If my daughter is learning about the presidents (as she is currently interested in doing) and we want to continue that we can. We can spend an entire day on this. So, the learning can be deeper and more engaging. You preserve curiosity: For many kids, schools have a way of killing curiosity by emphasizing drilling, testing, and the rigid demands of the school schedule. With homeschooling, it is much easier to preserve a child’s curiosity and give it room to grow. Cons: You are responsible for everything: Ultimately this is true of every family but you feel this more when homeschooling. As a family, we need to take steps to ensure that our daughter is getting a good education in all areas. We do this fairly well by being creative and not simply drilling subjects just because they “need to know them.” Socialization: This is often seen as a “con” of homeschooling but it is much easier to socialize with homeschooling than with public schooling. The reason I say this is because we are free to explore the many options for socializing in the real world as opposed to being forced to socialize in a school setting where kids are grouped in artificial ways: such as by age. You are paying for a resource you don’t use: All property owners pay taxes to support the public school. So, one of the downsides of homeschooling is that you are paying to support a school system that you are not using. For our family, these are not very major downsides and are easy enough to workaround. The benefits of homeschooling easily outweigh them. Like many families, we choose to homeschool to avoid the many more cons of public schooling which include: Cons: A seemingly relentless obsession with testing instead of learning. For many school districts, there is a perceived need to focus on testing as succeeding on high-stakes tests is necessary to get proper funding. But, it does have the effect of crowding out real learning and often kills off curiosity as well. Public schooling is coercive: With forced attendance, rigid scheduling forced exams, and homework much of schooling is based on coercion. That can’t be healthy for kids of almost any age. The underlying message which is also damaging is that we don’t trust kids to learn unless they are forced to do so. the presumption is that learning won’t occur naturally without such coercion. Artificial socialization: Think about how people socialize in the real world. They interact with others of different ages and backgrounds in different ways through, mostly, voluntary interactions. In schooling, socialization is often forced and is usually done by age. Sometimes this leads to the formation of lifelong friendships. Sometimes not. But, in any case, it misses many other real opportunities to socialize. Pros: I admit I am biased towards homeschooling. Even worse, I have a homeschooling bias towards unschooling! So, seeing the pros of public schooling is a little more difficult for me. And, I am saying this having been through public schooling myself. Perhaps that makes it even more difficult to see the pros. Even so, Easy access to a variety of activities: While homeschoolers can participate in sports, art, music, theater, and many other activities these are all easily available at many public schools. Of course, with problems in funding, many of these programs are becoming rare in public schools. Access to a variety of educators: Again, homeschoolers can gain access to many different teachers but in public schools, they are all there in one place. But, access to these educators is one thing, getting quality learning from them is quite another. It’s not the teacher's fault for this. In large part, they are mandated to do certain things in the classroom and many of these things (like preparing for high stakes testing) take time away from actual teaching. Freedom from the responsibility for their child’s learning: I don’t know how big a factor this is for parents but as I mentioned above I believe it is every parent’s responsibility to see to their child’s learning so this shouldn’t be seen as a benefit. In any case, it is risky to assume that simply sending your kids to public school will take care of their learning. Force rarely works to achieve goals and when it comes to raising children it would certainly not work well.
Your question seems to assume that if the parents weren't involved but the state would, there be no bias in raising children. But, why should that be? You would simply be substituting one set of biases (the parents) for a different set of biases (the states). And, the cost of this substitution would be quite high including a huge infringement of autonomy. Parents have biases and make mistakes in raising their children. But, with so many parents raising kids in so many ways the potential for large-scale harm is minimal compared to a system where there would be one ultimate authority for raising children. In such a case, if there were mistakes made (and there certainly would be) they would be duplicated on a massive scale. Yes, it is unfortunate that some parents teach kids that violence is an acceptable way to resolve their problems. Also unfortunate that some parents raise their kids to be racists and homophobes. But, at their worst, these cases are not systematic and duplicated on a wide scale. There are problems with liberty as the basis for social arrangements but the goods far outweigh the problems. As Friedrich Hayek once pointed out, to get the benefits of liberty we have to be prepared to pay some of the costs of people who will do things with their liberty we don’t like. The best we can do is to encourage the free and open exchange of useful information regarding parenting practices. What works and what doesn’t work are in many ways well understood. One of the principles that are well accepted among those who study child development is that force is not an effective way to raise kids or teach them or discipline them. Using force as a way to get parents to change their parenting practices would fly in the face of that principle. How would a child feel about numbers if they had never gone through formal kindergarten education?8/1/2022
My daughter has been unschooled and feels just fine about numbers. They are not something to struggle with or be frustrated with. We use them as tools and explore interesting things about them as we do with letters and other things we use and interact with.
We approach numbers as something that can be useful in many ways. We use them to tell time, to measure for making a recipe, for counting how many hangers we need after we do laundry. We play games and do activities with numbers and other mathematical things such as graphs, charts, rulers, protractors, and so on. I suspect that many kids come by their hatred of math and numbers because of formal schooling. Numbers are often forced on them without any useful context and they learn how to add, subtract, and multiply by drills and memorization instead of by seeing how they can be useful. So, they develop math anxiety or math phobia and this stays with them well into adulthood. In my college teaching experience, I often saw students struggling with math courses and expressing their long-held dislike of math. This hatred most likely did not come from being homeschooled or unschooled. No, it came from formal schooling often imposed too early on children before they are developmentally ready to engage in formal learning. It’s a shame because numbers are so interesting and such an integral part of the world around us. Kids miss out on so much by only seeing numbers as things to add, subtract, multiply, and divide. Instead, they could see them as useful tools that help them accomplish their goals and also as a beautiful language that helps us understand the world around us. Here’s a couple of tips that might help.
Think about a topic you’re already interested in and then try to find a connection to the topic you need to study. In looking for this connection you will be learning more about the subject but in a way that interests you since you’re looking for connections to something you already find interesting. Think about a question you want answered or a problem you’d like to solve. Make the time you spend studying a search for insights to help answer your question or solve the problem. This could be a question or problem in another subject or something outside of school entirely. In each case you are focusing on making connections to something you already have an interest in. So, the studying becomes a way to investigate something your interest. When I was in school taking classes another approach I used which was similar to the ones above was to always be on the lookout for ways I could use what I was learning. Sometimes these were not obvious but again if you are looking for a way to use what you are learning, you will be learning the material but in a more fun way. You certainly can get a home schooled college education. What you cannot get is an accredited degree. For the moment the only source of this credential is an accredited university or college. That may change in the future but for now it represents the major drawback to drying to do college at home.
The one exception to this point could be if you were wanting to receive a college education in a field such as nursing, medicine, or some other field which requires a certain amount of time in a specific setting that a college classroom offers. Beyond that negative factor the other major negative factor I think you would miss out on is the chance to do some professional networking with professors and other peers who could be professionals in your field. You might also consider a negative effect that you will miss out on some uniquely college related social activities. This would be true if you were interested in joining a fraternity or sorority. What is interesting though is that each of these negative effects can be overcome. You can get a college level education in most any liberal arts subject you can think of at home. You can still engage in professional networking. And, of course, you can still avail yourself of many opportunities to socialize. The idea that there might be alternatives to pursuing a conventional college degree is not new but it is still a relatively uncommon notion. However, it is growing in popularity due to one major negative effect that getting your college degree may entail: going deeply into debt. For that reason, many people are now considering other alternatives. For more on these you might find these books interesting: Hacking Your Education by Dale Stephens Better Than College by Blake Boles DUY U by Anya Kamenetz At the very least it could be comparable. But, potentially it could be much better.
Put yourself in the place of an interviewer for a job you want. The interviewer has a choice between two candidates. The first candidate has a conventional four-year degree in English or Communications or some other general education major. For the sake of this example, I should point out that this candidate's degree does qualify them for the job for which they are interviewing. The second candidate does not have a conventional degree. What this candidate has is a digital portfolio which outlines all of the learning activities they have engaged in for the past 5 years including such things as taking courses online from universities all over the country (a psychology course from Harvard, a biology course from Yale, communications from Duke, history from UCLA, and so on). To show mastery of the material in each of these courses the candidate has written several papers on various topics related to the course and many papers showing connections between several courses and the insights gained from them. This candidate also has links to various other online profiles including a LinkedIn profile with quite a few connections, endorsements, and recommendations. An active Twitter account with a decent number of followers and retweets. Several internships with companies in fields relevant to the job they are interviewing for now with recommendations from those in the company that the candidate worked with. Like many jobs that this second candidate has interviewed for, this one has a formal degree requirement but it is not a requirement that is inflexible. This second candidate was able to get an interview based on their portfolio and is in the running for the job. So, if you were the interviewer which candidate would you hire? At some point, shortly many employers are going to recognize that the second candidate is far superior in several areas. They have stronger motivation and passion for their learning as evidenced by the amount of effort and work they put in to craft a portfolio not simply earn a degree. At some point, employers are going to start asking the following question to those with a conventional degree: Is that all you did was attend classes and earn the degree? You could have taken courses from universities all over the country with the best scholars in their fields. Why didn’t you take advantage of all that available knowledge? The movement to do college like homeschooling is still relatively small, but it is growing. In the face of continued increases in tuition and the number of resources available online for free, I expect that this alternative approach to higher education will continue to grow. It will take a more highly motivated student to succeed in putting this kind of higher education together. They will need to draw in resources from a wide variety of sources including books, online courses, internships. They will also need to validate this learning in unique and varied ways such as blogging, posting articles on various websites, establishing a professional presence on LinkedIn, and using digital badges. But, for the student willing to do this, I think the payoff will be beneficial. If the competition is still “just earning a degree” it will be possible to outpace them and show potential employers that you provide a great deal of value. And, if the employer does require a college degree they may be willing to pay you to complete the degree. Not a bad deal! Here are some useful resources available for learning more about doing college as homeschooling: Hacking Your Education: Ditch the Lectures, Save Tens of Thousands, and Learn More than Your Peers Ever Will by Dale Stephens Better Than College: How to Build a Successful Life Without a Four-year Degree by Blake Boles DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education by Anya Kamenetz This is a nearly impossible question to answer in advance. Many will argue that anything irrelevant to you is not worth learning. But, how can you know what is or will be relevant to you without first learning about it?
Of course, you can’t learn everything there is to know but it is also not a good idea to rule out learning anything without first investigating it. You never know what might be useful and if you’re interested in improving your creativity and critical thinking skills, the more you learn, the more you will improve these skills. Let’s consider, as an example of learning, creativity. What is creativity? Can it be learned? How do creative people think? These are some of the questions that Jonah Lehrer looks at in his book Imagine: How Creativity Works. One insight I think is particularly important and provides a useful argument for the importance of learning as much as you can even if it seems irrelevant to your area of study or your current job. Creativity requires the mixing of ideas and to do this, you need to be exposed to many different ideas from many different areas of knowledge. There are countless examples of this process that could illustrate the point. One of the most famous is the example of Steve Jobs being inspired by a course in calligraphy he took. This led to the development of the many different fonts in one of the first Apple computers. In his book The Mind and the Brain, Jeffrey Schwartz writes about using the insights of Austrian economics combined with Buddhism to help develop a treatment for obsessive-compulsive disorder. In neither case would that knowledge seem to have been worth knowing. Not until an application presented itself. But, that application would not have presented itself if these subjects weren’t first learned. This is what Louis Pasteur meant when he said that “chance favors the prepared mind.” In Lehrer’s book, he describes a similar process of combining ideas. Dan Wieden, co-founder of the advertising agency Wieden+Kennedy came up with the “Just Do It” Nike slogan by thinking about a murderer named Gary Gilmore whose last words at his execution in 1977 were “Let’s do it.” He was originally prompted to think about Gilmore due to a discussion with one of his colleagues who happened to mention the writer Norman Mailer. As Wieden puts it “we were talking about Mailer, and I knew that he had written a book about Gary Gilmore. And that was it. That’s where the slogan came from. Just a little sentence from someone else. That’s all it takes.” The point is that’s all it takes if you have a sufficiently large store of ideas from which to draw and make connections. Where do these ideas come from? Well, one of the best ways to assemble this storehouse is to read widely, learn about different subjects, have a well-rounded general knowledge of the world, and remain curious. All of these are elements of a good education and are too often missing in what passes for education these days in most primary, secondary, and post-secondary schools. Much of education these days seems to be very focused on relevance. We are told that students want to learn what is relevant to them and will respond best when given relevant information. As educators, we are told that this is the reason why students do not read many books, certainly not the classics. They just aren’t relevant. But, what is the a priori relevance of calligraphy to developing a computer? What is the a priori relevance of Austrian economics to treatment for OCD? And, what is the a priori relevance of the murderer Gary Gilmore to coming up with an advertising slogan? Judged by our current standard none of these are relevant and would not merit knowing about. So, the question becomes: How much creativity are we depriving students of (and they are depriving of themselves) by only focusing on the relevant? In a world where there is a premium of creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving don’t we need to be teaching more irrelevant information than ever before? So, don’t rule out anything as “not worth learning” until you’ve learned a little about it. And, even then you won’t be dismissing it as “not worth learning” but simply as not worth learning more about at this time. Who knows when that might change? There are a lot of things that could be done to re-design and improve the education system:
The presumption of much of our current system is that without coercion students will not learn what they need to know. But, this is untrue. If students see the value of learning something, they will learn it. So, let’s make sure we are showing students the value of learning and let their intrinsic motivation to learn what is important to them take over. Let’s allow for more creativity and application in the classroom. Teach students to ask good questions, solve problems, and they will learn what they need to learn to provide the answers and solutions. There are always going to be variations and I think much of the problem with education in the U.S. is trying to create a one-size-fits-all “recipe” for a good school system. Instead, we need to consider the possibility that there may be different ways to educate students and these variations need to be encouraged and available. Some students will thrive in a highly structured environment such as most schools offer. Others need more autonomy. All of them need a system that preserves their curiosity and doesn’t beat it out of them with the obsession with high-stakes testing.
Many who look at the variation in schools systems across the U.S. conclude that a large driver of the differences is money. While this may be true, simply injecting more money into systems that don’t have as much will not solve much. Much of the success that happens in the schools is due to factors that are at work outside of the schools. I think some school systems are better than others because they have better parent support of the children’s learning, relatively more teacher autonomy, less emphasis on high stakes testing, and school culture which values learning for the sake of learning as well as for its practical value. What makes creating a recipe for a successful school system so difficult is that many of these factors cannot be mandated from above or legislated into existence. There must be a general culture in place of both adults and kids who value learning and are active in learning. This means that adults need to be role models for this. We can’t credibly argue that learning is important while we sit around all evening watching television. One thing that can be done to take direct action to improve school systems is to focus on teacher training. Currently, teacher education is not done very well, and in many universities, it is widely recognized that teacher’s colleges are the “academic slums” of the university (to use a term often used by the economist Thomas Sowell). There need to be high standards for entry into teacher’s colleges and high standards for graduation. Once teachers are graduated and employed, they need to be given sufficient autonomy to teach. In other words, we need to train teachers well and then trust them to do their job well without dictating from the above academic standards and curriculum specifics. Finally, teachers need to contribute to the cultural climate of learning in the schools and communities. My sister was a teacher for many years and one thing I noticed when she gathered with other teachers was how much they talked about problems with administration and how little they talked about their subject matter and learning. Unless that changes, there won’t be the necessary climate of learning that is needed for a school system to be successful. For me, the optimal definition of being educated is to be conversant in a wide range of topics. By conversant, I simply mean being able to talk intelligently about them. Among the topics that one should be conversant about as an adult I would include (in no particular order):
Art, literature, history, psychology, philosophy, politics, economics, biology, chemistry, astronomy, geography, physics, music, sociology, mathematics, religion, technology. Much of our schooling does not prepare students to be conversant about these topics. Rather, it prepares them to complete exams which themselves encourage short-term cramming to pass the exams and then purging your memory of useful information. Students need to be taught how to talk about these subjects in a way that shows they can make connections between them, apply them, use them for problem-solving, critically think about them, and realize that knowledge of them enriches their lives. How that definition can be operationalized for an educational system will depend on cultural factors but it should also be open to adopting different methods for different students. More and more we are coming to realize that one size fits all education models, especially those which emphasize testing and grading schools based on performance don’t work well. Integrating learning into a child’s life early on, preserving curiosity, and making learning dialogue and a cooperative effort seem to work much better. |