Homeschool Pass, Unschool Fail

[Guest Anonymous]

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/the ... le2160188/

In a Canadian study, kids aged 5 to 10 in structured homeschool curricula outperformed their public school counterparts. The unschooled kids fared poorly, some up to 4 grade levels behind.

[Kitty]

That's not surprising, really. Unschooling does have its merits, but it's not actual education and shouldn't be treated like it is. It's great before kindergarten, afterward it's a supplement to school.

[FlorenceHamilton]

That seems pretty intuitive. IMO, the argument for state supported quality public schools is that not every family can provide a consistent, high quality education for their children. Since the success of a society rests so heavily on a physically, emotionally and intellectually prepared next generation, it makes sense to devote public money for those kids who don't have the resources at home.

I am thinking seriously of offering to homeschool my grandchildren (when they come), at least for the early grades. I have no problem using public facilites, such as libraries, museums, hisorical sites and natural habitats. I also have no trouble with the idea of finding outside teachers for subjects that I feel my proficiancy lacks.

If for some realon, I am unable to fulfill that role, then I am happy to see them attend a high quality public or private school. I will only teach religion as a cultural and historical study. The parents job is to oversee any religious training.

Just my 2 cents.

[lilah]

Interesting stuff! Canada does a lot to support homeschoolers, parents can get financial support to buy supplies or learning materials but in return they have to check in with a teacher on a regular basis to talk about what their kids are learning. I do think homeschooling can work great for kids, most kids I've interacted with in public school thrive in a one on one or small group setting.

As for unschooling I'm not that surprised by this study. I lurk over at mothering.community and there are so many unschooling moms who basically let their kids play video games all day and claim it's educational. Or unschooling parents who start panicking becuase their kids can barely write or do math. Very rarely do you hear about unschooled kids who have received a quality education, and usually there's some huge gaps in their education. Of course some unschooling parents would argue that grade levels and ages of mastery are arbitrary but since education is all about scaffolding it really doesn't do a kid any favors when they are trying to play catch up because they didn't learn how to say read until they were ten. Some kids can catch up quicker than others.

[oscar]

Hmm. I have friends who unschool their kids, both of whom have dyslexia, ADHD, anxiety disorder and auditory processing problems. They receive some special education services, but no formally structured academic activities. The reason this family settled on unschooling is because their children were failing to make academic progress and were stressed and miserable all the time in more structured settings. My friend says it is an incredible amount of work to keep track of her children's evolving interests and enthusiasms, identify and provide resources to help them learn, and monitor their progress in the absence of straightforward metrics. Their kids are not only learning academic content, but also how to be self-motivated and compensate for their deficits. That said, neither of them would do well on a standardized test.

This is in stark contrast to a former roommate who was allowed to "homeschool" in high school, but spent all his time playing Animal Crossing and drawing anime catgirls because his parents never checked up on him. He was woefully unprepared for higher education or employment when he graduated.

I have another friend who homeschools some of her children, but sends others to public school for the special education services they receive in that setting.

It's not clear from this article whether the study controlled for learning differences among children who are homeschooled, unschooled or public-schooled. Only 74 children were included in the study, which seems like a fairly small sample size from which to draw robust and generalizable conclusions.

[maybeizfundie]

I think unschooling comes in a couple of different forms. For some particular families and particular children, done a particular way, it may be beneficial and sufficient.

But while I've observed in my own children the value of "child-led learning" (especially in the preschool years), I don't believe that type of learning is sufficient in and of itself, particlarly if they are going to live in Western culture and in this modern era. I do think that unfortunately some parents use unschooling as a way out of doing the work of leading their children's education.

[TVR]

Lilah, i should mention that some provinces (like AB, IIRC) give financial support to homeschooling families if they meet certain criteria like following the state curriculum (once again, IIRC). In Ontario homeschoolers don't receive any financial support and most of us prefer it that way :) :)

I have seen some unschooling families where unschooling works wonderfully because the parents are committed and they really encourage their children and facilitate learning. I have seen some other unschooling families where "unschooling" is a pretty term for academic neglect - keep in mind that I'm not anti-unschooling.

[AnnoDomini]

The idea of unschooling is wonderful and is most likely the perfect solution--for some kids and some parents. The parents have to be really, really careful. Too often, unschooling probably isn't carefully done. I know mine wasn't. I cried my way through Algebra 1 and the whole class hated me because I asked so many questions (I believe I would not have passed if I hadn't asked so many questions).

[slickcat79]

I think "unschooling" is a terrible term. I would have a hard time taking anyone seriously if they tell me they unschool. It doesn't necessarily mean that they're not providing a good education, it just sounds like speshul snowflake terminology to me.

[Witsec6]

It's not clear from this article whether the study controlled for learning differences among children who are homeschooled, unschooled or public-schooled. Only 74 children were included in the study, which seems like a fairly small sample size from which to draw robust and generalizable conclusions.

This.

[Kitty]

I like the idea of unschooling, but not as a primary education method. In order to function in Western society you have to have structured learning. I think homeschooling is wonderful in the early years, but the problem then is that the parent can only teach their kid so much and at some point will have to rely on tutors and possibly public or private schools. Unschooling is basically what happens before formal education starts- the child learns at his or her own pace. In a sense then, just about every parent unschools. Extra-curricular unschooling is excellent and will probably happen anyway.

[Kitty]

I think "unschooling" is a terrible term. I would have a hard time taking anyone seriously if they tell me they unschool. It doesn't necessarily mean that they're not providing a good education, it just sounds like speshul snowflake terminology to me.

^seconded. It also, to me, vaguely sounds like Newspeak, which is a bit ironic.

Also, upon further examination, the article doesn't state at all how structured the homeschooling was. I personally think there needs to be a happy medium between no structure (unschool) and too much (what I found in my public school experience, in the US). I think home-schoolers are much more likely to have found that happy medium.

Since this is a forum about fundies and I've been dying to say this: I think fundy parents expect too much of themselves in educating their kids. One hypothesis of mine about how low-quality a lot of fundy homeschooling curricula are is that those curricula are meant to be easier for the parent to teach. Fundies also assume that parents are automatically good teachers, and should do EVERYTHING for their kids. Because of this stupid doctrine of self-reliance to the point of isolation, the kids start off strong, surpass the parents, and are then stuck and do not have any other means to get a good education, so their education basically stops. Or, the parents deliberately take things slow, and it seems that not a lot of time is spent on education, but on other things like chores and Bible study.

[AnnoDomini]

Kitty, I'm a little confused. How can fundies expect too much of themselves yet pick the curriculum that's easiest for them to teach?

[clibbyjo]

My 15 year old unschooler has been working for hours everyday for the past 2 weeks on computer programming (HTML,VB Script,Java Script and Batch) He will be teaching these to the kids in our co-op who are interested. He is reading Steven Hawking's book A Brief History of Time and just finished Darwin for Beginners. (Both of which he chose to read) He is starting 2 MIT college level classes today . He volunteers 1 day a week at a hospital,he fences, he hangs out with friends,etc... Every CAT test he has taken has never scored below 96.

My 12 year old LOVES math and is in the middle of 7th grade math because she did it during the summer for fun.She brought me in the chart she made today to show me she has scored only 100%and a couple where she missed 1 problem. She also read Darwin for Beginners because her brother was and she wanted to finish it before him(they both finished it today). She is also writing a book about cats which has almost 300 pages.

My little one(age 9) read the Steven Hawking bio after his older brother, so he wanted Steven Hawking books too. Lucky SH and his daughter wrote some children's books and we got 2 of them from the library about adventures in space. That is how unschooling works.

[Rosa]

But while I've observed in my own children the value of "child-led learning" (especially in the preschool years), I don't believe that type of learning is sufficient in and of itself, particlarly if they are going to live in Western culture and in this modern era. I do think that unfortunately some parents use unschooling as a way out of doing the work of leading their children's education.

Homeschooling or unschooling are both a lot of work, and parents who throw up their hands and give up or go back to workbooks should just go all the way and send their kids to public school. Good unschooling is MORE work -watching what the kids are interested in and throwing solid resources their way at the right moments. It's not just throwing the kids off the boat and seeing if they swim.

The thing about that study, aside from sample size, is that there is no reason for unschooled kids to be "at grade level" at any point before about 16. It doens't really say anything about the quality of learning going on - Montessori schools and Waldorf schools have similar issues, if they're not teaching things in the timeline of traditional schooling, they often look behind in various ways at certain checkpoint ages, but by the end the kids should be caught up or ahead of their peers.

(and I say that as a person who thinks about 90% of the homeschoolers I've ever met are not having/going to have good results. Just because a significant portion of homeschoolers are motivated by something other than good educational outcomes doesn't mean you can't get good educational outcomes from homeschool or unschooling.)

[snarkykitty]

I have a relative who has dabbled in fundie-ism. A few years ago, she decided to homeschool her daughters. The older one was entering junior high and was having social problems because she didn't like that "all the girls talked about was boys and dating." She was very naive and sensitive. Then, because the older one was being homeschooled, the second one had to be, too.

The mother used to joke that she "only had to be one chapter ahead" of the kids (insert my freaking out face). She "did school" for only a couple of hours a day, with her then-infant climbing all over the table (as opposed to making the most out of naptime) and often ended up "cancelling" school for the day because she was tired or the baby wanted to play. The kids ended up watching television or going outside to play.

The kids returned to school the next year half a grade behind their peers, and had to take after-school classes, weekend tutoring, and summer school to catch up (or not be held back).

[oscar]

Kitty, I'm a little confused. How can fundies expect too much of themselves yet pick the curriculum that's easiest for them to teach?

My husband's aunt is homeschooling her youngest with a curriculum she chose mostly because she finds the lessons easy to teach and grade. I would consider this curriculum to be academically substandard. But she believes her son will develop better character and intellectual ability than his peers in public school, due to some magical property inherent in homeschooling. I'd say she's expecting too much of herself in the sense that she anticipates an outcome disproportionate to the ability and effort she's put into teaching her son.

It's interesting to hear all the Canadians weighing in on this study and providing perspective.

[clibbyjo]

Homeschooling or unschooling are both a lot of work, and parents who throw up their hands and give up or go back to workbooks should just go all the way and send their kids to public school. Good unschooling is MORE work -watching what the kids are interested in and throwing solid resources their way at the right moments. It's not just throwing the kids off the boat and seeing if they swim.

The thing about that study, aside from sample size, is that there is no reason for unschooled kids to be "at grade level" at any point before about 16. It doens't really say anything about the quality of learning going on - Montessori schools and Waldorf schools have similar issues, if they're not teaching things in the timeline of traditional schooling, they often look behind in various ways at certain checkpoint ages, but by the end the kids should be caught up or ahead of their peers.

(and I say that as a person who thinks about 90% of the homeschoolers I've ever met are not having/going to have good results. Just because a significant portion of homeschoolers are motivated by something other than good educational outcomes doesn't mean you can't get good educational outcomes from homeschool or unschooling.)

I would say 90% of those I have met ARE going to have good results. Of course, I am in a secular group so that is the difference. Of the 40+ families in my group, I would say most have at least 1 kid working several grades above level.(one of my sons best friends is 11 and doing Algebra 2 and also the MIT open course college classes my son is doing, he is a math and computer genius ) My daughter has a friend who also skipped 2 grades because she was bored in public school so her mom is homeschooling so she can work where she needs to be. Most of my friends are unschoolers or eclectic homeschoolers.

Our co-op started an Odyssey of the Mind program this year. I am curious to see how my older son's group is going to fair against the school kids which would be our first time competing in an intellectual way against "school" kids. It is made up of 7 kids: 3 are gifted,2 have aspergers(1 gifted) and the others are average intelligence and very creative(one is in pre college acting program at community college). The creativity and brains in this group is pretty awesome. They are probably building a robot with emotions.(not decided yet)

[Kitty]

Kitty, I'm a little confused. How can fundies expect too much of themselves yet pick the curriculum that's easiest for them to teach?

I think all fundy curricula are made for the parents rather than the kids. What I meant by fundies expecting too much of themselves is, they expect parents to be not only parents but educators and prison wardens as well. They do not consider that being a parent does not make you a good educator. Fundy homeschooling curricula all sound very watered-down, too. Because fundies believe education should be entirely up to the parents, a homeschool graduate would be a grade or two (or more!) behind a public high school graduate. So it's basically the kids learning everything that the parent knows, without tutors or online education, except for CollegePlus and whatnot. Between having to run a household/maximum security prison of eight to twelve children, school days are rather short, which only slow down the kids so they don't pass the parents too quickly. Public and private education are changing at a very rapid pace, so fundy homeschooling curricula are pretty much stagnant. for example, I went to public school and so did my dad. My dad didn't have to do much the stuff I did in high school, until he was in college. I probably should have worded it better, but considering how parent-centric fundy education is, it's all about what the parents know and can fairly easily teach or at least help with, because fundies rely on parents to do literally EVERYTHING.

There's a reason for the phrase, "it takes a village to raise a child." Quite frankly, the child is much better off in the village than stuck at home with Mom all day. Not saying that mothers can't be good teachers, but they'd learn so much more from the village that one person alone could not.

[Feberin]

My 15 year old unschooler has been working for hours everyday for the past 2 weeks on computer programming (HTML,VB Script,Java Script and Batch) He will be teaching these to the kids in our co-op who are interested. He is reading Steven Hawking's book A Brief History of Time and just finished Darwin for Beginners. (Both of which he chose to read) He is starting 2 MIT college level classes today . He volunteers 1 day a week at a hospital,he fences, he hangs out with friends,etc... Every CAT test he has taken has never scored below 96.

My 12 year old LOVES math and is in the middle of 7th grade math because she did it during the summer for fun.She brought me in the chart she made today to show me she has scored only 100%and a couple where she missed 1 problem. She also read Darwin for Beginners because her brother was and she wanted to finish it before him(they both finished it today). She is also writing a book about cats which has almost 300 pages.

My little one(age 9) read the Steven Hawking bio after his older brother, so he wanted Steven Hawking books too. Lucky SH and his daughter wrote some children's books and we got 2 of them from the library about adventures in space. That is how unschooling works.

I recently read an article about unschooling and the kids in it were much like yours doing lots of great things. But I have seen people who call what they're doing unschooling but the kids are doing nothing academic all day (like a previous poster mentioned just playing video games all day). I wonder if this study got a lot of them? I would think unschooling like any learning environment would be great for certain kids while failing others. But like all homeschooling the parents need to be involved and provide the experiences and resources or else it doesn't work just like a crappy teacher in a classroom.

[Koala]

My 15 year old unschooler has been working for hours everyday for the past 2 weeks on computer programming (HTML,VB Script,Java Script and Batch) He will be teaching these to the kids in our co-op who are interested. He is reading Steven Hawking's book A Brief History of Time and just finished Darwin for Beginners. (Both of which he chose to read) He is starting 2 MIT college level classes today . He volunteers 1 day a week at a hospital,he fences, he hangs out with friends,etc... Every CAT test he has taken has never scored below 96.

My 12 year old LOVES math and is in the middle of 7th grade math because she did it during the summer for fun.She brought me in the chart she made today to show me she has scored only 100%and a couple where she missed 1 problem. She also read Darwin for Beginners because her brother was and she wanted to finish it before him(they both finished it today). She is also writing a book about cats which has almost 300 pages.

My little one(age 9) read the Steven Hawking bio after his older brother, so he wanted Steven Hawking books too. Lucky SH and his daughter wrote some children's books and we got 2 of them from the library about adventures in space. That is how unschooling works.

Love reading about your homeschooling adventures. :)

[dirtyhippiegirl]

My 15 year old unschooler has been working for hours everyday for the past 2 weeks on computer programming (HTML,VB Script,Java Script and Batch) He will be teaching these to the kids in our co-op who are interested. He is reading Steven Hawking's book A Brief History of Time and just finished Darwin for Beginners. (Both of which he chose to read) He is starting 2 MIT college level classes today . He volunteers 1 day a week at a hospital,he fences, he hangs out with friends,etc... Every CAT test he has taken has never scored below 96.

My 12 year old LOVES math and is in the middle of 7th grade math because she did it during the summer for fun.She brought me in the chart she made today to show me she has scored only 100%and a couple where she missed 1 problem. She also read Darwin for Beginners because her brother was and she wanted to finish it before him(they both finished it today). She is also writing a book about cats which has almost 300 pages.

My little one(age 9) read the Steven Hawking bio after his older brother, so he wanted Steven Hawking books too. Lucky SH and his daughter wrote some children's books and we got 2 of them from the library about adventures in space. That is how unschooling works.

Just out of curiosity -- do you think your kids would be doing any of this if they were in public school? Just drawing from the experiences of myself and my husband, who are both certified nerds, your kids' unschooling sounds a lot like what we did in our spare time. (Or in my husband's case, sometimes to the determent of traditional classes that he found intolerably boring. And I was known to skip school to go flying...)

[treemom]

I would say 90% of those I have met ARE going to have good results. Of course, I am in a secular group so that is the difference. Of the 40+ families in my group, I would say most have at least 1 kid working several grades above level.(one of my sons best friends is 11 and doing Algebra 2 and also the MIT open course college classes my son is doing, he is a math and computer genius ) My daughter has a friend who also skipped 2 grades because she was bored in public school so her mom is homeschooling so she can work where she needs to be. Most of my friends are unschoolers or eclectic homeschoolers.

Our co-op started an Odyssey of the Mind program this year. I am curious to see how my older son's group is going to fair against the school kids which would be our first time competing in an intellectual way against "school" kids. It is made up of 7 kids: 3 are gifted,2 have aspergers(1 gifted) and the others are average intelligence and very creative(one is in pre college acting program at community college). The creativity and brains in this group is pretty awesome. They are probably building a robot with emotions.(not decided yet)

I am a proponent for educating you child in a way that works for them, so I am pro-all sorts of schooling and un. However I suspect you meet sucessful homeschooling families because you do things with your kids that helps make it successful.

I dont know enough, not even thru supposition to guess the percentage but I do think you are going to meet more successful kids!

[TVR]

Dirtyhippygirl, I started a reply earlier and then got sidetracked :)

We homeschool (not unschool) and my kids do a lot of similar stuff. Obviously not reading the same books, interested in the same subjects or doing the same activities, but similar stuff. Each child has their own interests and they pursue that.

Their friends who are homeschooled/attend public school/attend private school also have their own interests and pursue those in their own time. Some are big time into programming right now (as is my 13 year old); some attend extra classes (in person or on-line) for subjects that their schools don't offer, and most have interests and read loads of books on subjects not covered during their "normal" school hours. Also about 90% of them do volunteer work regularly. Some hold down a part-time job on weekends and during holidays.

I think it is a little easier for my kids because they DO have more free time, but I really don't see their non-homeschooled friends having no academic/sport interests outside of their learning in school.

[Kitty]

I know a woman who homeschools her kids. they're both like, 3 years ahead of their peers.

She knows people who unschool their kids, and those un-schoolers are not very good at what they're doing. She met a 13 year old who didn't know how to read. I'd say literacy is the basic foundation of education, which means this kid probably wasn't learning much at all.