-— The Unschooled kid doesn’t ever get tested and you can’t certify him to anything -—
Good heavens!
Have you ever read the bio of Ben Franklin?
I’d also recommend”The Underground History of American Education.” It’s available to read online for free.
Compulsory schooling has never been a benign institution. It has always been a humanist /progressive project.
Your army of ‘Ben Franklins’....look around. Do they exist in 2015? Your opportunity in life? Looking for a job with the fire department, the post office or police department? Forget it...either present the GED or HS diploma. Bank job? Nope. Want an apprentice-type field? They will want to see some GED or diploma...else they wake up on day one to realize you can only add/subtract...but can’t grasp division or multiplication.
The ‘Ben Franklin’ crowd? It was a fantastic group....they had private tutors that came through and introduced Jefferson, Washington, and Franklin to Latin, Roman history, and Socrates. Because of the typical small size of a couple of kids from the family....you could quickly run through a lesson, give some reading/home work assignment, and a 12-year old kid in 1750 might have been as bright as a 18-year old kid today.
“Unschooling”? Pause for a minute and review how this works. There’s no tutor, no class environment, no maps on the wall, no text-book, no curriculum, and absolutely nothing that the Ben Franklin kids would have had as assets in their learning process. Put Ben Franklin in a unschool environment, and he would have never gone onto his greatness.
I wouldn’t personally care about this whole episode, except I seem to suspect by age forty....these kids will start to show up at some welfare office and demonstrate they are capable of cutting firewood, flipping burgers, etc. They will be put on some form of welfare or government aid. It’s not their fault....it’s the parent’s responsibility but they are long-gone out of the picture. So I help to contribute tax revenue to pay for the parent’s mistakes.
And don’t talk up their positive life skills unschooling. The last time I looked....you need at least a ninth-grade reading ability to handle a tractor repair manual, and needed at least 8th grade math skills to function with most of life’s responsibilities. It might be helpful to know the Constitution but if you never got introduced to it....how would you know your rights?
Your army of ‘Ben Franklins’....look around. Do they exist in 2015? Your opportunity in life? Looking for a job with the fire department, the post office or police department? Forget it...either present the GED or HS diploma. Bank job? Nope. Want an apprentice-type field? They will want to see some GED or diploma...else they wake up on day one to realize you can only add/subtract...but can’t grasp division or multiplication.
The ‘Ben Franklin’ crowd? It was a fantastic group....they had private tutors that came through and introduced Jefferson, Washington, and Franklin to Latin, Roman history, and Socrates. Because of the typical small size of a couple of kids from the family....you could quickly run through a lesson, give some reading/home work assignment, and a 12-year old kid in 1750 might have been as bright as a 18-year old kid today.
“Unschooling”? Pause for a minute and review how this works. There’s no tutor, no class environment, no maps on the wall, no text-book, no curriculum, and absolutely nothing that the Ben Franklin kids would have had as assets in their learning process. Put Ben Franklin in a unschool environment, and he would have never gone onto his greatness.
I wouldn’t personally care about this whole episode, except I seem to suspect by age forty....these kids will start to show up at some welfare office and demonstrate they are capable of cutting firewood, flipping burgers, etc. They will be put on some form of welfare or government aid. It’s not their fault....it’s the parent’s responsibility but they are long-gone out of the picture. So I help to contribute tax revenue to pay for the parent’s mistakes.
And don’t talk up their positive life skills unschooling. The last time I looked....you need at least a ninth-grade reading ability to handle a tractor repair manual, and needed at least 8th grade math skills to function with most of life’s responsibilities. It might be helpful to know the Constitution but if you never got introduced to it....how would you know your rights?