Talk:Unschooling

"How to quit school and get a real life and education" - surely, come to Wikiversity.. ;-) Cormaggio 11:07, 9 September 2006 (UTC)

That quote (currently) continues:

"... The best ways to escape the worst aspects of public schooling, how you can and why you might want to."

I think that both of these sentences need to be more completely explained and justified. My jokey response above also needs to be critically examined - are we actually advocating giving up school? How exactly is school not relevant to "real life" and/or "education"? What are the "worst aspects of public schooling" - and how do we know? Is this only applicable to public schooling? And, regarding my comment, are we saying that Wikiversity will be of any more use to a person's education than school is?

I'm aware that the "why you might want to" is so far the only indication that this page will actually examine the issue rather than actively advocate giving up school. I don't think that this is something that we should be advocating - though perhaps this betrays something about my own conception of Wikiversity. I'd love to take this discussion forward if someone is interested... Cormaggio ^beep 14:02, 6 February 2007 (UTC)

The problem isn't exactly school itself, i.e, the existence of a centralized resource, but compulsory education, one-size-fits-all, and a lack of trust in children's ability to learn without being forced. I removed the "why you might want to" language because it was, indeed, not neutral. I am, however, very involved with the unschooling movement. From North Star for teens: "If school isn't working for you, forget school, get a life." North star does not promote the idea that school is wrong or bad. Many North Star kids go back to school for part or all of high school, but they go back, if they do, because they choose to be there, and they are then primed to gain maximum benefit. Key to the unschooling movement is the concept that children naturally learn, if they are not somehow damaged such that aversion to learning arises.

North Star was started by a teacher who realized that, enforcing the curriculum and the entire approach of the ordinary public school he was working in, he was harming his students. So he decided to do something to instead empower kids, and he's been brilliantly successful.

This discussion could be quite relevant to Wikiversity. There are approaches to Wikiversity that think of "educational resources" as fixed things, materials to be used in a classroom setting, perhaps, documents to be consumed, ideally well-cooked, with "authorized" content, i.e., vetted for conformance to some particular set of standards, usually highly conservative. There is another stream of thinking that became incorporated in Wikiversity, which is "learning by doing," where individuals learn by creating content here, through discussion and interaction.

The simple "educational resource" model did not allow, for example, that a 7-year old kid could create pages on Wikiversity with his own stories. It was considered vandalism. Yet all that was needed was to shift the context. He was welcomed and guided to create pages only in his own user space, and they were monitored to avoid child protection problems. So he was learning wikitext and creative writing, both educational. But he was not "creating educational materals," except for himself.

The Wikiversity vision described the creation of educational resources and learning-by-doing for all ages. The original proposals were naive and unclear about certain things. For example, there was discussion of how original research would be validated. In actual practice, what we have done with original research is to identify it as such, wherever there is some challenge or controversy, or, ideally, before that point. I don't see this in the proposals, but, in practice, again, Wikiversity is neutral through inclusion rather than exclusion. I.e., we do not exclude non-neutral material, but identify it and present it in a neutralizing context, as opinion, original research, essays, etc.

This, then, moves away from the standard educational model, where learning is through the study of officially approved documents and sources. Rather, learning becomes an exploratory activity.

That, then, leads to a problem. Resources exploded on Wikiversity, which had, for a time, a very much undisciplined and highly eclectic mainspace, with pages created spread out. So someone looking at a random page often saw something very undeveloped, even inappropriate, or so it might seem. Hence I've been promoting the organization of Wikiversity. This is nondeletionist, it's inclusionist, but then seeks to place resources where they fit into an overall hierarchy of learning, not as a fixed and immutable thing -- it is frequently not obvious where to place a resource, but to make the content approachable.

I have an unschooled daughter, she's almost thirteen. Because of state law, I am required to have an approved home schooling program, but, in fact, she is responsible for her own learning. It's become completely clear to me that she does a better job, making choices for herself, over nearly everything, not just about learning, than I do when I imagine that my task as her father is to control her. The superintendent of schools, who approves home schooling "educational plans," wants to see curriculum. So I design a curriculum, in consultation with Daughter, that frames what she already wants to do in terms of what she may gain from it of academic interest. She is interested in makeup, and makes her own makeup from basic materials, experimenting with many combinations. Do you know that you can make lipstick from nontoxic crayons? So: materials science, the use of lab equipment (scales and a hotplate), and, then, drama (she creates faces) and video production (she's working on youtube videos), and marketing and economics (she has to budget her funds, which she does spectacularly, she never runs out of money, though her income is fixed at this point, and will remain so until she is either working or regularly selling products). Math, of course, is part of that, she is constantly aware of cost per unit weight, prevailing prices for what interests her -- so she can grab bargains. She took a cosmetology workshop at the local vocational high school, and, of course she paid for it (plus the Department of Children and Families kicked in much of the fee), and she received a pile of makeup as part of it. We were discussing whether or not the workship was worth what it cost, so we looked at the value of the items. There was a color kit, and she looked at it and said, that she could get it on-line for about $10. I checked. $12.50 on ebay.

Now, "makeup." Is that important? Shouldn't she be learning about useful stuff like ... like what? She is becoming a young woman. How she looks, how she presents herself, could be crucial for the rest of her life, regardless of whatever judgments we might have. Right now, she wants to be a vlogger. I took her for a complete neurological exam, and in the evaluation session where we went over the result -- which included a complete evaluation of her educational achievement -- he asked her what she wanted to do when she grows up. She said "vlogger." He said, "No, I mean like, doctor, lawyer, that kind of thing." She was amused. I pointed out that vloggers can make a ton of money, if they are popular, and that she has what it takes to be popular. But ... isn't that "shallow"?

In other words, we have a whole complex of ideas about what is important, and we impose them on kids, instead of allowing them to find their own way in a shifting world. There is room for both, in fact, but children learn best from adults by example. My daughter asks me my opinion about things, but if I fall into lecturing her -- I can easily do that -- she says, "Dad, I'm not listening." Smart kid. And a joy to parent. As long as I don't get too attached to the idea that I know better than her. Sometimes I do, perhaps. So, then, how do I effectively present this to her? Turns out that forcing her to learn something backfires. What she learns from being forced is that she doesn't like it!

So, right now she is planning on going back to school for high school. She says, "If I don't like it, if I have something better to do, I can always leave it. If I go back to school in the 9th grade, it's automatic entry, I don't have to test in. (Like a lot of kids, she hates tests, though, in fact, her performance, overall, is high.) After the 9th grade, I'd be tested for placement. So that's a place to try school again."

Back to Wikiversity: we developed, over years, actual practice that is highly inclusive. However, we have never documented this, and so I see the Dutch Wikiversity project on Beta flopping around, having learned nothing from our experience, because we have never clearly documented it. We have never clearly developed learning materials around Wikiversity itself. Or have we? Were they developed and just not made obviously accessible? That, then, would be purely an organizational problem. --Abd (discuss • contribs) 13:58, 21 August 2014 (UTC)