I'm not wishing ill on your children jf. I'm really not. I'm worried for them, but I don't want any harm to come to them.
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I'm not wishing ill on your children jf. I'm really not. I'm worried for them, but I don't want any harm to come to them.
Unschooling and some of it was comparisons between mainstream, homeschool and unschool. There is surprisingly little peer reviewed information around. I thought there would have been more. Most of it is from bloggers and webpages for unschooling which is hardly scientific ;):
And in reply to your other post (that was in reply to my post) is that the problem comes down to whether or not parents would be accepting of the fact that they weren't doing their job *properly* if they were getting a bit lazy because how would they know they were getting lazy in the first place? It's a bit arbitrary I suppose in that because unschooling is a complete lifestyle choice, if you had to make the decision to send them to school because you weren't cutting the mustard so to speak, it would essentially be an admission that you chose the wrong *lifestyle*, therefore some families would continue to do what they were doing, whether it was the best thing or not. which again comes back to not doing it for the right reasons in the first place too. But or all intents and purposes they would still call it unschooling because technically that's what it still is, it's just not being done right.
I've also been wondering too, what happens if the family unit breaks down and the parents separate? If this happens in mainstream education, at least the kids can keep going to school, but what happens in an unschooling, or even a homeschooling environment when that happens? especially if one parent stayed home and the other one worked? Would it still be a feasible option if you had to survive to do it on parenting payment? How does the parent with the kids get adequate support to run a household and continue to home/unschool the kids? What if one parent worked that was not the primary carer? Would they still support the choice to unschool if they had to take time off work to do it during visitation with the kids? How is it fair to the kids that they can't go on trips etc to follow their interests (and for some families this even means overseas trips) anymore when the family is separated? Would the other partner still be supportive of the educational choices made for the kids once their is animosity? Men who were seemingly supportive of home/unschool may not be once the relationship ends. There are so many questions from a feasibility point of view that would surely raise a lot of ethical/social conscience questions as well, like is it even fair on society to pay welfare to two parents if they both decided that once they separated they would go on benefits to keep unschooling their kids?
When was I asked about research to support my decisions, anyway? What research do you have? Apart from crunchy mumma bloggers, that is. Anyway, I doubt anyone has actually ever done any peer reviewed research on how much unschooling ****s kids up.:
Thanks. I hadn't looked into specifically unschooling research (only homeschooling in general). I suppose it's hard to do a study though, every family is so different.
That was pretty much what they were saying. You can't give standardised tests to these kids to prove effectiveness across mainstream and unschooling because it just wouldn't work and it just wasn't something that was researched very well. Makes me wonder though if it's something that can't be done because the unschoolers don't want to be proven wrong? Because what would anyone do if they did find out that it actually caused damage (I'm hypothesising here in a big way) and that they had screwed their kids up? No one wants to be told that, so it's probably best to avoid the risk of that ever happening by just not being studied in the first place? Dunno. It does make it hard for the unschooling movement to be authorative on how good it is when there is only anecdotal evidence that it works and it good for kids in the absence of any real studies though.
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Okay ladies. Enough is enough
Thankyou to those that made informed posts throughout this thread.