Friends:
"Unschooling." Put that word into your vocabulary. It overlaps with the concept of "homeschooling," which tends to have an anti-government, individualistic, libertarian bent to it. I can see how this can be a class issue with families requiring sustained, inordinate resources and parental time, which are luxuries that most families do not have.
I think there are legitimate critiques of education, including many which I share. My concern is what is expressed by Indiana University professor of education Robert Kunzman as follows:
"Perhaps the biggest drawback of an unschooling education, according to Kunzman, is one that is less quantifiable via research. In a world that has become increasingly polarized, where there is far less focus on being civic-minded or community-minded and there has been increasing emphasis on the self, Kunzman is concerned that unschooling in a limited, siloed environment can further contribute to children growing up in an isolated bubble, without exposure to outside ideas or perspectives."
The anti-thesis of this kind of education for me is expansive, meaning interdisciplinary where young people of all ages can learn an array of topics across many fields where they can make connections across them. Children optimally develop the capacity to think analytically, evaluate and synthesize evidence, and become independent thinkers. Empathy and interpersonal skills, especially involving working in and with one's community, help prepare youth to first know and love themselves so that they can know and love others. This has never been more important in our increasingly connected and highly diverse world.
Fostering a sense of personal responsibility and being an active citizen to make the world a better place can't happen in a silo that diminishes not solely children's worlds but as a system, diminishes democracy to that which one can get out of it as opposed to what one can do to perfect the union.
-Angela Valenzuela
Unschooling Is the Parenting Trend
That’s Pissing Everyone Off
BY EJ DICKSON JUNE 24, 2024 | THE ROLLING STONE
“WE DON’T TEACH our children anything,” the spiritual influencer Mami Onami proclaims in a TikTok. “Anything that they learn is in response to either their interest or their questions.” She has near-translucent
“WE DON’T TEACH our children anything,” the spiritual influencer Mami Onami proclaims in a TikTok. “Anything that they learn is in response to either their interest or their questions.” She has near-translucent blue eyes and razor-sharp cheekbones, with tattoos snaking across her neck, arms, and taut abdominal muscles; one of them is the word “gentleness” on her forehead, in neat cursive. She then flips open to a page of her six-year-old son Rainer’s notebook, where he has scrawled the words “egg,” “lamp,” “jar,” and “lion.” “This is him doing it by himself,” she says, adding, “If you do not like this idea of sending your kids away for 40 hours a week, if you are not into your kids conforming, trust that you can follow their interests and they will learn everything they need to learn, not what other people need them to learn.”
There are 4,075 comments on the video, almost all of which are vitriolic. “You’re crippling your children,” one top comment sniffs. “It’s fine if you want to keep them ignorant forever….I personally want better for my kids.” Many call her “lazy,” accusing her of shirking her responsibilities in educating her children. Some of the most vicious comments are directed not at Onami, but at her son, mocking him for being developmentally “behind.”
Onami is no stranger to controversy: A spiritual influencer and teacher with more than 250,000 followers on TikTok, she has advocated for such practices as “free birth,” or pregnancy and labor without medical intervention, and drinking her own menstrual blood. But she says she was shocked by the venomous reaction. “I wasn’t expecting that video to blow up,” she tells Rolling Stone. “If I had, my hair wouldn’t have been looking like that.” She says she posted it because she was genuinely proud of her son’s achievements. She had been concerned about his prior lack of engagement in reading or writing, and she was thrilled to see him starting to express interest in words of his own volition.
