I've been browsing homeschooling / education articles on reddit so they're starting to show more frequently in my rankings.
There's an interesting discussion going at reddit in regards to a John Taylor Gatto article, "The Psycopathic School" from Dumbing Us Down. Interesting to me, anyways. The atmosphere is ripening for unschooling and homeschooling to make a huge difference. The smart are joining the conservative in recognizing that school is not "doing the right thing" by our kids.
What better way to raise a geek than to give your child the freedom to learn what they want, when they want?
There are a lot of people who "got their education" and are now just burning up their lives, hoping and waiting for retirement to come quicker. Is this the fulfillment of the promise of schooling? No, thanks, I'll take door number two.
If by unschooling my kids I let them taste freedom for a few years, and they end up serving burgers in a McDonald's somewhere, have I done worse than anyone who gives the system control of their child's mind? There are too few people in our generation who don't carry the taint of institutionalized thought. For me, homeschooling is NOT about making sure my kids believe what I want them to belive. It's more about making sure the state doesn't have the chance to tell them what they have to believe.
There is no standard body of knowledge anyone needs just to live. Sure there's things like hygine, anger management and basic morality (do unto others...) but if those aren't imparted in childhood, you've got more problems than what level of math they're at. Schools excercise their authority by making sure they determine what everyone--regardless of gender, class, race, religion, etc--needs to know, and then pushing all people through the steps of learning those things. I truly believe that if my child wants to be a carpenter, they don't need to have read "To Kill A Mockingbird". It's a good book, and I hope they'll want to read it, but they will not be less of a citizen because they haven't.
Once we can get over the belief that we can make a list of everything a person "needs to know" we can accept that maybe, just maybe, by giving our children the freedom to grow we'll give them more of what they need than any school.
UPDATE: Continued discussion
ntoshev: I think a not-for-profit community effort similar to Wikipedia has better odds to change things for good.
adbachman: Why do we need something similar to Wikipedia when we already have wikipedia?
All the info is there, searchable and accessible, for anyone who wants it. The change away from institutions is already happening in the way the web has opened communication between people who have information and people who want/need it.
ntoshev: While I like Wikipedia and I think it is already helpful, it follows the format of encyclopedia. A textbook is different in that it presents related concepts from a certain field in a linear way, ordered to be easy to understand without prior knowledge, and ensuring certain coverage of that field.
Maybe this can be achieved if Wikipedia is augmented with "learning guides".
right on, I was just having a conversation about this yesterday.
The big step from top-down education to bottom-up learning (learner directed) I think comes in the difference between curriculums and courses of study.
The way I define it, a curriculum says, "you must know these pieces of information and you must learn them in this order using this learning style". A course of study, on the other hand, says, "so you'd like to know about (c)? Well, to get there you should learn about (a) and (b)."
I also think of it like: a year in public school follows a curriculum, a jagged line tracing subject matter vs. time, whereas a "course of study" is an ideal college career in which I touch many subjects but on the way to something concrete. Many colleges though, have fallen back on curriculums and are now a list of check boxes that have to be filled in before receiving a diploma (see Teacher ed. for an extreme example).
"Learning guides" could turn wikipedia into an incredibly powerful tool for self-directed learning. A community dedicated to providing them wouldn't be too hard to create, either, most interesting careers have some form of guide floating around already. The hard work is distilling the guides and pruning the generalities. It doesn't have much of a buisness model, but does helping people really need a business model?
Thinking smaller, nobody can walk up to a school and say, "I want to be a biologist" and have someone lead them down the path to biology. Every step we take in learning, whether in school or on our own, is in chunks. That's what wikipedia (and the web in general) already does very well: provide the chunks and the connections between them. If my children want to become actors, I don't need to know every step they'll have to take right now, I just need to know that an actor has to be able to read, so we work on that. Maybe tomorrow we'll get to stage directions, but right now, where we go in the next five weeks isn't critical.
