Education is a tricky topic. The American education system has many flaws, from failing to teach students topics like government functions to allowing bullying to occur. Some parents have had their kids learning at home since before COVID-19 sent all the “regular” students to join them. There are two main flavors of this – homeschooling and unschooling.
Homeschooling tends to involve a stronger curriculum, and can sometimes involve an online learning system like K-12. Unschooling involves no curriculum, instead letting children decide for themselves what to learn. There are a variety of reasons people decide to homeschool or unschool their children, be it religious reasons or special needs. My mother chose to unschool my brothers and I when we were younger in part because she believed it was better than having the school tell us what to think. (Ironically, this lasted until we started pushing back against her telling us what to think.)
I was unschooled from birth until sixth grade. We had no set curriculum; sometimes we would read out of a history textbook, sometimes we would read certain books from the library. We played a lot of educational video games, spent countless hours in the library and occasionally had research projects. Other than that, whatever we learned was entirely up to us. Imagine yourself at ten years old, sitting at home all day, with no obligations or homework or anything to do other than play Moshi Monsters for ages. What would you learn in that situation?
The benefits of this are arguable. On one hand, I started sixth grade with a college-grade reading level. On the other hand, several of my brothers write like kindergarteners despite being in their late teens. I didn’t learn how to consistently write in lowercase until seventh grade. I missed years of math basics that I had to catch up with later in life. If there’s something important you learned in elementary school, I completely missed out on it. I’m lucky I came out with a decently round understanding of the world, but I’m learning more every day.
This leads to an awkward situation when homeschooled or unschooled kids reach college age. While some homeschoolers have a strong enough curriculum that they can proceed directly to college, others struggle to meet GED requirements, limiting their options for their future. I have seen both cases happen.
The other major drawback of unschooling for me was social isolation. We had a small club of other homeschoolers, and we were all in several sports and clubs from early ages, but on a day-to-day basis we didn’t see kids we weren’t related to. While other kids our age were learning sharing and basic social development, my older brother was memorizing the God Mode cheat codes for DOOM.
I blame unschooling for having a large part in my current social awkwardness, and I have spent a lot of my life making up for lost time in learning to be “normal.” Having various undiagnosed neurodivergencies doesn’t help, but perhaps those issues would have been caught and addressed had I been in public school from the beginning.
While I find it hard to say unschooling was wholly negative for me, it definitely had major drawbacks and I cannot say it was truly worth it. Homeschooling in general is an extremely subjective method of learning that relies on having parents that are good teachers and children that want to learn what they need to learn to have a basic education. Unsurprisingly, a great number of parents and children do not fit these roles.
While there are many flaws with the current education system, I do not believe homeschooling or unschooling is a perfect, catch-all solution. At worst, it’s avoiding the issue of education all together – and setting kids up for failure in the long run.
Categories: Opinion
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