This link has been bookmarked by 21 people . It was first bookmarked on 27 Apr 2009, by Lantis Gaius Capistrano.
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It is not up to teachers or school administrators to figure out what
you should be or do. It’s not up to the State, it’s
not up to your guidance counselors. It’s not up to your
parents. What you do with your life ought to be up to you. What you
learn ought to be up to you. How you navigate the world and
create your place in it ought to be your decision. Your life
belongs to you. School does its best to disabuse you of this
notion. Unschooling celebrates it. Unschooling puts the
responsibility for creating a satisfying life squarely where it
belongs: in the hands of the one living it. -
PS presents 50 reasons why schooling is, in every imaginable way, bad
for us and our society, and then 50 reasons why unschooling, which she
defines as "learning
without formal curriculum, timelines, grades or coercion; learning in
freedom" is the natural way
to learn. She argues that we are indoctrinated from the age of five to
cede our time, our freedoms, and what we pay attention to, to the will
of the State, so that we are 'prepared' for a work world of wage
slavery and obedience to authority. We are deliberately not taught
anything that would allow us to be self-sufficient in society. And in
the factory environment of the school, where teachers need to 'manage'
thirty students or more, ethics and the politics of power is left up,
from our earliest and most vulnerable years, to the bullies and other
young damaged psychopaths among our peers, to teach us in their
grotesquely warped way. As PS explains, it is in every way a prison
system. - 1 more annotations...
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Bill AndersonD Pollard describes his own experiences with independent study and also critiques the current (Canadian and US) public education system. It's worth reading all the comments. And while I agree that self-directed learning is the only kind that works, moving from the current system to an "un-system" will require effort and persistence. The thought scares me.
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Mario A NúñezPS presents 50 reasons why schooling is, in every imaginable way, bad for us and our society, and then 50 reasons why unschooling, which she defines as "learning without formal curriculum, timelines, grades or coercion; learning in freedom"
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Given the damage we've done to the world -- due in no small part to the
"education system" that has molded us -- damage that future generations
must reverse, it's the least we can do for them, and, at last, for
ourselves.
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The fact is that my peers had done
what no English teacher had been able to do -- inspire me to read and
write voraciously, and show me how my writing could be improved. -
Unschooling, by contrast, starts with the realization that you 'own'
your time, and have the opportunity and responsibility to use it in
ways that are meaningful and stimulating for you. When you have this
opportunity, you just naturally learn a great deal, about things you
care about, things that will inevitably be useful to you in making a
life and a living. Your learning environment is the whole world, and
you learn what and when you want, undirected by curricula, textbooks,
alarm clocks and school bells. You develop deep peer relationships
around areas of common interest, once you're allowed to explore and
discover what those areas of interest are. And the Internet and online
gaming allow you to make those relationships anywhere in the world, to
draw on the brightest experts on the planet, and to communicate
powerfully with like-minded, curious people of every age, culture and
ideology.
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The fact is that my peers had done
what no English teacher had been able to do -- inspire me to read and
write voraciously, and show me how my writing could be improved. My
writing, at best marginal six months earlier, was being published in
the school literary journal. On one occasion, a poem of mine I read
aloud in class (one of the few occasions I actually attended a class
that year) produced a spontaneous ovation from my classmates.
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Tim HartAn Unschooling Manifesto
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Tom KrieglsteinOne person's story of the failure of formal schooling and his success with independent studies. Very motivational, but need to read the book to get the full substance
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Tom Daccord"Then in Grade 12, something remarkable happened: My school decided to pilot a program called "independent study", that allowed any student maintaining at least an 80% average on term tests in any subject (that was an achievement in those days, when a C -- 60% -- really was the average grade given) to skip classes in that subject until/unless their grades fell below that threshold. There was a core group of 'brainy' students who enrolled immediately. Half of them were the usual boring group (the 'keeners') who did nothing but study to maintain high grades (usually at their parents' behest); but the other half were creative, curious, independent thinkers with a natural talent for learning. The chance to spend my days with this latter group, unrestricted by school walls and school schedules, was what I dreamed of, so I poured my energies into self-study."
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Tac Andersonto me this just shows that not everyone learns different. education should not be a one size fits all thing.
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