Life Is. | A Look Into the World of Unschooling
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Channel: YAT Studios
Views: 48,136
Rating: 4.9056144 out of 5
Keywords: unschooling, documentary, homeschooling, education, I don't want to go to school, what is unschooling, what is homeschooling, does homeschooling work, does unschooling work, should I send my kid to school, should I homeschool my kid, should I unschool my kid, home education
Id: gR_Tf56w9Wg
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 47min 21sec (2841 seconds)
Published: Tue Jan 08 2019
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We all knew that kid whose mom would let them do anything, they were fun to hang out with but you knew in the back of your mind it wasn't a recipe for success.
I babysat for a family that Unschooled, and it was very unsuccessful. They ended up giving up, and putting their 7 year old into public school kinder, without being able to read or write. But he was great at LEGO!
My take away with this is that unschooling works well with parents that are, themselves, involved, well regulated, understand the value of learning, understand overcoming personal challenges, and know how to build structure to achieve goals. I imagine these parents do unschooling and make unschooling look like a silver bullet.
I generally abstained from school and had a really unstructured childhood. My parents have ambition, and an unending interest to learn and solve interesting problems. That, through example, drove me to learn on my own really well. But I didn’t have the structure to accomplish the things I wanted in life. I didn’t get that structure until far later in life as I developed it on my own. So I can relate to your sentiment that some structure would have been nice so you could be given some tried and true tools, instead of having to build them all yourself.
Definitely enjoyed the documentary. I had no idea that unschooling existed so this was extremely interesting to watch. I’m sure this will spark a lot of debate with people that are unfamiliar with unschooling.
I worked at a pre-school chain that wasn't exactly this, but there are some similarities.
We weren't allowed to put kids in time out. We weren't allowed to say no to children. We weren't allowed to restrict them to a specific area or activity, e.g. sitting on the group rug for a story time, effectively allowing children to ignore directions with abandon.
A lot of it was framed as giving the kids "choices". Instead of disciplining kids we were supposed to "re-direct" them to something else. If they're throwing Legos, suggest they go read a book or something like that.
It was complete garbage. None of the teachers really believed in the bullshit we were being fed from the corporate office. I was probably the most obvious teacher that completely disregarded these restrictions and just taught my class the way I thought best. Sometimes I'd get reprimanded, but overall, my classes were the best behaved compared to other teachers who tried to adhere more closely to the "guidelines".
I thought this was a really interesting and well-made documentary- you've clearly got a lot of talent for shaping a story. Out of interest, why haven't you gone to college? It sounds like you'd like to but haven't been able to.
I really enjoyed watching this. I thought it was personal and maybe a bit more believable because of your interview mixed in. I felt like you made an effort to present everything in an at least somewhat objective manner - both positives and negatives, highlighting when your experience might not be reflective of the majority. I appreciated that. Overall really well done. By the way, the line where you said you wouldn't change the past because it was part of who you were really resonated with me because that's how I feel about hypotheticals like time travel!
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Years ago I knew a kid who I think was unschooled or something like it. On face level there was nothing wrong with it but there were so many very basic topics that he knew nothing about or had a completely wrong perception over.
I really liked the documentary, unschooling is something I didn't even know existed and I think you do a good job explaining what it is and how it works. I found it interesting.
Public schooling, in terms of learning, is an easy target. It takes the bulk of kids together, and then has to teach all of them. This means that the pace of learning is set by the lowest performers. This is mitigated some when they start to break classes out into 'advanced' and such.
So getting better results than regular public schooling is a simple thing really. So it's kind of a wild frontier out there in terms of parents and groups coming up with 'better alternatives'. Almost all of them can hold up their kid's academic skills and say 'better than public schools'. But the only way to see if that yields happier and more productive adults is probably with scientific study that spans decades.