03-05-2023, 04:15 PM
The modern Homeschooling movement began in America in the 1960s after John Holt's 1964 book How Children Fail. The thesis is, after years of serving at a private boarding school, that all standard education merely educates a student on how to behave in school and learn the classroom game. It can be summed up simply by its foreward:
If anyone is interested you can find a pdf of it here, there are many good anecdotes that I may post here later. Holt was himself writing at a time when schools were comparatively incredibly productive and high-performing, so many of the problems that we know about modern education are absent from the book simply because they did not exist to the same degree in the 1960s. John Holt himself was a New Age weirdo, so he does have many disagreeable ideas as well. His belief that children are all born with a natural intelligence and desire to learn no doubt comes from teaching at a high-IQ selected private de facto all-White school in 1950s Colorado; contrast his ideas on natural intelligence with Marty Nemko's experience teaching black students. There is also an almost peaty message in Holt's book that I enjoy, that of the child as the platonic human ideal; of pure openness and malleability to new information. The so-called "unschooling" should, in Holt's ideal, be about the lengthening of a student's childhood, not as in coddling them into numaleitude, but to nurture an extrospection about the world and a thirst for information that extends as long as possible.
It's universally accepted on this forum that public schooling and the vast majority of private schooling are a non-option for raising future young, but there is not much breath given how to exact do the alternative, save for a few core things like being a strong father figure or imparting bibliophilia. Modern day homeschoolers typically use a few different named strategies, which I'll outline:
Quote:Why do they fail? They fail because they are afraid, bored, and confused.
They are afraid, above all else, of failing, of disappointing or displeasing the many anxious adults around them, whose limitless hopes and expectations for them hang over their heads like a cloud.
They are bored because the things they are given and told to do in school are so trivial, so dull, and make such limited and narrow demands on the wide spectrum of their intelligence, capabilities, and talents.
They are confused because most of the torrent of words that pours over them in school makes little or no sense. It often flatly contradicts other things they have been told, and hardly ever has any relation to what they really know— to the rough model of reality that they carry around in their minds.
If anyone is interested you can find a pdf of it here, there are many good anecdotes that I may post here later. Holt was himself writing at a time when schools were comparatively incredibly productive and high-performing, so many of the problems that we know about modern education are absent from the book simply because they did not exist to the same degree in the 1960s. John Holt himself was a New Age weirdo, so he does have many disagreeable ideas as well. His belief that children are all born with a natural intelligence and desire to learn no doubt comes from teaching at a high-IQ selected private de facto all-White school in 1950s Colorado; contrast his ideas on natural intelligence with Marty Nemko's experience teaching black students. There is also an almost peaty message in Holt's book that I enjoy, that of the child as the platonic human ideal; of pure openness and malleability to new information. The so-called "unschooling" should, in Holt's ideal, be about the lengthening of a student's childhood, not as in coddling them into numaleitude, but to nurture an extrospection about the world and a thirst for information that extends as long as possible.
It's universally accepted on this forum that public schooling and the vast majority of private schooling are a non-option for raising future young, but there is not much breath given how to exact do the alternative, save for a few core things like being a strong father figure or imparting bibliophilia. Modern day homeschoolers typically use a few different named strategies, which I'll outline:
- SAH (School-At-Home) - School-at-home is the most "normal" style compared to standard public education, based around purchased curriculum books from private school-affiliated publishers for a ~4-6 hour daily classroom time and a quiz & exam structure designed to prepare a student for mandated federal testing. It's structured as close to standard education as possible, with kid's curriculum being age-based K-12 grades. It's also the most expensive system by far because of its aforementioned reliance on curriculum books. Naturally, this is probably the "easiest" for stupid families who want only took their kids out of school for problems like bullying or drug use. Beyond which institution to buy books from, there is little control over what you're being taught your kid, allowing whatever you're trying to run away from by homeschooling your kids to come right inside your house.
- Unschooling - Unschooling is the method created by John Holt in the 1970s to capitalize on the success of his book. Holt's newsletter website describes the method as "student-centered, unconventional, and individualistic", which practically equate to a style which puts little (if any) order on a child's learning, allowing them to pursue whatever interests them, with an emphasis on crafts and art. There is no quantifiable school day or instruction time because Unschooling has neither school time or instructional periods, save for short-term cramming in order to pass mandated federal testing. This style, like Holt himself, presupposes that every child has the innate ability to be a savant if just given the environment to flourish. Unschooling parents have a nearly cult-like reverence for this system and John Holt himself, and dislike this method even being referred to as a method ("because it's, like, a way of thinking, man"). This style was popular in the 90s and 00s, especially among parents of autistics, leading to a whole class of archetypal "Weird Homeschooled Kid" you may have met.
- Classical - The Classical Method, is the approach that many "trad homesteaders" attempt. It relies on a three-tiered system called "The Trivium" of rigorous teaching of grammar and the Bible (& other classics) in adolescence, the logical application of the concepts in the books, and then their rhetorical application. A less popular approach relies on the teaching of secular "Great Works" as defined by Encyclopædia Britannica, and an even less popular approach relies on the teaching of Greek & Latin as was done in traditional American schools. Because of it's overt Christian nature, the term is often also applied to all forms of Bible-based homeschooling. Its emphasis on high-prestige classics means creates many bibliophiles and many "homeschooled savants", but its lack of self-instruction means the student often only becomes as smart as their parents, leading to an equally large amount of dumb Baptists who can hardly string a sentence together. It is probably the most popular style today as the homeschooling movement pivoted from New Agers to Baptist Conservatives in the 2000s.
- Montessori - Created for the education of autistic children, the Montessori Style is most popular for Maria Montessori's more broader parenting style, but it is often applied to modern homeschoolers as well. Similar to Unschooling, Montessori stresses self-directed learning and unstructured education time, but is somehow even less proactive. The style places importance on "hands-on" expression using a multiple of toys, leading to an entire subgenre of kid's toys branded as "Montessori". Practitioners often identify themselves as "Montessori Moms", a type of upper-class mom who doesn't spend much time tending to her children. There's even an official Montessori Certification that some practitioners undergo.
- Charlotte Mason - The Charlotte Mason method was designed for actual homesteaders who had no access to schooling, and as such is today sort of an intermediary for parents who don't want to bother giving their kids books but feels bad having them do zero schooling. CM's most unique quality is it's sub-hour long instructional periods (and significantly less than that for younger kids) and emphasis on simple allegorical morality stories education tools, dubbed "mind-food". Like Montessori and Unschooling styles, it falls flat on teaching maths and sciences, and most CM parents end up supplementing this style with SAH curriculum books.
- Waldorf - Waldorf Education, or Steiner Education, is the archetypal New Age homeschooling, placing little importance on curriculum of any form until teenage, and instead nurturing a soul-body connection through "imaginative play". Waldorf Education is a common form of Private Schooling, but the curriculum is also employed by homeschoolers. Schooling is done in broad weeks-long genres and relies on the open free-association of ideas by the student as guided by the teacher. In practice, this means the student is rarely "taught" anything except general morals until they reach ~14. If the Classical Method is designed to ingrain a solid moral base through classic works, the Waldorf style attempts to create the same through soul-searching introspection in the students. Despite it's hand-off approach, the Waldorf Style is an enormous industry of special-made toys, how-to books, and teaching seminars.