Wednesday, February 8, 2012

How can you tell?

How can unschooling parents tell if their kids are learning?

They can tell because they're there with them every day. How did you know when your child could ride a bike? How did you know when they could swim? That's how you know when a child can read or count by fives or spell. They do it!

When they discuss current events with an understanding of geography and history, you know they've picked up that information, gradually and from all kinds of sources. It won't be in the same order kids at school or using a curriculum might learn it, but one reason that schooled kids can fail to learn something is that they have nothing to hook the new fact to. With natural learning, all learning is hooked into something the learner already knows.

SandraDodd.com/interviews/successful
photo by Sandra Dodd

2 comments:

  1. I have always been intrigued with the idea of home schooling - when I was at school 6 decades ago I was frustrated at the lack of connection between subjects - tudor history, C19th lit, modern religion - didnt make sense nor the learning by rote. In my ageing I love the dozens of connected paths I find in any research I do - love the conectedness of events, time and people -

    Yours sounds like a 'good' home schooling but are there poor home schoolers that lock children away from knowledge, I wonder? - is there any kind of check? - is all home schooling of the same value?

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  2. It's not easy to lock children away from knowledge in the 21st century, unless a family is impoverished, and those families aren't even wanting to homeschool.

    Not all school-schooling is of the same value, and little of it is the same value you're thinking if you went six decades ago. I went in the U.S. in the 1960's, the best so far here. Late 50's, 1960's... it wasn't so great before that and various government rulings and changes set it on the expensive, frustrating downhill after that.

    School can never be ideal.
    Learning is personal, and we're helping our children find joy in learning. Information is freely available now, and the environment is easy for them to maneuver. People used to go to schools 100 years ago because it's where maps were, and books. All my kids can use Google maps on their phones and see things that were unavailable for anyone to see even 20 years ago.

    I could go on, and I have. ☺ http://sandradodd.com

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