| | I wonder if many of the 'unschoolers' have ever had a truly great, transforming teacher in a traditional classroom and have viscerally experienced how much difference such a charismatic person can make in a young child's or adolescent's life. There are many movies and stories that tell of this, from "To Sir With Love" to "Stand and Deliver". (And I can attest that it makes all the boredom worthwhile and unimportant.)
The nature of learning and the need for guidance changes once you get past the 'Montessori level' of the physical, tactile, self-exploratory "reach out and touch it" and once you get very high into the realm beyond the physical and immediate.
The reason a good teacher and mastery of a core curriculum -- English, Math, Science, History -- is vital (as is finding good schools, which DO EXIST) is that you can't just "snap bang" pick up all the stuff you didn't find interesting years ago. It is often hierarchical and slow to learn requiring many problems and can't be crammed into weeks but takes trial and error, step by step. Hierarchy refers not only to the way we store knowledge. It refers to the way we do and logically must -learn- it. You can't pick up algebra if you never mastered fractions, long division, certain aspects of logic, pre-algebra, etc. You can't learn to substitute letters for numbers in equations until you have thoroughly mastered -every single one- of the operations of arithmetic. Advanced or formal science won't make much sense unless you mastered general science in elementary or middle school. It will just be floating abstractions without concretes. Modern political issues in America about religion, race, gender won't fully make sense unless you have not just memorized but understand the Protestant Reformation, Reconstruction, etc.
There is no free lunch.
And there ain't no f**king shortcuts.
The only reason 'unschooler'parents or 'progressive education' intellectuals pooh-pooh or underestimate the process involved is they don't remember the fact they had to learn it in traditional schools. They don't remember the time and gradual brain-stretching over years that it took.
You need all four elements of the core curriculum. And they are both cumulative and interrelated.
You can't skip the Math in grade school or later because you need it to fully understand the Science. You can't skip the Science because you need it to assess what you might like to do, to understand a complex technological world, and you need the scientific method to learn how to think logically, without which -nothing else- is possible. You can't skip the English or let it slide for years at a time - including the grammar, the vocabulary, and the literature - because you can't think, communicate, understand yourself without them. You can't skip the History (and geography) because then you don't even recognize the planet you live in.
You won't be a good writer or a clear thinker in polished, well-honed English unless you know how to concretize, to give vivid examples, to make apt comparisons, choose metaphors, etc. And you won't know how to do that unless you have read great literature or great poets or skilled essayists. You won't be able to converse with well-educated people or write for an intellectual audience or persuade anyone with an education about Objectivism or your proposal for your local school or the direction of the country or your town unless you know something about our culture and western civilization other than Ayn Rand and can draw on its examples.
It's not just about whether kids are naturally lazy or naturally curious and try to seek out knowledge of value.
The reason you need a teacher to (gently, inspirationally) guide your children through this material is that it is too vast and the good stuff too hidden to think you will stumble on it via library search or internet googling. And you don't know what you don't know. Nor do you know when knowledge is floating or out of context or requires a base.
You'll never get a fraction of what you need in order to be well-rounded without guidance.
Nor can any one parent be as much of an expert, as can a professional who has taught world or American history or science or algebra over and over and has learned what works. (Do I need to mention again that I mean a GOOD professional.) Parents, themselves not always well-rounded Renaissance people, are just as likely to mis-guide the child as not.
And having read all of Ayn Rand, a touch of Mises, and a dab of Aristotle doesn't make you qualified to discuss the water cycle, organic chemistry, or to compare Chinese civilization with western. It is the height of hubris to think otherwise. Something, unfortunately, Objectivist and libertarians are seldom short of.
And being well-rounded -is- vital to being as successful, and even as intelligent as you can be. (Genius and intelligence grow out of vast knowledge.) While there may be exceptions to this, people who need to do nothing but pursue one thing for a lifetime or huge sections of one, they are the exception not the norm.
Once you've had a good, well-rounded 'classical' liberal arts education you can look back and see how many decades it took to acquire it and how much power and satisfaction and perspective it gives you in everything you do, in the level of pleasures you can have, far beyond the television set or the technician who wouldn't know Tennyson from a tsetse fly. (sorry about the triple alliteration.)
Don't let yourself remain a philistine, if you are or refrain from giving your children the guidance that will let them remain narrow specialists who, if they are 'creative' types, don't deeply and thoroughly understand science and the vast new world it has created and, if they are 'technical' types(or professional or businessmen, don't fully and thoroughly know who Freud and Herodotus and Constantine and Stowe were or what implications Thermopylae had for western civilization and for us today.
--Philip Coates
(PS, and don't get me started on why Latin in middle school is brain-expanding and helps triple your vocabulary, or the importance of a foreign language, or art and music and organized sports in school.)
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