Is It Selfish to Fight for Homeschooling Freedoms? (Part 4)

An article in the New York Times discusses unschooling. Reading that article, you'd think unschoolers are kooks who have no control of their children, and you'd think the children are brain-wastes. There are people flipping out because they don't understand how unschooling works and they have no ability to control it, monitor it, STOP it.

Most of the articles about unschooling cover families who have kids in the grade-school years. Seldom are there articles that tell about grown-up kids. What about MY kids? They were unschooled. The oldest is a prize employee who has helped train the people who train her counterparts in other stores. The second graduated with a BA in three years and is now employed. The third graduated with an AA in one year and is now happily married and working. We were the people who are "cause for growing concern" (in the words of the article) among educrats. My grown-up kids turned out just fine, thankyouverymuch. And they wouldn't be the people they are if, in our homeschool, we had conformed to conventional school methods.

Apparently this article is making the rounds of many major newspapers. The cardiology nurse today was asking us questions about "real homeschoolers" and "these unschoolers," based on what she read in yesterday's Milwaukee paper. We talked. She was getting it. She was understanding. She saw the need for there to be alternatives to the government-run schools. But she too had one question.

"But you're one of the good ones. What about the others out there?"

Hey, I know a whole bunch of the "others out there." Not only do I know hundreds of homeschoolers, but I know gobs and gobs of unschoolers. I am NOT "one of the good ones." I'm one of the run-of-the-mill average ones. I might even be in the lower half, simply because my attention has been divided amongst more kids. (I think it's easier to be a reeeally good unschooler if you don't have a whole bunch of kids.)

The uproar about people "not doing anything" with their kids isn't a big problem. I'm not saying that every single homeschooler on the face of the earth is pristine and pure; that'd just be a stupid thing to say. But the desire to monitor and regulate homeschoolers becaue of "those unschoolers who don't do anything" is nothing more than people who have certain ideas about what education should be and who are unwilling to allow for different methods and different timetables.