The fact that you can type out that sentence and have it make sense means that your education wasn't meaningless.Blandest, May 26, 2016, 03:08:05 pm
I learned almost nothing about reading or writing from K-12. My parents read to me as a kid, and then abruptly stopped. They said, "Here's a book and if you want to know what the story's like then you have to read it yourself." I remember throwing a giant temper tantrum, and then the book was still there when I finished. So I started trying to read it. Everything more or less worked itself out after that. I was always better at reading than most of the people in my grade level. No surprise given that my fellow students were being forced to read books that they hated, and I was reading for fun. If you read enough it also gives you an instinctive sense of grammar. As a kid I would always fail the parts of grammar exams that involved identifying a grammatical structure. But I had no problems with finding errors in incorrect sentences or writing reasonably well.
I know that's just one anecdote and I think I can do better. In the United States we have Sudbury schools, which allow students to learn whatever they want to learn whenever they feel ready. It's sort of extreme-Montessori meets unschooling. Those kids still all learn how to read and write.
Even if you don't remember or use a lot of that stuff now, it's a useful stepping stone to the stuff you do use. Being able to communicate and write and solve problems are skills that take years of practice.moooo566, May 26, 2016, 03:56:03 pm
My reading of educational psychology leads me to believe that there's not a generalized problem solving or critical thinking skill. Educational psychologists use the technical term "transfer of learning" to refer to what laymen would call critical thinking. The lesson of the research on transfer of learning is that short jumps, which are referred to near transfer are possible. Large jumps, or far transfer almost never happen.
I know that's kind of abstract, so here are some examples. For near transfer, playing the piano transfers to the accordion, and ice skating transfers to roller skating. Learning one skill helps you with the other when the skills are very similar.
For far transfer, Western Civilization taught all students Latin for several hundred years, on the grounds that learning Latin would make other languages easier to learn. This has been experimentally disproven, but not before making generations of children miserable for absolutely no reason. Similarly, when educational psychologists studied the effect of logic classes on reasoning they also found no change. And then there's one of the weirder findings I've encountered, which is that students who take a Psychology class in high school do just as well in college Introductory Psychology as students who have never taken Psychology before. I mean, those K-12 kids spent an entire semester learning Psychology, so you'd think they'd be better at it once they got to college, but they're not.
Also, if your range of childhood experiences ONLY consists of watching cartoons and hanging out with your mom and/or dad, I have a feeling your social life might be pretty stunted after a while?Nikaer Drekin, May 26, 2016, 03:57:35 pm
Yeah, obviously kids should be doing kid stuff with other kids. But isolation isn't a necessary condition of homeschooling or unschooling.
I got in trouble as a kid because I asked my parents to get me math textbooks at one point, even.journeyman faguar, May 26, 2016, 04:07:47 pm
Okay, that's legitimately fucked and it wasn't what I had in mind when I mentioned unschooling. I was thinking of something much more along the lines of the Waldorf model. Actively stopping children from learning basic skills they've expressed an interest in is not what I'm arguing for.
