Forced anything is bad

When you force by gun point to share my wealth, I don't call it donation, it's theft (or taxation). When you force a person to do your menial job, it's called slavery. When a person is forced to have sex, it's called rape.

When people are taught by force, what do most people call it? That's right, education. [I believe that the correct term is "schooling."]

Unschooling goes against the tide: there are no forced anything. Force is used to get something you want done that the other person does not. Education is the last thing you want to force on anyone. Just as a coach does not have remote control for each players, you want to motivate and encourage your children. You want to show them that you are a learner too. You show them the tools and usage and let them loose.

I do my best to let my children do their own dictionary look up. I know how to spell most of the words they ask but I have them look it up. Tools like Franklin's Electronic Speaking Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary helps find spelling (corrects misspellings) and with the computer generated pronunciations, even I find it useful! Now that they know how to use it, I almost always tell them, well sound it out and go look it up.

Likewise with computer programming, they are into playing games and I had promised to get them going on writing games. After they reminded me this promise for few months, I finally got them the evaluation version of Stagecast and made sure that they can follow the tutorial and off they ran on their own. They quickly found the limitations of the eval software and were trying to push the limits and then I finally got them licensed version where the limits were taken off. (They each have a notebook and so sometimes they work alone, other times they collaborate and others, they just share ideas.) Just this weekend, I downloaded examples, some of which were pretty well done and they learned a few trick or two from them.

[This was started as a comment to "Homeschooled Wild Child"]