Unschoolers introduced by NYTimes

"Home Schoolers Content to Take Children’s Lead" is an article on unschooling. Unfortunately, they seem to "get" us unschoolers (or to "out" us unschoolers to the public and see more regulation take place to control us).

Sadly, it seems that reporters these days don't like to do much of investigative journalism. To quote the article:

There is scant data on the educational results of unschooling, and little knowledge about whether the thousands of unschooled children fare better or worse than regularly schooled students.

Obviously the "journalist" hasn't been in touch with sudval.org -- considering that Sudbury Valley School has been running an unschooling school for almost 40 years, they seems to have plenty of data to throw at the "journalist." Sigh.

Going further, on one hand it claims unschooling's stats are not well known ("there is not even reliable data on how many people are unschooling") but on the other:

Unlike the more familiar home-schoolers of recent years, unschoolers tend not to be religiously motivated.

How's that for accurate, fact based reporting? Most friends who do home educate and are religiously motivated, do shy away from unschooling but it's a matter of degrees if you ask me (see my "How to unschool in 5 easy steps"). As much as I believe in unschooling, we practice a bit of delayed academics where we take time doing basic English and math studies but they get plenty of unschooling time ("self-directed studies" or recess for most people) in any given day.

Copyright 2006, DannyHSDad, All Rights Reserved.