Education Without School

  "It is, in fact, nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry; for this delicate little plant, aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom; without this, it goes to wreck and ruin without fail. It is a very grave mistake to think that the enjoyment of seeing and searching can be promoted by means of coercion and a sense of duty. To the contrary, I believe it would be possible to rob even a healthy beast of prey of its voraciousness, if it were possible, with the aid of a whip, to force the beast to devour continuously, even when not hungry, especially if the food, handed out under such coercion, were to be selected accordingly." -Albert Einstein   For those unfamiliar with home education, un-schooling must sound like a strange term. In the realm of home education, un-schooling comes up in conversation in the same way public school does for private school families, as a lower clas...

I've been meaning to post this for those who like to structure their homeschool to replicate public school. It's a "time allotment for instruction" schedule from one Ohio public school system in which I substituted. This is the basic plan under which the teachers were supposed to arrange their daily lesson plans. I figured it m ight give you some ideas of what is considered to be adequate by the state. And you could use this type of schedule, inserting the subjects you cover, as your "brief outline of your curriculum" for these grades, which you could then submit with your annual notification. Otherwise, please remember that public schools waste lots of time on things like travel between classrooms, libraries, gymnasiums, auditoriums, cafeterias, etc. Throw in PA system announcements, knocks on the classroom door and visitors who show up for various reasons, students coming and going to the office, the nurse, the restroom, their locker, and so on. I have be...

     I keep hearing so-called experts on TV, telling us about how kids must go to school so that they get properly socialized. By that they mean socially indoctrinated, because socializing can occur in any size group, any age, anywhere. But nagging at the back of my head is the voice that says, yeah, but kids also need plenty of time alone. Or at least they need time to do their own things, think their own thoughts, without a crowd of other kids all around them.       We get so little "time alone" these days. What with television and all its gradations, on almost all the time, computers and the smorgasbord of entertainment, learning and social platforms that they dish out 24 hours a day. And then we have music blaring from a variety of sources anywhere and everywhere. Where is all this alone time? Yes, these are all different social activities from those encountered in school, but they are still social by nature.     I  recall the t...

“Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school.”- Albert Einstein  The public school environment educates students to achieve a certain level of knowledge specified by boards and bureaucracies. It does not educate the individual on moral obligations or responsibilities, such as empathy or concern for peers and our communities. Nor does the school endow the student with any sense of personal values, instead often demoralizing the individual. These students learn how to function only when given explicit instructions on what they must learn and how they should think. If concerned about the effectiveness of learning, look no further than how much more an un-schooled or homeschooled student can learn by focusing on specific learning goals, then following up and applying lessons learned to the real world. In school, test scores trump everything else and dominate all other goals, surpassing more meaningful ideals. Public schools educate students thro...