Unschooling, because Homeschooling was too much work.

[SirNitram]

Link

Many parents consider Patapsco State Park a leisure destination. Suzy Provine of Millersville views it as a classroom.

As children headed back to local schools this week, she and her four sons explored the park's craggy earth and tossed large and small rocks into standing water to test the laws of gravity. Venues such as Patapsco are why Provine, 38, has never sent her children to traditional school, opting instead for an eclectic approach to learning known as unschooling.

A byproduct of home schooling, unschooling incorporates every facet of a child's life into the education process, allowing a child to follow his passions and learn at his own pace, year-round. And it assumes that an outing at the park - or even hours spent playing a video game - can be just as valuable a teaching resource as Hooked on Phonics.

"It's different from sitting in front of a desk all day," said Provine's oldest son, Marcus, 8, adding that his friends in traditional schools say they would rather be unschooled.

Zoa Conner of LaPlata, co-organizer of the Enjoy Life Unschooling Conference to be held near Frederick this month, said the approach is about helping children discover what they're really interested in.

"If most [people] think back to their own school experiences, how much of the information you were expected to learn do you know today?" added Conner, an unschooling parent. "We cannot know beyond the shadow of a doubt precisely what our children will need when they are 10, 20, 30 or 80. We do all want what is 'best' for our children and we want our children, now and when grown, to be poised to accomplish whatever they may decide is important. This is where unschoolers excel."

While unschooling parents say the method is growing in popularity, some education experts question its effectiveness.

Joyce L. Epstein, director of the National Network of Partnership Schools at the Johns Hopkins University, had never heard of it. She knew of no research on the topic, "and research would be needed in order to justify it."

Teri Flemal, director of Quality Education by Design, a New York-based program that helps parents hire personal teachers and build home curriculum, said she believes unschooling has its place. But she says it's most useful for a child in a crisis transitioning from traditional schooling to home schooling, not as a regular teaching method.

"I'm reading e-mail from unschooling parents who think having their kids remodel their house with them is 'school.' I'm sorry, but it's not," Flemal said. "Painting, hammering, measuring - hey, that was great in primary school. I love that stuff.

"But I can tell you that it will not hold these kids in good stead as they compete with home-schoolers who are creating model video games, requiring them to know the ballistics of how fast and at what angle the bullets need to travel to create an impression of a certain size on the wall, or perhaps the home-schooler who has written a symphony."

The term "unschooling" was coined by the late educator and home-schooling advocate John Holt, whose 1964 book, "How Children Fail" and home-schooling magazine Growing Without Schooling are among the cornerstones of alternative learning.

It is uncertain how many of the nation's children are unschooled, since statistically they fall under the category of home schooling. The U.S. Department of Education estimated that 1.5 million students nationwide were home-schooled in the spring of 2007, or 2.9 percent of the school-age population.

Unschooling parent Billy Greer of Pasadena estimates that about 10 percent of all home-schooled children are unschooled. He and his wife, Nancy, founded the Family Unschoolers Network 15 years ago.

The state department of education says that whatever their methods, parents who home school must provide regular, thorough instruction in the studies taught in public school to children of the same age. Parents must maintain a portfolio of home-schooling materials that are reviewed by a local school representative at the conclusion of each semester.

State law says that if a home-schooled student's education is found to be insufficient, he is to be placed into public school. But Maryland department of education spokesman Bill Reinhard said that rarely happens. "Most parents involved in the home-school movement take it seriously," he said.

One reason parents say they unschool is an increasing dissatisfaction with the quality of regular schools. GreatSchools, a San Francisco-based, independent nonprofit education group, probed the current economy's impact on education in a June national survey conducted with research company Harris Interactive. The survey of 1,086 parents of schoolchildren found that 61 percent believe that the quality of traditional education in the country will suffer due to school cutbacks.

Unschooling parents say traditional school parents often inquire about the approach at the start of the school year and the start of second semester.

"Interest in unschooling has skyrocketed," said Pat Farenga, president of Holt Associates, a Wakefield, Mass., organization that carries on John Holt's work.

The approach has taken on different forms that include "radical unschooling," which extends its philosophies beyond education to such areas as mealtime and bedtime.

"You take the trust you have for a child to learn organically and you branch it out into other areas of parenting," said radical unschooler Dayna Martin of Madison, N.H., whose new book, "Radical Unschooling - A Revolution Has Begun," is in its second printing after being released in July.

"We don't punish our children. We don't have bedtimes," Martin said. "We don't live by rules; we live by principles. Our philosophy is respect for children's equality in the home."

Regardless of approach, what typifies most unschooling families is that there is no such thing as a typical day.

Greer from Pasadena remembers once getting up with his son and daughter at 3 a.m., making a thermos of hot chocolate and taking sleeping bags to Downs Park to watch meteor showers.

"We stayed there until sunrise, then went home and shared the experience with mom, who was just getting up," he said. "Finally, as the excitement wound down and exhaustion set in, we went back to bed for a nap just as most kids were getting ready to leave for school."

Martin said that one evening her family had sausages for dinner, and her 11-year-old son wanted to know how sausages originated. The next day, the family visited a nearby sausage factory and learned about its roots in Germany. Interest spread to all things German.

Farenga said that through unschooling each of his three daughters learned to read on their own. Lauren, now 23, learned to read by being read to. Alison, now 20, learned to read by playing the Nintendo game "The Legend of Zelda." Audrey, now 16, taught herself to read.

Unschooling parents scoff at the notion that the practice means no learning.

Greer's 17-year-old daughter, Lane, remembers that just a few years ago people raised eyebrows when she mentioned that she was unschooled. But that was before the 17-year-old earned 43 college credits while being unschooled. She'll enroll at Anne Arundel Community College in the spring.

"Now," she says, "they say, 'You're so lucky; I wish I had done that.' "

An 'unschooling' day
Suzy Provine of Millersville described what she and sons Marcus (8), George (6), Lance (3) and Miles (17 months) did on a recent "unschooling" day:

• "Kids up around 8:30 or so, played Lego til breakfast was ready, dropped off lunch to my mom."

•"Visited Patapsco State Park: Searched for crayfish, tossed different size rocks in water to make big splashes … caught [an amphibian] and skate bug and observed before setting free … found a clam shell in the stream and talked about how it might have ended up there … headed home, had lunch."

•"Made ice cream (we started it the day before) with mint from our garden. When we went out to pick the mint, we found that our parsley plant was being devoured by three giant green and black striped caterpillars, which we caught and observed for a few hours."

• "Picked some squash from the garden and checked on the status of all of our plants … while the ice cream was freezing we watched and noticed that as it froze, it expanded and filled up the freezing bowl more."

•"After dinner we read a few books before bedtime … Marcus played a few computer games after the little boys were in bed (map and strategy games online)."

Radical Unschooling is my favorite. 'Take a part in his upbringing? But that's work.'

[Bounty]

This would be a great way to educate your children if it was done alongside a formal education. Which is why any school system worth the name will already incorporate as much practical examples and hands-on experience as possible.

Essentially what these people have done is taking one aspect of education which facilitates learning - incorporating facts and data in a fun activity - ands stripped out the facts and data. On the surface it might seem like a brilliant idea to leave out the boring parts and learn anyway, but in the long run you'll end up with children that have a scattershot knowledge of the world without any sort of framework or theoretical grounding to place it in - and that framework is precisely what they'll need to build any further education on.

If these parents were taking their children to study bugs in the woods or watch meteor showers and then packed them off to a proper school during the day, they'd be up for parent of the year as far as I'm concerned. This way, though, 'learning' by accident and getting lost of entertainment rather than education, is going to leave these kids crippled later in life. This'll bite them in the ass bigtime.

[Thanas]

Stories like this are the reason I am glad that I live in a SOCIALIST FASCIST STATE that would come down so hard on these idiots that they would lose their children and probably do some prison time as well.

[Serafina]

What Bounty wrote

Agreed.

The way they do it looks like "homeschooling for the uneducated" - these parents propably do not include FACTS into their teching because they do not KNOW them.

Frankly, i find the whole idea of homeschooling idiotic and useless, because a single pair of parents can not possibly have the knowledge of several highly educated teachers.
And it seems like homeschooling and "unschooling" are based on the same though model.
Homeschooling: "hey, we can teach our children elementary school stuff (reading, writing, basic calucations) better than the schools can. Therefore, we must be better at teaching high school stuff (mathematics, literature, physics etc.)."
Unschooling: "hey, having fun is good for learning. Therefore, fun must be learning. Lets have fun with our children to educate them"

[loomer]

The only form of home schooling I can support (unless the parents happen to be fucking walking encyclopedias or only teach one or two subjects to their kids in conjunction with the school, like their areas of special training) is distance education where the actual knowledge is compiled by teachers and sent out to the student.

Unschooling should be made flat out illegal and punishable by a brief prison sentence - afterall, apparently you learn better through experience (though this is sometimes true in a lot of areas)!

[Surlethe]

Interestingly, unschooling is older than what has come to be known as "ordinary" homeschooling. It has its roots in the '60s counterculture, and was the original form of modern homeschooling, before religious bastards co-opted the movement. My take on it is that it's stupid because kids don't know what's best for them. My wife likes it sort of like she likes communism: in "theory", it's very nice, but in practice it'll never work. We'll probably incorporate some elements of it into our homeschooling, but only the exploration parts in conjunction with structured curricula.

[RedImperator]

I can actually see the appeal of this as a reaction against current trends in American public education, which can be summed up as: "SIT DOWN. SHUT UP. MEMORIZE. THIS WILL BE ON THE TEST." As an actual pedagogy, though, it stinks.

[Alyrium Denryle]

Interestingly, unschooling is older than what has come to be known as "ordinary" homeschooling. It has its roots in the '60s counterculture, and was the original form of modern homeschooling, before religious bastards co-opted the movement. My take on it is that it's stupid because kids don't know what's best for them. My wife likes it sort of like she likes communism: in "theory", it's very nice, but in practice it'll never work. We'll probably incorporate some elements of it into our homeschooling, but only the exploration parts in conjunction with structured curricula.

So you are homeschooling the offspring then? Well I suppose unlike most you have the education to be able to do it properly, and will not deliberately withhold information from the munchkin...

[Tolya]

Huh? Since when watering plants, checking out animals and playing LEGO is considered "education"?

I always thought that illiterates are an undeliberate byproduct of some screwed up circumstances. I never imagined that someone was trying to do it deliberately.

It may work for some genius kids with artistical inclinations... but I can't imagine a 12-year old discovering things like mathemathics by throwing some stones into a pond.

[Broomstick]

I have a sister who homeschooled her two boys... but she joined a non-religious home-schooling community linked to the University of Michigan that enabled the parents to fill in gaps where their own knowledge wouldn't reach, and gave them access to a lot of resources. She did a bunch of stuff like this "unschooling" (One thing that sticks in mind was her and the kids collecting roadkill and cleaning it down to bones, then reassembling the bones into skeletons and mounting them - much more involved than a plastic model kit) but that was in addition to their regular homeschooling.

Come to think of it, when I was a kid I recall my parents doing some of this "unschooling" stuff - but that was in addition to school.\

I think all these "unschool" activities are great. But at a certain point yes, you actually DO have to do some boring, rote memorization or work on things that don't excite you. Because life is like that.

[Surlethe]

It's not just because life is like that, it's because doing boring work on things that don't excite you is an incredibly important life skill. How many people have jobs where even a majority of their time is spent on things that are exciting and don't require self-discipline or a work ethic?

[Duckie]

Unschooling seems like a great idea- teach a kid to learn about stuff even in their spare time, to like learning- coupled with a terrible idea- 'do that and only that.'

Had I been unschooled, undoubtedly (assuming I had the internet to look stuff up on) I'd know almost as many things as I know today about physics and linguistics and history. But I'd also know nothing about mathematics, which I would have never attempted to even learn the slightest and most basic aspect of because it's not interesting to me.

Unless you're a renaissance person in potentia, you can't get a balanced education simply by faffing about doing what you find fun. Because obviously not everything necessary to be a well-rounded person is fun.

[PeZook]

If this approach was introduced en masse, it would produce an entire generation of ignoramuses.

There's no easy way to say this. You couldn't sustain a hunter-gatherer tribe with such an approach to education, much less a civilized society, where you need to know all sorts of boring and unfun stuff in order to function at the basic level, not to mention do things like design work or industrial management.

I also find it rather funny how the woman interviewed in this article says "How much of the stuff we are expected to know do you remember now?" - most stupid people tend to think they don't use knowledge they gathered at school every day. Untill they measure a room or figure out their taxes or buy insurance or fit their home with a lighting rod or do a thousand other things they'd have no fucking idea about if it wasn't for school.

This said, of course, "unschooling" should be part of life for any parent, though not instead of school, but as a supplement. A competent parent should be able to answer questions like "Why is the sky blue?", IMHO.

[RedImperator]

So you are homeschooling the offspring then? Well I suppose unlike most you have the education to be able to do it properly, and will not deliberately withhold information from the munchkin...

A well-educated person with a knack for teaching (and the self-discipline to actually be a teacher every day) could probably give his or her kids a good elementary school education, though they'd need to find some way for the kid to develop social skills. Once you get to high school, though, there's no fucking way.

Just for fun, Metatwaddle and I once figured out what subjects we could home school, assuming both of us stayed home all day and got support from both our parents. Now, keep in mind, I'm a novelist (aspiring, anyway) and master's-holding, state certified social studies teacher, and she's a physics/philosophy double major and classically trained pianist. My mother is a talented cook and professional bookkeeper, my dad can fix just about anything with an internal combustion engine, her dad is an anatomy professor, amateur astronomer, and avowed birder, and her mother was a banking executive with an Ivy League MBA. The six of us together couldn't give one kid a proper high-school education--none of us speak a foreign language fluently, none of us are qualified to teach chemistry, none of us are well-read in the classics, and we couldn't supply a proper science lab for biology, chemistry, or physics. Got that? Three graduate degrees, a hundred years of collective real-world experience, and two professional educators couldn't give a proper high school education. We could provide a fucking great "unteaching" supplementary experience (okay, after you're done your homework and piano practice, you and grandmom will make spaghetti sauce, and then after dinner, granddad is going to set up the telescope in the backyard and help you find Saturn. I'll proofread your short story while you're doing that, and then tomorrow, Grandpa Jim will show you put that lawnmower engine back together so you can sell it on eBay), but we couldn't replace a real education.

[Simon_Jester]

Frankly, i find the whole idea of homeschooling idiotic and useless, because a single pair of parents can not possibly have the knowledge of several highly educated teachers.

In a very tightly restricted subset of cases, it works- generally because the students wouldn't get nearly enough "highly educated" teachers at their local school, and even then if and only if the parents are themselves highly educated.

In the vast majority of cases, one or both of these conditions does not apply. In which case, as everyone is saying, it fails. Hard.

Had I been unschooled, undoubtedly (assuming I had the internet to look stuff up on) I'd know almost as many things as I know today about physics and linguistics and history. But I'd also know nothing about mathematics, which I would have never attempted to even learn the slightest and most basic aspect of because it's not interesting to me.

How do you know much about physics without knowing much about math?

Doing physics while being bad at math is hard; doing physics while not knowing the math at all sounds impossible... [confusion]

This said, of course, "unschooling" should be part of life for any parent, though not instead of school, but as a supplement. A competent parent should be able to answer questions like "Why is the sky blue?", IMHO.

OK. Without invoking high college-level physics concepts, why is the sky blue? In terms that will make sense to a three-year old?

I'm not saying you can't answer the question in that context; I fully expect that you can. But "why is the sky blue" is a particularly difficult example, not because the answer is not known or because you don't know it, but because the frame of reference in which the answer makes sense is one that itself takes a while to learn. Therefore, I think it's a fair place to allow the parent to bow out and teach the "Daddy doesn't know everything" lesson instead of the "This is why the sky is blue" lesson.

Just for fun, Metatwaddle and I once figured out what subjects we could home school, assuming both of us stayed home all day and got support from both our parents. Now, keep in mind, I'm a novelist (aspiring, anyway) and master's-holding, state certified social studies teacher, and she's a physics/philosophy double major and classically trained pianist. My mother is a talented cook and professional bookkeeper, my dad can fix just about anything with an internal combustion engine, her dad is an anatomy professor, amateur astronomer, and avowed birder, and her mother was a banking executive with an Ivy League MBA. The six of us together couldn't give one kid a proper high-school education--none of us speak a foreign language fluently, none of us are qualified to teach chemistry, none of us are well-read in the classics, and we couldn't supply a proper science lab for biology, chemistry, or physics. Got that? Three graduate degrees, a hundred years of collective real-world experience, and two professional educators couldn't give a proper high school education. We could provide a fucking great "unteaching" supplementary experience (okay, after you're done your homework and piano practice, you and grandmom will make spaghetti sauce, and then after dinner, granddad is going to set up the telescope in the backyard and help you find Saturn. I'll proofread your short story while you're doing that, and then tomorrow, Grandpa Jim will show you put that lawnmower engine back together so you can sell it on eBay), but we couldn't replace a real education.

I honestly think you could come close to matching what students actually walk away from high school with:
-The foreign language requirement is very much worthwhile, but the majority of students who won't need that language will forget it in short order; you can be a functioning educated person in only one language.
-The degree to which the classics are a problem depends heavily on your definition of "classics." Greco-Roman "classics" have been de-emphasized in the public schools to the point where your student is not at a disadvantage for not knowing them, even in terms of their cultural education context. English literature classics are more of a problem, but even then most students do not come away remembering all that much about them, or having read more than a small quasirepresentative sample of them.
-The lab work is an issue. Looking around on the Internet, I'm seeing enough stuff that I think the equipment would not be a problem if you can find a room to do it in.
-The lack of chemistry knowledge is even more of an issue... here, I have no answer, because pursuing a bachelor's in chemistry is almost certainly an impractical amount of work to get this set up.

...but taking all that together, you'd still be in shouting distance of a decent high school curriculum, and the child would probably come away with as much general education as the typical high school student of comparable intelligence. Get a bit of help from outside (a foreign language teacher and possibly a chemist) and you'd definitely have it.

[Duckie]

Had I been unschooled, undoubtedly (assuming I had the internet to look stuff up on) I'd know almost as many things as I know today about physics and linguistics and history. But I'd also know nothing about mathematics, which I would have never attempted to even learn the slightest and most basic aspect of because it's not interesting to me.

How do you know much about physics without knowing much about math?

Doing physics while being bad at math is hard; doing physics while not knowing the math at all sounds impossible... [confusion]

Oh, dear. See, I'm even overestimating my own learning capabilities. Although I'm referring to high-level maths as stuff I'd never be able to force myself to learn without incentives created by schooling ('do this or you get a bad grade', 'do this or you don't get a job in 10 years' is probably too much for kids to viscerally care about in my experience even if they intellectually do care.)

You can do at least basic newtonian motion and the like with basic calculus, although admittedly that's not much. Really though I just made a mistake in posting without thinking too much.

[GrandMasterTerwynn]

Unschooling . . . it's like the way they used to teach kids in the good old days . . . of the eighteenth century! Seriously. While the dumbing-down of public education to the point where the most a student learns is which end of the pencil goes to the paper, this "unschooling" notion is even worse. It seems like the way you'd educate kids in a sod house out on the prairie somewhere, where you didn't even have the luxury of a one-room school.

Engaging in the mental exercise of what I could possibly teach a child . . . let's see: I've got a B.S. in Computer Engineering (and all the requisite math, physics, and comp-sci courses to go with it,) and seven years in the industry. I taught introductory C++ programming labs in college (as a T.A.) and subbed for the professor in a couple lectures, to great feedback. I do a lot of radio control stuff and robotics, and I shoot, handload, and fish. I'm an amateur astronomer who's built his own telescopes and eyepieces. I was also a Boy Scout for a while, so I know a bit about practical outdoorsmanship and botany, and am extensively well-read in quite a few science subjects. I also used to draw quite extensively and I write prolifically. One day, I'll actually finish my major writing project and try to get it published, in what little time I can spare from working.

Does this mean I'd be an effective educator who could supply a child with a competent education? Fuck no. I'm a veritable font of encyclopedic knowledge. I've got enough knowledge to fill a river a mile wide . . . but only an inch deep. I could give a child a very respectable "frontier" education. Which would be about the equivalent of a fairly enriched grade school education. But high school . . . no. Even junior high/middle school would be a sore challenge for me to undertake. As we saw earlier, someone who is actually qualified as an educator with full familial support, including other qualified educators, wouldn't be able to provide a high-school education.

And this is why, historically, most people barely had a level of education equivalent to grade school. And why "unschooling" is just as stupid as its name would suggest.

[RedImperator]

...but taking all that together, you'd still be in shouting distance of a decent high school curriculum, and the child would probably come away with as much general education as the typical high school student of comparable intelligence. Get a bit of help from outside (a foreign language teacher and possibly a chemist) and you'd definitely have it.

And all it would take is six adults staying home to home-school the kids. And how many families do you know would have that combination of education and experience?

[Patrick Degan]

This is the thing about homeschooling.... I consider myself a fairly knowledgeable person. I could probably teach my son history, english composition/literature, art. But I consider myself incompetent to teach math or science, which are both very involved and detailed subjects, and nothing we could provide would take the place of an actual chemistry lab for science projects. Also, little league or tai-kwan-do or piano classes do not take the place of the socialisation which can only be learned by daily exposure to other kids and adult authority figures at a mass public venue. Also, the inevitable bias I have toward my son would either cause me to be too lenient on his lesson work or overcompensate and be too harsh and critical in an attempt to neutralise that bias.

About the only reason why I even consider it is because of just how shitty most schools are becoming —especially in fundie-land where I and my family presently reside— in the wake of this No Child Left Out Of Cram-School nonsense. But I doubt that's enough of a reason to take a risk with my son's whole future development.

[ThomasP]

...but taking all that together, you'd still be in shouting distance of a decent high school curriculum, and the child would probably come away with as much general education as the typical high school student of comparable intelligence. Get a bit of help from outside (a foreign language teacher and possibly a chemist) and you'd definitely have it.

And all it would take is six adults staying home to home-school the kids. And how many families do you know would have that combination of education and experience?

You know it hadn't really hit me until you wrote that bit up as to what homeschooling really does entail. When you really sit down ad put it in perspective like that, it's sobering.

It makes think back to a woman I knew on another board, basically your stereotypical fundie housewife, who used to argue with me when I'd comment about homeschooling being inadequate.

This is a woman that would endlessly argue with me over the validity of evolution and man-made global warming based on Fox News-style talking points - and would get upset because I'd question her ability to teach her children science.

Between the choice of that or the crumbling public schools, things really are bleak for a lot of kids today.

[Cairber]

I did my final education project on unschooling. It was an investigation of unschooling that ended up being quite critical. There isn't a lot of good source material on unschooling, most of it is first hand accounts, self-published books, and, of course, all the stuff Holt wrote. But I found that there is a very large unschooling population in my area, and between observing and meeting with many of them plus the sources I could find, I came to the conclusion that all the talk about "unschooling" working for everyone is untrue and that many of these kids do lack basic skills that others would have at that age (for example, I met many 7 year olds who could not read; of course, their philosophy is that this is OK)

I also found that it is a very elitist method of education. They talk about the child coming up with an idea, yet the parents never seemed to appreciate the privilege it took them to help expand on that idea. One parent told me of the 5 encyclopedia collections they had and how they have helped spark interests in their child- but who has that kind of collection? Others talk about back yard gardens, traveling all over the county, and sometimes traveling the world-- yet they all told me how great this would be for all kids to experience and none mentioned the privileges they had that made all these things possible.

There is also this idea of "trust." Unschoolers constantly talk about how, if you de-school a child (that is, give them a period of deprograming from real school), then that child will suddenly have all these interests that will lead them to learn just as much, if not more, than children in school. They never talk about a child who is not motivated; they claim this way of 'teaching' creates endless motivation and learning.


more later...

[Simon_Jester]

...but taking all that together, you'd still be in shouting distance of a decent high school curriculum, and the child would probably come away with as much general education as the typical high school student of comparable intelligence. Get a bit of help from outside (a foreign language teacher and possibly a chemist) and you'd definitely have it.

And all it would take is six adults staying home to home-school the kids. And how many families do you know would have that combination of education and experience?

As I said, I know none.

Remember, all I said is that I think you're close to being able to do it, to the point where it would work "well enough" if you actually tried it and made a really serious effort to pull together any outside resources you needed. Your child would learn a lot, and would have a good chance of coming away with as much actual knowledge as a normal high school student, though quite possibly not a typical honors student who goes to special advanced programs.

And, I agree, you're way the hellandgone out on the hyper-educated end of the bell curve. So I do in fact see what you're getting at. I'd rather this not turn into a case of violent agreement where you say "Proper home schooling is practically impossible!" while I say "Proper home schooling is almost always impossible."

[Serafina]

It's also important to remember that you need specific skills to teach - having an master in, say, physics doesnt make you a good physics teacher.
Having knowledge and conveying that knowledge are two different skills.

You can replace that knowledge with a parent-child connection for simple stuff, but once you have more complicated stuff - it doesn't really work that good any more.

As an anecdotal example:
My father used to homeschool/unschool me about physics (he has a master (or bachelor?) in physics).
Note that i still went to school normally.
It worked great for stuff like newtonian mechanics, simple thermodynamics, basic electricty - but i had HUGE gaps of knowledge for everything above that level.
Why?
Well, simple, he just did not know how to teach it, and he completly forgot to teach certain things.
Eg, the atomic model - we talked about fusion&fission before i learned the atomic model - which meant that it made no sense to me at all.
And when he explained the atomic model to me, he made it completly backwards - he tried to explain me the quantum mechanics model first. You know, they teach the simpler, older models first in school for a reason.

Anyway, teaching is hard, and you do not have that skill just because you are knowledgable about something.

[Akhlut]

Anyway, teaching is hard, and you do not have that skill just because you are knowledgable about something.

Yeah, I'm actually kind of worried about that when my son gets school-aged, as I have two bachelor's degrees (biology and history) and I'm worried that while I have the knowledge, I won't be able to simplify it properly enough for him to understand what I'm talking about.

Luckily, my wife is working on young childhood education, so she can teach me how to simplify.

This point also brings up worries about people who also don't know what they're talking about and are horrible at imparting 'knowledge'; would that leave the kid open to decent education for later, or would it leave that child with an even more terrible understanding of subjects that is almost impossible to eliminate because everything was taught by their parents?

[Surlethe]

So you are homeschooling the offspring then? Well I suppose unlike most you have the education to be able to do it properly, and will not deliberately withhold information from the munchkin...

A well-educated person with a knack for teaching (and the self-discipline to actually be a teacher every day) could probably give his or her kids a good elementary school education, though they'd need to find some way for the kid to develop social skills. Once you get to high school, though, there's no fucking way.

As far as social skills go, homeschoolers rarely work in a vacuum. Generally, they network and cooperate to maximize their collective resources - for instance, Rachel teaches several classes, in Latin, history, and debate, to homeschoolers from many different families.

Just for fun, Metatwaddle and I once figured out what subjects we could home school, assuming both of us stayed home all day and got support from both our parents. Now, keep in mind, I'm a novelist (aspiring, anyway) and master's-holding, state certified social studies teacher, and she's a physics/philosophy double major and classically trained pianist. My mother is a talented cook and professional bookkeeper, my dad can fix just about anything with an internal combustion engine, her dad is an anatomy professor, amateur astronomer, and avowed birder, and her mother was a banking executive with an Ivy League MBA. The six of us together couldn't give one kid a proper high-school education--none of us speak a foreign language fluently, none of us are qualified to teach chemistry, none of us are well-read in the classics, and we couldn't supply a proper science lab for biology, chemistry, or physics. Got that? Three graduate degrees, a hundred years of collective real-world experience, and two professional educators couldn't give a proper high school education.

That's what worries me about our homeschooling plans. We're together qualified to teach physics, economics, mathematics, history, Latin, and ancient Greek - that leaves gaps in chemistry, biology, and literature. Oh, yes, any idiot can teach English composition - but I happen to be qualified to teach that as well, and Rach can teach debate or rhetoric. I'm not sold on the importance of a literature class, so chemistry and biology worry me more. It is, however, possible to reconcile lack of qualifications or equipment for certain classes with homeschooling: often homeschooling parents will band together to hire teachers from the school district to teach classes. If that fails, we can always hire tutors and equip our own labs - Rachel learned Greek from a college professor her parents hired to tutor her, for example.

There's also the question of how the education our children would receive in the local school district would compare to the education we could give them. If the school district would involve rote memorization in an understaffed, overstudented classroom with no one-on-one teacher-student time, we could probably do a better job buying curricula and lab materials and learning the material a little bit ahead of the kids.