To study the moon landing you would go to Houston or Orlando. Duh. You sackless dumbass.

Actually applying some cognitive science terminology to your rant about stupid lazy people. People need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, right?

No one ever said that the kids would be learning on their own, but that they would be learning about what interests them. My daughter was three and couldn't wait to learn to read. Kids love, absolutely love to learn, as long as we don't impose a system on them that smashes that love. Playing games and coloring are a very important part of growing up. They will do that, until they have done that as much as they want, then they will go do something else, naturally. Let Education Always Remain Natural (LEARN).

Good point. Actually, I'm a product of public school. My unschooled daughter would tear me up for having written such a poor sentence. Doh!

Awesome post Workergnome!

Were there any kids at your high school that didn't go to college? Are there any kids that you graduated with living at home with Mom and Dad?

Wow! You sound like a very hard right strict father person who hates the government helping people out. So why are you defending an instrument of the socialist state like public education?

LOL! You are so right. How about modding it insightful?

Unschoolers don't use a cirriculum. The idea of unschooling is that when you come up with something that sounds interesting enough to learn, you figure out how to learn about that subject. Go as deep or as shallow as your interest takes you. Just like in the adult world. When we started homeschooling our kids, we were using a curriculum, and the kids did it, but they were bored silly pretty quickly. We came to call this "school at home". What's the point of that? Once we embraced unschooling, our kids blossomed. The loved it. They learned so much on their own it was astonishing.

The public school methodology works great for what it was designed for. The problem is that it was designed to create good factory workers for the dawn of the industrial age. For today's world, the school system is broken, and unschoolers aren't going to wait for someone to fix it. Taking action. Taking control.

The unschooling community is very much like the open source community. It's about freedom and control of your own destiny.

And you know this how?

There used to be aversion by universities to homeschooled children. More recently they have learned that kids who learn at home or on their own are better prepared for the independence of college than most of their public schooled peers. Yes, real, state run universities accept willingly applications from homeschool children. They can't "seek" them out because they are not aware of them, but if a homeschool kid applies, then they are recruited every bit as much as a public school "A" student.

If the parent lacks the skills, they find someone else to teach the kid that skill, if that's what the kid really wants to learn. Unschooling is about being and learning in the real world, not some artificial teaching environment.

"Unschooling: For those kids who aspire to be the dish washers of the future"

That, sir, is a statement.

Those aren't unschoolers. Unschoolers that I know, and since I am one, I know a lot of them, are every one of them is very conscience of socializing. They just want control of their children's education, and not turn it over to the state and the kids peers. I would argue that the main problem with public school is that we group all the kids by age rather than skill in each subject. By grouping by age, we end up with lots of peer groups that divide our children in ways that don't exist in the "adult" world.

Let us hope that a few can break out of that mold. I'm trying, but I'm trapped.

Why waste those six hours?

Universities actively recruit homeschool kids because they are better able to work independently than public school kids who have been told what to do for every task of their "education".