With their naming conventions, they could have gone further, and declined to report whether their children were boys, girls, or compact cars.
This is a very shitty way to break down gender barriers in society, but it's a great way to win passive aggressive head games with your parents.
The first raft of crap is no worse than the second raft of crap.
The "Anal X" tests works for 2 of the 3 names as well.
Putting aside the tone of the e-mail and whatever process led to it being written up in the newspaper, I'm relatively sympathetic to the idea of not leading with the gender of your newborn.
I hate gender roles, but I hate having my curiosity spurned even more.
Actually, that's not true. When it's an adult dressed ambiguously, I really don't care what their actual plumbing is.
But when it's your newborn, I dunno. I'm curious.
Technically 7 doesn't conflict with 6, I suppose.
I do have a kind of sympathy with what seem to be their goals, but actually trying to keep the kid's gender unknown for any length of time seems as if it would be hopelessly annoying.
Damnit, I was all ready to go with the "compact car" joke.
Their daughter will turn out to be super-into the Disney princesses, as revenge.
I have an amphibious gender too!
I couldn't care less, but I think it would be there interest to have more people that are allowed to change diapers.
I can't think of a scenario in which this story hits in the papers that doesn't involve the parents being some type of asshole.
Can everybody actually hear my eyes rolling or is that sound just echoing around the inside of my head?
12: Wow, that may be my worst yet!
I'll try again!
I couldn't care less, but I think it would be in their interest to have more people that are allowed to change diapers.
Storm is a girl name:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storm_%28Marvel_Comics%29
Well, I guess they can't ask the grandparents to babysit if they want to keep up their game.
I feel like they dig up a couple doing this and run a story about them every two years. I remember the father (in the last version of this that I read) replying to the nice old ladies who asked him if the baby was a boy or a girl, "Ask the baby."
Also, naming your kid Storm? Why not just cut to the chase and name it Tantrum?
In the hopes that natural rebelliousness will make the kid meek and biddable?
If it were named Tantrum it would be my two-year-old. Holy mood disorder, you crazy toddler.
(And may I add, as someone who really doesn't like making small talk with strangers, I am getting worn down by the number of conversations I need to have on a daily basis with nice old ladies. Grumble.)
So now, instead of people being influenced in their treatment of this kid by their gender preconceptions, they'll be influenced by their annoyance at liberals. The real problem, though, is that to keep this up the parents will necessarily infringe upon this childs god-given right to run around naked.
I'm too lazy to look it up, but I believe there's a lot of research indicating that people change their behavior towards, and interpretations of, newborns and toddlers, depending powerfully on what sex they're told the kid has. Same *child* in many of the experiments.
I wonder how long they will keep it up. Will they try sending Storm to school without revealing gender. When Storm asks "Am I a boy or a girl?" will they reply, "That's up to you, dear! Although as it turns out your genitalia is typical of -------"
I'm not actually appalled. It seems like an interesting experiment.
The real problem, though, is that to keep this up the parents will necessarily infringe upon this childs god-given right to run around naked take a dump on the good couch.
The couch's natural oils will clean that right up, Moby.
6,7: hate having my curiosity spurned even more.
Yes, thus my experience at a party the night of my firstborn's birth where I withheld that information for about 15 seconds and was nearly lynched (my decision to briefly withhold made spontaneously when confronted with everyone's immense need to know or more precisely their asking "What is it?" in unison to which I replied, "A baby!"). So *newsflash*, I can be a bit of an asshole, but in my tired/emotional state I found the manifest evidence of the primacy of gender over any other consideration* to be a bit depressing. In part because of the many actual concerns and considerations of that day (plus looking ahead to those of the immediate future), gender was inconsequential, so it kind of caught me up short--of course other people were not in that mode of thought.
*To be fair, my mere presence, demeanor and body language all signaled that nothing really serious or concerning was afoot.
Does this mean they use "it" when they need a pronoun to refer to the baby?
Also, how long is a 2 year old going be able to keep a secret?
Our couch is made of goose necks.
JESUS, STORMCROW! What was it?
28: Right, but then they went to the newspaper (apparently).
the primacy of gender over any other consideration
See, I would have asked you what color it was.
I would have asked if federal campaign funds were used to buy the baby.
I drew the line when my son wanted to buy Dora the Explorer girls underpants. But that was less an issue of my enforcing gender roles, and more an issue of my concern for the comfort of his balls.
they're allowed to pick out their own clothes in the boys and girls sections of stores
It does endlessly irritate me that there are boys and girls sections of stores, as opposed to having a unisex kids section with some gendered items.
Except for the rare occasion when we happen to walk by somebody selling t-shirts, our son gets to pick exactly none of his own clothes. (I suppose he gets to pick his Halloween costume.) He can pick from what we've already bought or received as gifts.
36: Well, I havn't measured, but I'd reckon they are each about the size of a olive.
23: Exactly, hence the curiosity. The rest of us must know whether to call the child "champ" or "sweetie" and what sort of jokes to make about their future vocation and abilities. Otherwise we're stuck with the gender-neutral nickname "scout" and burbling non-committally about how the kid is "super-cute" and "really something."
40: It just seems like little girls panties have room for a pair of olives.
the gender-neutral nickname "scout" "porkchop"
Storm?
Also, doesn't this count as actively concealing the gender identity rather than simply not disclosing it? And if so, where does it end?
42: Not comfortably, no. Even with the spacious briefs, you'll notice little boys spend a lot of time adjusting their olives.
31: JESUS, STORMCROW! What was it?
And this post really reminded of the incident because my initial announcement was "Baby's out!" and then continuing per 28. As to the answer, you may RTFA. I mean I was all ready with his Apgar scores ... oops.
And if so, where does it end?
Therapy.
Even with the spacious briefs, you'll notice little boys spend a lot of time adjusting their olives
Grown men, too. Gotta have breathing room, especially when you consider the shrinkage and expansion factor.
Although I think its actually more a matter of the contours of the fabric than the amount of space, per se.
So what color was *it*?
How dare you objectify my precious child.
I find both aggressive promotion and aggressive resistance of gender norms by parents of very young kids annoying. Not totally sure why; something about treating your kid as part of some agenda they haven't signed up for. Obviously if your teenage boy wants to wear a dress or whatever, you should let them.
I'm assuming it was a boy, named after the legendary Storm Davis.
What about aggressive subversion of gender norms?
Is there such a thing as aggressive indifference?
56: Yet you still want to know their color.
58: When you'd think he could tell by feeling with his hand.
These parents will burn in hell for the names they've lumbered their children with, but in the event they appeal, I sympathise with the idea that the shape of a baby's genitals are irrelevant for all conceivable purposes prior to potty training.
This was one of the minor campaigns, along with women not automatically taking their partner's name, that we thought we'd won back in the days of 2G feminism, but somehow it seems we lost both of them after all.
Oh, here's what was bugging me.
"If you really want to get to know someone, you don't ask what's between their legs."
I consider myself fortunate, that I have never had to resort to this method of determining someone's gender. (Also, is he implying that gender is just about what's between your legs? It's the 21st century, bro!)
59: That's why I don't have to ask about the gender.
57: I find it annoying when people have an aggressively moderate stand on gender norms, neither broadcasting their constant struggle to subvert the gendering of their child nor attempting to bludgeon their children into pre-cast "princess" and "football hero" moulds. You know, the kind of people who are all smug up in their moderate sensible-ness.
Should I be worried that my kid is totally fascinated by jail? Like, 10 questions a day about jail? And a song she made up that goes "we are going, we are going, we are going off to jail."
the shape of a baby's genitals are irrelevant for all conceivable purposes
The exception that proves the rule.
This post title keeps making me think "Baby's in reno with the Vitamin D".
64: If she's a teenager, then yes.
Should I be worried that my kid is totally fascinated by jail?
Oh, there's more annoying things to deal with. The flickr pool has a glimpse to the kind of things to expect in the years ahead.
64: Kid fascinations are pretty random. When I was a kid, I was totally fascinated by desperadoes and songs like "Ghost Riders in the Sky" and "Riders on the Storm" (which I also assumed was a cowboy song).
64. No,on balance, unless your kid's a teenager. When I was in kindergarten I had a friend who was obsessed with what it was like to have a bomb dropped on you for a few months, but he turned out fine.
64: You don't do any criminal law, do you?
69: Well, you know what they say.
74: You're one deep archives-linking motherfucker today, aren't you apo?
The context of 69: A couple of boys my daughter knows run around at recess "flashing" each other by pulling up their shirts. My sixth grader decides she's game and does it back. Naturally some marshmallow of a kid freaks out at seeing a brightly colored polka dot teenie bra and tells parents, who in turn call the school.
Bonus gender issue: Principal initially tells me he's leaning towards not suspending the two boys who initiated all this. Me and him have a chat about how I'm not all right with asymmetric punishment for girls. He says I've given him something to "think about". For his sake I hope he suspended those boys because if not me and him are going to be having an unpleasant chat with higher ups at the district.
This would seem innocuous -- if eccentric but still well within the bounds of conventional "I hate my parents" thirtysomething behavior -- if the parents hadn't reached for the mass media megaphone. Now it seems a little creepy, in a liberal/Canadian version of baby beauty pageants sort of way. Sometimes I wonder what refuge there will be, and where, for the last people in America who do things without running to the Internet to announce and justify.
||
NMM to Mars Spirit Rover.
What, rule 34. Someone was doing it.
|>
I decided it'd be pleasingly obnoxious to try to guess the kid's gender. I'm pretty sure he's a boy.
He says I've given him something to "think about".
That means he won't think about it.
78: Those first, orange-red images of the rough desert surface of Mars were the last time I spent any time at all gawping at the NYT front page.
It took me awhile into 76 to realize that Gswift's daughter had done something that she was being punished for.
Me and him have a chat about how I'm not all right with asymmetric punishment for girls. He says I've given him something to "think about". For his sake I hope he suspended those boys because if not me and him are going to be having an unpleasant chat with higher ups at the district.
Excellent.
I decided it'd be pleasingly obnoxious to try to guess the kid's gender. I'm pretty sure he's a boy.
Even more obnoxious would be to ask "So you guys are going to keep trying until you get that little girl you want?"
Oh, there's so much to hate getting into the article.
"[...]Jazz and now Kio are almost exclusively assumed to be girls," says Stocker, adding he and Witterick don't out them. It's the boys' choice whether they want to offer a correction.
They're four and two. They do not have the ability to make that choice. In all things they are looking to their parents for guidance; by remaining passive, the parents are actually making the choice, to do nothing; and imparting the lesson that this is the correct choice, and that asserting their gender identity is thus incorrect.
"I don't think I am responsible for that -- the culture that narrowly defines what he should do, wear and look like is."
They can do what they want, but it irks me that they won't admit that they're responsible for their choices as parents and are pretending that preschoolers are calling the shots.
The couple plan to keep Storm's sex a secret as long as Storm, Kio and Jazz are comfortable with it.
Preschoolers? I guess I mean infants.
Therapy.
They're four and two. They do not have the ability to make that choice. In all things they are looking to their parents for guidance; by remaining passive, the parents are actually making the choice, to do nothing; and imparting the lesson that this is the correct choice, and that asserting their gender identity is thus incorrect.
This seems overblown -- I don't quite get the leap from "My parents don't affirmatively correct people who guess my gender wrong" to "My gender identity is incorrect."
83 is win. Especially because it's almost sure to have a kernel of truth. If both of the kids are "choosing" to dress like girls, it sounds likely that the parents are (unconsciously?) pushing them in that direction.
Sorry, my wording was unclear. The leap was to "Asserting my gender identity is incorrect."
If both of the kids are "choosing" to dress like girls, it sounds likely that the parents are (unconsciously?) pushing them in that direction.
That doesn't sound necessary at all. Boy clothes are perceived as much more unisex than girl clothes -- a kid wearing four garments (shirt, pants, shoes, hat) could have three garments from the boy section of the store, and one sparkly pink thing, and would come off as unambiguously female because ordinary parents let girls wear boy clothes if they really want to, but stop boys from wearing girl clothes.
87: You weren't unclear, I misread you. I still think it's a jump, but not the same jump I thought it was.
So, with Storm, Jazz and Kio's parentals: Which bathroom are they sending the kids into when they're in a public facilitty? Are they learning how to use a urinal? Are they figuring all this out by trial and error ("free choice," I mean) too?
I'd say a kid might deduce "Asserting my gender identity is a low priority for my parents" or "Having other people be mistaken as to my gender isn't a terribly significant mistake", but I don't see why they'd get to "Telling people my gender, if I want to, is wrong."
90: They're young enough that I'd expect them to all be going into either bathroom with the parent they're with, wouldn't you think?
91: There're eventually going to get to "My parents are using me as a means of socio-political expression to a far greater extent than most parents do."
92: That's what we do. But the short urinals are so nice, when you can find them.
86 was me, further pondering how the parents are actually still parenting even if they're trying not to. I still think so, though:
The boys are encouraged to challenge how they're expected to look and act based on their sex.
In other words, they are encouraged to act like girls, and not encouraged to act like boys.
[Jazz] asked his mom to write a note on his application to the High Park Nature Centre because he likes the group leaders and wants them to know he's a boy.
By being encouraged (not just permitted) to violate society's expectations, they are feeling pressured by these expectations much more intensely than most children do. I suppose you could argue that this isn't as bad as being passively indoctrinated, but:
"Help girls do boy things. Help boys do girl things. Let your kid be whoever they are!"
.. as Jazz wrote. Looks like he's completely absorbed the idea that there are "boy things" and "girl things" and they're not the same.
At two and under, maybe, but the eldest is four. By 4-5 and up, the whole troop of kids shouldn't be having to tag along for each call of nature, right?
94.1: True enough. But that's not necessarily all that damaging.
In other words, they are encouraged to act like girls, and not encouraged to act like boys.
Again, doesn't necessarily follow at all -- that could just as easily mean that the kids are encouraged to do what they want and push back against anyone who tells them it's gender-inappropriate.
96: Public places, it's more like 6 or so before you'd send a kid into the bathroom alone. I honestly don't remember when we started sending them off unsupervised, but it was schoolage.
100: What I'm getting at is that younger than 6, they're still going into the girl's bathroom with mom and to the boy's bathroom with dad. They're learning which bathroom it's appropriate for them to go into and how to act there, right? They're not part of an undifferentiated mass of siblings going everywhere together.
100: I'd say school aged also. For one thing, ours can't possibly wash his hands without a step or a boost. For another thing, he certainly wouldn't care about washing his hands if he were alone.
97
True enough. But that's not necessarily all that damaging.
On the other hand .
I don't see why they'd get to "Telling people my gender, if I want to, is wrong."
More like "If someone assumes I'm a girl, I should hold my tongue, even if I don't like it."
And he does say that he doesn't like it. What if, instead of calling him a girl, people would regularly insult him, like call him stupid, and his parents refused to react since it's his decision?
they're still going into the girl's bathroom with mom and to the boy's bathroom with dad.
Well, no, because you don't have both parents with you all the time. Little boys get taken into the ladies room routinely because they're out and about without a male chaperone for the men's room -- fathers are less likely to take girls into the men's room, but it still happens.
that could just as easily mean that the kids are encouraged to do what they want and push back against anyone who tells them it's gender-inappropriate.
And yet, when the boy's pick up a stick and use it as a gun (as boys do), I have a hard time believing these particular parents don't try to put a stop to that. Which in itself is not at all a bad thing to do (as I do all the time), but would nonetheless drive home the point that "boy stuff is bad", while a similarly stereotypically girly thing would go uncensured.
Again, doesn't necessarily follow at all -- that could just as easily mean that the kids are encouraged to do what they want and push back against anyone who tells them it's gender-inappropriate.
No, if they're being encouraged to challenge society's gender roles but not encouraged to comply with them, they're being told to act like girls. It's not just this sentence; the rest of the article, too, makes it sound like they are not being encouraged to ignore society's gender roles, even though this seems much more like what the parents are trying to achieve.
(104 was me again -- who doesn't use autocomplete? neil doesn't use autocomplete!)
I have a hard time believing these particular parents don't try to put a stop to that.
Argh. I do think these people sound terribly annoying. But you're inventing bad behavior here and then condemning them for it.
105: If necessary, maybe, but given their druthers most parents take them into a gender-appropriate public bathroom most of the time when possible, right? The moms who take the little boys into the girl's bathroom are not necessarily teaching them that this is where they go potty, are they? They're doing so simply because there isn't someone to watch them if they leave them behind.
I mean, maybe some are, but it would seem highly unusual behavior. I'm not a parent myself though, I'm just going on what I observe of parental behavior in a facility full of kids several nights a week.
Clearly, these kids are going to either murder their parents or become child stars. I don't think anybody is disputing that. But, I do that the neil is reading in between the lines too much.
But, I do that the neil
I read between the words.
I don't see the distinction -- when I took Newt into a ladies room to use the toilets when he was younger, I never thought about it as teaching him which room to use. I guess I figured by the time he was old enough to go on his own, he could read the sign.
But seriously, from 29:
Does this mean they use "it" when they need a pronoun to refer to the baby?
How long would you use "it" for?
Kids can shit in the woods. Don't like the woods? Shit in the dryer.
114: First, I bet they give up pretty fast -- this would be terribly hard to keep up. But you wouldn't need to use 'it', you'd just have to avoid pronouns. "Storm's going to need to get Storm's socks before putting on Storm's shoes."
117: I wonder about Bob Dole's parents now.
54 Not totally sure why; something about treating your kid as part of some agenda they haven't signed up for.
Well but this describes a great deal of one's life before the age of 18. (I agree it's annoying, though.)
I love the "we are going to jail" song. Solfege it out and I will hum it on the bus to Rikers next time.
Soy un(a) perdedor(a).
I have seen @ used to create gender-ambiguous Spanish. To wit: Latin@. Works less with with "un/una" come to think of it.
Jazz was old enough for school last September, but chose to stay home. "When we would go and visit programs, people -- children and adults -- would immediately react with Jazz over his gender," says Witterick, adding the conversation would gravitate to his choice of pink or his hairstyle.
That's mostly why he doesn't want to go to school. When asked if it upsets him, he nods, but doesn't say more.
I guess I'm just repeating myself, but does it not sound like he doesn't like being called a girl but that he also feels powerless to prevent it? I don't know whether it's because he's insecure about asserting his gender or because he thinks his parents would reject him if he started slavishly following gender roles just to fit in, or what, because there aren't enough lines to read in between. The lines themselves, though, are where I get the idea that he doesn't like being called a girl but feels powerless to prevent it. (And I don't think it's because his parents let him wear pink.)
118:As well you should:
Sen. Bob Dole: Well, uh, not at all, Ted. In fact, after much soul searching, prayer, and consultation with my wife, Elizabeth, I've decided that I, uh - well, uh, in order to give the Amercian people the kind of presidential campaign that they deserve - well, I can't do it like Bill Clinton, as just a man. That's why I intend to undergo a series of medical procedures which will permit me to campaign, not as a man, but as a kind of half-man/ half-woman. Some kind of an androgynous sex neuter.
112 reminds of lyrics for a blues song I've been working on for years. It goes something like:
I'm a man! Yes, I'm a man!
I walk up to the door,
And on the door, it says "Men".
You know I walk in
Without any hesitation at all!
Yes, I'm a man!
M! A! N!
Maybe you get the idea.
120: Yes, but it's either "Soy un perdedor" or "Soy una perdedora". I am a fan of at-sign as new letter, myself.
I guess that based on gender-neutralized job listings I've seen, it would probably be written "Soy un/a perdedor/a."
in the article linked in the article, there's a lot more detail, including "Witterick now calls the baby she, imagining the "s" in brackets."
How did I miss that doozy? "Imagining the 's' in brackets" would make a good metaphor for this whole story.
121- but he also is the one choosing all the girly stuff. He's choosing the pink and the braids and the long hair. It seems like an okay thing to me if the kid wants to dress like that, but doesn't want to be teased. You think he should be forced to conform and then sent to school? I don't understand what you think the parents should be doing to prevent the teasing, other than forcing the kid to quit wearing what he wants to wear.
110: I don't know. Neil has run into some trouble elaborating his 95 but I don't see anything inherently wrong there.
I mean, it seems pretty reasonable to conclude that if boys at that age and in that situation are "choosing" to dress like "girls," they are not necessarily making a neutral "choice" but could just as easily trying to live up to a parental expectation that they "challenge" gender norms. A great deal of gender is communicated by tacit expectation and non-explicit pressure, I don't see why that should be assumed not to be the case here.
Likewise, putting the burden of choice on them to say something when other people assume they're girls is genuinely fucked up. It does communicate a tacit expectation that they shouldn't offer such a correction either.
121: It looks as though what he's finding unpleasant is kids hassling him about his clothes and hair.
adding the conversation would gravitate to his choice of pink or his hairstyle.
I'm not seeing anything that indicates he's been discouraged from asserting that he's a boy.
Honestly, I think these parents are making their kids lives hard. But it's hard because everyone else in the world is so incredibly uptight about staying gender-appropriate. This sort of thing probably isn't the way to fix that, but the uptightness is a shame and hurts people.
130: The parents' own exaggerated concern with a faux-emancipation of their children is as reprehensible a form of "uptightness" as anything they're facing.
Honestly, the worst thing in the story to me is this:
Both boys are "unschooled," a version of homeschooling, which promotes putting a child's curiosity at the center of his or her education. As Witterick puts it, it's "not something that happens by rote from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. weekdays in a building with a group of same-age people, planned, implemented and assessed by someone else."
IOW, both boys are being subjected to the ravages of crackpot alternative pedagogies from an early age, with the parents telling themselves it's much better than boring old "school." This is much worse than the gender stuff in a way, really, since pedagogies based on unstructured learning are persistent and pretty well-documented failures. At some point, someone's going to have to sit them down and tell them they are making choices for their kids, whether they want to or not, because that's a big part of what parenting is.
The article asserts that Jazz doesn't like to be called a girl. The mother is quoted as saying that, when someone calls Jazz a girl, she doesn't say anything. What is Jazz supposed to think when his mother stays silent when someone says something that hurts him? The article doesn't say--and it would be pretty hard for anyone to find out--but it seems incredible that a six-year-old would conclude that this silence means his mother respects his right to speak for himself. Children do listen.
Unfortunately the parents are doing a lot more to ensure that society's rigid gender roles harm their children, than to help dismantle society's rigid gender roles. A proud, self-confident boy wearing pink to his first day of school might help that latter goal.
I give. We can unambiguously tell from the linked article that the parents involved are maliciously and self-aggrandizingly destroying their kid's lives, and what they're doing has no redeeming features.
Storm is a girl name
Indeed. And assuming these kids don't grow up to despise their parents and everything they stand for, I reckon there's a good chance Storm will end up like the Storm in Minchin's poem.
Like most things, "unschooling" describes a wide spectrum of behaviors. Although I agree that much of it is misguided, I know several families who I'd describe as doing various forms of unschooling, and most of them got a better than average education.
Time for me to jump in on behalf of the defense! Crackpot alternative pedagogies? Maybe, but please do note that the father is a science teacher and the mother is also involved (probably unprofessionally) in teaching? I hate this assumption that parents are automatically incompetent to educate their young children. The article mentions that Jazz (the only one of their kids who is even eligible for school) can read and write, so he's not behind for his age.
(I should mention that I was non-schooled until 5th grade (my mother was also a teacher) and quickly learned that I was several years ahead of my classmates in everything, except for writing cursive.)
136: Crackpot alternative pedagogies? Maybe, but please do note that the father is a science teacher and the mother is also involved (probably unprofessionally) in teaching?
Teachers aren't immune to crackpot alternative pedagogies, since the educational profession is notoriously vulnerable to faddism. I don't assume that parents are "automatically incompetent" to educate their young children; I do assume that choosing to do it via ideologically "unstructured" approaches is hugely risky, because "unstructured" pedagogies do not necessarily road test well. (I learned to read at home, too, before I ever saw the inside of a school -- but teaching children at home is not automatically "unschooling.")
In practice, I think the main problem with "unschooling" is if you have parents who don't like math, then the kids won't find math or mathematical sciences interesting. So having a parent who's a science teacher makes a big difference on this front, and I actually expect (in the absence of evidence beyond "father is a science teacher" and "unschooled") they're getting a solid education.
Considering the widespread misery of mass-educated childhood, "unschooling" deserves at least a hearing.
OT: If you think that there are "problems" with the films of Terrence Malick, you are the problem. In unrelated news, I hate the Internet.
"His dance is a science teacher, so they're probably getting a solid education" is indeed quite a leap. But who knows, maybe so.
I don't see why you need a crackpot alternative pedagogy at all. And the "structure" in public education largely has to do with the logistics of operating a school for hundreds of students. When the only teacher is mom and the class size is one, what do you need structure for?
The other big problem is with kids who have trouble reading/don't like to read. Learning to read is really important. But I don't know what percentage of people don't want to learn to read, it might be pretty small.
139: Considering the widespread misery of mass-educated childhood, "unschooling" deserves at least a hearing.
Bah. The "widespread misery of mass-educated childhood" is what universal literacy is based on. I like Pink Floyd, too, but come on.
143: It's a shame that the U.S. education system hasn't gotten much literacy, much less the universal, for the widely-acknowledged misery of several generations of children.
I admit to an extremely strong bias against homeschooling, though the obviously successfully homeschooled folks who show up here have changed my mind a bit on that. Still, it strikes me as a solution that really does not scale, and I'm skeptical that these particular folks are likely to do a particularly good job.
I regularly take my daughter to the men's room; what else am I supposed to do in public? Recently, she started demanding to go to the "girls bathroom" which is super annoying and has provoked fights. Curse you, images of silhouettes with long hair and bows indicating the sex appropriate restroom to the illiterate!
Also, Pink Floyd sucks. Almost as much as Yes.
141: I don't see why you need a crackpot alternative pedagogy at all.
You need one to conclude that education must reject the notion of the educator setting a curriculum for the student, which is what "unschooling" proposes.
Well, my base assumption (based data from my home state) is that homeschooled kids in the US get better than average education. Anecdotally people who self-describe as "unschooling" mostly just means the parents are hippies, and anecdotally they don't seem to be all that different in terms of education outcomes than other homeschoolers. But, again anecdotally, I think that self-described "unschoolers" have a weakness that if the parents don't like math the kids won't learn math (rather than learning it badly and hating it), which is dangerous because if you at least know how to do some math (even if you hate it) you can be turned around by a good teacher down the road. But science teacher parent makes me worry less about this point. So I'm back to my "probably above average" baseline.
What, exactly, is a solid first-grade education anyway? I think if you get to seventh grade and are up to speed on the three R's, you're well equipped for future success in higher education. I don't exactly belong to the greater homeschooling community but I think any parent who's reasonably intelligent, has an appreciation for learning and (crucially) has several hours a day to spend on their kid's education is capable of getting them there. A parent who hated school maybe not so much.
I get wistful about the idea of homeschooling, because it sounds as if you could get so much more, academically, done in so much less time. But there's the whole socialization thing to worry about, and then the fact that I couldn't really homeschool and hold down a full time job, and it's clearly not practical.
144: The US has a literacy rate of 99%. And where its mass education system is still in place, it does quite well. (The US has problems of underfunded inner-city schools and a wide disparity between public and private education, but it has a long, long way to fall before it hits Third World standards.)
The notion that mass education is totes boring and must be challenged is simply groundless.
And 148 is right -- I'd guess that the big homeschooling risk would be a parent who just skips math completely.
145: Certainly homeschooling doesn't scale at all well and is always going to be a minority option, but I'm not sure why that should make you biased against it.
You can't just conflate "structure" and "curriculum" like that. You need structure in a school because it has to have a place for every child. You need structure because resources don't allow for each student following the curriculum at his/her own pace.
151: Hey, did you see that statistic that was floating around a couple of weeks ago claiming that 47% of Detroit residents were functionally illiterate? I never tracked it back to the original source, but you know that's got to either be just false, or have a definition of 'functionally illiterate' that knocks out half the House of Representatives.
Eh, I should shut up because I have neither anecdotal nor actual knowledge of the effects of homeschooling. My gut is that it just seems like flaky know it all individualism of the worst American kind, not dissimilar to bloggers who go off on all kinds of issues with minimal knowledge and convince themselves that they're masterminds. I know that a lot of teahing is crowd management, but surely there's good reason to think that on average people who have been extensively and professionally trained to, and have experience with, educating even younger kids are likely to do better at it than amateurs on the fly, at least on average. With exception for genius kids and remarkable parents, but your kids probably aren't geniuses and you probably aren't remarkable. But this is really a prejudice, not an argument.
I don't know about current practices (nor every state), but when I was a homeschooler I still had to take the state standardized tests.
I mean, mass education clearly didn't teach me how to edit before posting, but let's agree to ignore that.
154: You can't just conflate "structure" and "curriculum" like that.
Sure you can, since curriculum is a key part of educational structure. The apparatus of structure may be lessened, but it is most certainly there, in a relationship of one teacher to one student where the teacher sets the curriculum and expectations.
155: Yeah, claims about "functional literacy" are much harder to evaluate. I've seen similar claims about Canadian literacy, but it's hard to work out what they're based on.
Certainly you'd expect teachers on average to be better at teaching than non-teachers. But would you really expect them to be say 20 times better? The very thing that makes homeschooling non-scalable, means that you can do a better job with much less skill because you have so much more time per student.
Is "every weekday you must spend several hours on educational activities" enough structure?
I don't get the theory behind 160. Are you saying that a
homeschooling parent can succeed by being 1/20 as good a teacher as a professional, because there aren't 19 other kids in the room? That doesn't seem at all obviously right (to be clear, I am 100% certain that you know more and have thought more about this than me).
Well right certainly it's not actually 20 times easier, it's somewhere between 1 and 20. But teaching one person is way way easier than teaching a room. And not just for crowd management reasons, but because you can aim just at what that one person is confused about rather than saying things that are only helpful for half the class.
Is homeschooling anything close to common in other post-industrialized countries? If so, what sort of people do it? I don't think it is as wholly identified with reactionary political/social opinions in the U.S. as when I was a child, but the association seems pretty strong even now.
Asilon homeschools three of her four kids, and I would say she falls into the sensible-moderately hippieish category.
Re functional illiteracy, I think they're typically based on being asked to paraphrase the contents of newspaper articles. Which is problematic.
I think that association is why the non-reactionaries call it "unschooling" -- because "homeschool" has become a word for people actively opposed to their children being (mis)educated (by Godless commie indoctrinators).
Also classes are just not a very efficient component of learning. I think anything beyond an hour or two of time listening to someone else talk in a day is time that's eating into more useful ways of learning (reading, solving problems, talking one-on-one with someone).
167 gets it right, "unschooling" mostly just means "homeschooling" done by people who don't want to be mistaken for conservative christians.
167: I suspect that that association is a little unfair these days, or at least incomplete. I'd love to know whether there are substantial homeschooling movements in England, Japan, Germany, etc., etc.
Study Shows That 50% of Detroit Residents Just Don't Give a Fuck
"64: Kid fascinations are pretty random. When I was a kid, I was totally fascinated by desperadoes and songs like "Ghost Riders in the Sky" and "Riders on the Storm" (which I also assumed was a cowboy song)."
When I was 5 or 6, I was completely obsessed with storks. It has nothing to do with the childbirth myth, or a movie, and I never saw storks in real life. I just liked the look of them, i guess.
I don't think it's that common in the UK, but I definitely associate home-schooling here with moderate hippy types who want to give their kids a less rote-learned and more child-driven education. Not religious right-wingers.
No one else is amused by a preschool aged child being described as "homeschooled"? We used to call that "childcare" or "parenting", didn't we?
Or perhaps it's just me who feels snarky when I read this stuff.
170: Not all homeschooling is done by conservative christians (and not all conservative christians who homeschool do it for religious reasons!), but it's enough of the homeschooling population in the US that I can understand why some people would want to find a different name to distance themselves.
Looked it up, and was surprised to see it's legal in France. I's not in Germany, though.
OT: Duke Nukem Forever has gone gold. I can remember when I would have cared about this.
Home education is increasing over here, mostly due to the internet and so more people becoming aware of it. It's certainly not seen a a Christian/right wing thing here (although there are people like that of course).
It really is SO different to school education that it's pretty hard for people who haven't experienced it to really understand it, I have found. The whole idea that you can only learn things if someone else is teaching you, to their agenda, just isn't true at all. The more kids I meet, the more bizarre it seems that it is at all feasible to stick 30 of them who are roughly the same age in one room and teach them anything successfully.
Teaching professionally is totally different. I do some private maths tutoring, and assume I'm okay at it - my students succeed and get the results that they want - but I'm pretty sure I'd be a completely appalling classroom teacher. My role with my own kids is not to teach them stuff necessarily, but to be there to help them out and show them where to find the things they want to learn.
And LB - "sensible-moderately hippieish category" - I'll take it.
I'm sure there are hippies that homeschool, but "unschooling" is not just homeschooling for hippies / non-reactionaries. It is a specific term for a specific kind of pedagogy.
OT: Duke Nukem Forever has gone gold. I can remember when I would have cared about this.
Fuck yeah. I may have to buy it on principle.
What I'm arguing (and I'm not 100% sure about this, but I suspect it's true) is that someone self-describing as an "unschooler" is not a very strong indicator that they ascribe to all of the writings of John Holt, but is a very strong indicator that they're hippies. Similarly, parents who send their kids of Waldorf schools, probably kinda hippies, probably don't actually believe in the four humors.
Over here, we tend to call it autonomous education. (Rather than defining it by what it's not.) It's the idea that learning what you want, when you want, is more efficient than trying to cram facts into someone's head when they don't give a shit. It's generally how we learn as adults isn't it, so I never really understand why people think it's such a crackpot theory when applied to children.
Maybe not in America, but (highly German-influenced) Chile is lousy with Waldorf schools and homeopathic pharmacies.
And if I meet a British person who tells me that their family believe in autonomous education, then I probably would assume they'd read John Holt, and wouldn't necessarily assume they were hippies in the new age/Minchin-poem-Storm fashion. Possibly hippies in the bleeding heart liberal sense, although I know a scary number of libertarian-identifying home educators.
To me, the great advantage of home education is that the kids can truly be educated in a way appropriate to their "age, ability and aptitude" (as one of our legal phrases goes). Which means my 10 year old can do as much maths as he likes, and that I really am not worried that my 8 1/2 year old isn't reading fluently yet. We're fairly structured these days, but I still prefer to keep it child-led - they might as well go to school if they're just going to have someone telling what to focus their energies on all day.
I try to avoid teaching them any English grammar too.
Part of the reason I was arguing that "unschooling doesn't necessarily mean what you think it means" is that I suspect DS has some really extreme radical version of "unschooling" in mind. Partly because of the more innocuous name I'd guess that "autonomous education" doesn't automatically make people think it's the most extreme parody of itself.
Looking back though it appears that DS hasn't actually said what's so crackpotty about unschooling.
186: It'd be interesting to try teaching kids actual grammar, like what they'd learn from a linguist.
YOU MUST UNLEARN WHAT YOU HAVE LEARNED.
Is there evidence as to homeschooling effectiveness that controls for race/class/other non-curricular factors? Or do the studies just match up the homeschooled vs nonhomeschooled without controls?
And if I meet a British person who tells me that their family believe in autonomous education, then I probably would assume they'd read John Holt, and wouldn't necessarily assume they were hippies in the new age/Minchin-poem-Storm fashion
My Minchin link wasn't in response to the homeschooling thing so much as the absurdly over-the-top rejection of gender norms. Well, to be honest, it was really in response to the name Storm. I'll take any excuse to reference Minchin.
By all means, let's heap mockery onto people who are trying to subvert the gender norms of our society, because goodness knows our current gender norms work so fucking well.
Also, Storm is a fine name for a human.
190: The SES of homeschooling parents would be interesting, since we know that the SES of the parents of non-homeschooled kids is a generally decent predictor of the kids' outcomes (in the aggregate, anyway).
I think if I were homeschooling my non-existent kids, I'd be attracted to the idea of a small collective of parents doing it collaboratively: our friend Mr. Smith is good at math/science? Maybe he should do the mathy/sciency schooling. Our other friend Ms. Jones is terrific at literature? Perhaps she would let young Johnny join her and her children for reading. This would offset any concern that I at least would have that some areas were being neglected in favor of others.
I don't know much about it, but I've gotten the sense that online communities of homeschoolers are pretty robust, sharing instructional materials and tips and concerns, and that parents are pretty actively hands-on in trying to ensure that their kids aren't missing important areas of learning that will hamper them in future.
I am tempted to say that one of the great virtues of school is that it teaches you that life is full of (and how to deal with) arbitrary, brutal authority and subject matter you find dull and uninspiring. But that is perhaps a cynicism too far.
156
... but surely there's good reason to think that on average people who have been extensively and professionally trained to, and have experience with, educating even younger kids are likely to do better at it than amateurs on the fly ...
Experience probably helps a bit in maintaining classroom discipline but the professional training is basically worthless. Teachers without it perform just as well.
194
... arbitrary, brutal authority ...
I imagine I could provide my kids experience with this without extensive professional training.
194: Off the top of my head, I'd say that there's plenty of time to figure that out later, when you have more of the intellectual and emotional tools available to deal with and address it.
Anecdotally, the handful of homeschooled kids I knew -- knew in college or in their twenties -- had figured it out fine. But, and this may be important, they were from UMC (culturally if not economically) families who didn't exactly keep their kids sheltered from the wider world.
True, and your kids would also grow up hating teachers unions.
Myself, I find that it not only comes naturally, but provides hours of wholesome amusement.
I've had a few homeschooled students (for religious reasons, in the cases I'm thinking of), and they were fucking sharp. They weren't great writers, usually, but neither are most kids who went to public high schools. But some of them were far better prepared than their peers for doing the kind of self-directed inquiry and research that creates great college-level projects, and they tend to be less embarrassed about sharing their ideas and knowledge with peers.
From _School Figures_, which is about a decade old now:
Trait, Homeschooling families, Public school families
white (1998), 94%, 63%
SAHM not working for pay, 76.9%, 30%
Parents w/post-secondary education, 88%, l.t. 50%
Certified teacher as parent, 19.7% of mothers and 7.1% of fathers, l.t. 3% of US labor force
1997 median family income , $52k, $43,545 (families with children)
4th grade kids watch more than 4 hrs. TV/day, 1.7% , 38.5%
191 - no, it just seemed like an easy way to describe the person I was imagining. Also yes, you can never have too many gratuitous Minchin references.
192.1 - I have to agree. I can't imagine their stance is sustainable for long, and I'm sure it's annoying as hell in real life, but I find it admirable and appealing.
193.1 - I see families from very varied SES. Out of my friends - mostly SAHM, some SAHF. Mostly professional, some own business/self-employed, some working class with very little formal education, some well-educated but poor, some basically living on benefits. I think they are rather more heterogeneous than my friends might be if I had sent my kids to school at 4/5.
193.2 - friends of mine do that a couple of times a month, and it mostly works very well for them. I'm not drawn to it myself - I think being respsonsible for my own kids is enough without worrying about what other people want for theirs!
Some friends of mine do that sort
OK, I think it's time for me to go to bed as I seem to lost the ability to comment successfully. Have actually been up late looking at local schools as my about-to-be-13 year old is thinking of going in September.
The homeschooled students I've taught were fine as students, but it was fairly routine for them to grouse at the start of term for not placing out of any quarter of Latin, even though they had done Latin at home for years.
202.4: I think being respsonsible for my own kids is enough without worrying about what other people want for theirs!
Yeah, I had that thought immediately: by 'small-collective schooling' am I not just describing a miniature version of what homeschooling is presumably intended to get away from? But I think there's surely room for a middle ground, at least once the kids are a bit older; a lot of this has to do with what I think would be my own concern that I was favoring one topic over another, when in fact my hypothetical kids might be all gung-ho for that other.
I'm with 192, also. I thought of you, Ham-Love (if I may call you that) when someone said "gender-appropriate" upthread: no no no, it's "gender-conforming" please.
These are the guys that do that "functional illiteracy" bullshit:
http://www.caliteracy.org/naal/
In fact, the term "functionally illiterate" is frequently used to describe the estimated twenty percent of adults in the US who cannot perform basic tasks involving printed materials. Functional illiterates may have trouble filling out a job application, using a computer, understanding written instructions, reading a contract, and many other related tasks. Many of these citizens are not able to hold a job, and those who do work regularly have difficulty with occupational tasks and career advancement. Illiteracy, whether complete or functional, can affect many aspects of life, including employment options, financial well being, and education opportunities, and it usually prevents individuals from fully functioning in society.
http://www.caliteracy.org/nil/
There are three types of literacy. Prose literacy is the ability to read and comprehend documents with continuous text, such as newspaper articles and instructions. Document literacy is the ability to read and understand documents with non-continuous text, such as job applications, maps, and transportation schedules. Quantitative literacy is the ability to perform computations, such as reviewing a bill or balancing a checkbook. These three types of literacy cover the types of reading that people need to do to be functional on a daily basis. Because each type of literacy is unique, instructors such as those at the National Institute of Literacy understand that reading programs must be developed for each one.
Teachers without it perform just as well.
Really? I'm not aware of evidence on point
And he does say that he doesn't like it. What if, instead of calling him a girl, people would regularly insult him, like call him stupid, and his parents refused to react since it's his decision?
I'm only about halfway through this thread -- have we established yet that neil is doing a great job of proving Storm's parent's point? Because, you know, equating "calling him a girl" with "calling him stupid"? The parents are trying to teach their kids that being called a girl, even if factually inaccurate, is not actually an insult and that behaving like it is damages little girls and grown women. To say that the parents are telling their boys to "act like girls" reinforces the idea that certain behaviors are permissible for boys and certain behaviors for girls. We don't all buy that crap.
If (and I think this was spike, not neil) the parents reprimand the boys for playing guns, they are sending a message that violence is unacceptable, not that boys are. (Oh, and girls totally play toy guns, too. And lightsabers, and boxing. I did, anyway.) I bet the kids are totally free to play soccer or toy trucks or Bob the Builder if they want.
"Teachers without it perform just as well."
Oh, and girls totally play toy guns, too. And lightsabers, and boxing. I did, anyway.
Girls can't make that evil blue lightening shoot out of their fingers, like a Sith.
Comedian Nato Green is good on this question. And good in general. You should go see him, Bay Areans. Including Massachusetts Bay Areans, it turns out.
My parents got shit from our pediatrician over the fact that I had a rag doll that I loved and was still constantly playing with it at age five. At the same time I also loved to do play sword fights (rusty garden stakes don't feel good when they go into your eye) and toy guns. Later on they absolutely refused to get me a bb gun. Clearly fake toy guns were one thing, realistic ones were another.
OT ESPN3 is driving me nuts. The sound cuts off after every commercial break and I have to reload the thing.
209: To be fair to neil, I gathered the claim he wanted to make was that the parents are putting on the kid the responsibility for responding to people who are bullying him, and neil feels that the kid is too young to bear that burden on his own.
It's not even remotely a straightforward question any time you want to raise a kid in a nonconformist manner. What counts as nonconformist depends on the environment in a way that I'm not inclined to just gesture at: a black kid raised in some environments to 'act white' is going to have trouble. A brainy kid encouraged to be smart in a not-very-well-educated environment likewise. A gender-nonconformist kid in a gender-conformist locale is going to have a lot more trouble than one raised in a smaller freer-thinking community. So on and so on.
My first thought after what I took to be neil's objection was: I hope to god the parents are talking to the kid regularly and seriously about the kid's feelings about all this, so that when they say that it's Jazz's decision, they know that's true.
208
Really? I'm not aware of evidence on point
Here is one paper (which I have not carefully examined).
210
Maybe not
I expect it is beneficial for a math or science teacher to have taken courses in math or science. This is not what I was talking about, I was talking about the sort of training in teaching methods that education majors get.
I've just found out that when you make a gin and tonic, a cherry is often a better compliment than a lime wedge. For example, if you replace the gin with rye and the tonic with cola, the line seems out of place in your gin and tonic.
My impression is that it is quite useful for elementary school. Once you get into high school a little bit of training is nice, but what really counts is experience. I remember reading recently that the first five years of teaching have an enormous impact on teacher quality. From my own experience I can say that throwing some kid out of college into a classroom with absolutely no training is not a recipe for competency. My poor students. But I was a 'native speaker' so I got paid more than the Polish English teachers who were excellent, and who spoke flawless if slightly accented English.
complement, Moby. Your spelling non-conformity is very stressful in this environment.
217: thanks for the link James.
I wasn't equating calling him a girl with calling him stupid; and please note that I didn't invent the idea that Jazz does not like to be called a girl (any more than, one presumes, he likes to be called stupid).
It doesn't sound like I got my point across very well, based on what you're saying. Basically, I think these parents are not achieving the worthy goal they're setting forth, of raising children who are not fettered by society's idea of gender-conforming behavior (thank you parsimon); in fact, it seems plain to me that not only is Jazz thoroughly aware of gender roles, he is suffering because the world is telling him that he doesn't fit into them.
Since you implied that I "buy that crap," by the way, I should mention that I care about this so much because I don't buy that crap, and I care a lot about raising my kid not to buy it. As far as I'm concerned these parents and their approach to the problem and their self-promotion are simply reinforcing the notion that you should, in fact, buy that crap for your own good. Today half the blogs on the internets are full of articles about how these hippie idiots with their crazy ideas about gender are abusing their children.
I don't think it's good that a boy thinks if he likes to wear pink he'll be an outcast; nor do I think it's good that a boy thinks he's an outcast because he likes to wear pink. It's the same shit.
221: The cherry was from Narnia and I should have said "complimenter."
Sorry, I have to pull one more thing out of the article to defend my reading-between-the-lines. At one point the mother flees from a store with her kids when she's challenged about buying a pink feather boa for Jazz. What is Jazz supposed to think about that? (Besides "why don't I have my boa?") What is he learning about the validity of people who demand gender-conforming behavior? I wish there was something in the article about the parents teaching their children that the people who judge them are wrong, but there isn't.
neil -- hopefully the article is kind of crappy in reporting on the kind of dialogue the parents are having with the kids.
That is, hopefully there is that dialogue, but the article figured it was too boring-sounding to relate it.
In my social cohort--not in school, in an expensive city, not a parent--I haven't had much interaction with homeschooling of any ideology. However, I am acquainted through my ex with two of the most widely cited home-school child-advocates, now in their late thirties.
Let me just say that they do not live down the stereotype of homeschooled kids as cocooned and maladjusted. Nice people (musicians/composers with a knack for grant-writing), and I'm sure harmless. Very, very weird, though.
It doesn't seem like it needs to be so crazy, especially today. There is a ton of material available online now, from lesson plans to full-on curricula. I do think that the socialization of school is useful and important.
Still, that can be an add-on, rather than a replacement. My mother did a ton of after-school teaching, not only with her kids but with a bunch of friends around the neighborhood. There were some teaching play-dates involved, which is how I found myself trying to program a turtle to draw nifty shapes over at my sister's friend's house.
And of course every weekend hike was geology and botany class.
You know who else is weird? Weird people, that's who!
Eh, I tend to suspect that lots of people who are not homeschooled are cocooned and maladjusted as well.
I think they're more vicious and maladjusted. On the veldt, that's what worked.
On the veldt everybody was homeschooled. All our problems stem from public schools. You know who was for public schools Stalin, that's who.
But on the veldt, kids ran the risk of being eaten by lions and tigers so they couldn't be in a cocoon.
In Cocoon, the old people get rejuvenated by space aliens, which is actively harmful to the political debate because it suggests a deus ex machina solution to Medicare is at least plausible.
But, back on the topic, the parents haven't told the grandparents Storm's sex in four months. This suggests that they either hate their own parents or they really suck at understanding another person's point of view in a dialog.
I think being in a cocoon might be an advantage, relative to wandering and playing in the bush. Nice kitty kitty. And maybe you'll find one that needs a thorn pulled out of its paw.
But on the veldt, kids ran the risk of being eaten by lions and tigers so they couldn't be in a cocoon.
I'm sick of all these nonconformists and their press. What makes them so fucking special? Let's hear it for the value of blandly fitting in.
Let's hear it for the value of blandly fitting in.
My grad school paper for a class on "the theory of the everyday" ended up being over a year late. Blandness is really, really hard to write about.
237: The whole point of your state is to package something and sell it to everybody under 22 who isn't actually getting food from UNICEF while screaming about nonconformity. I'm going to blandly fit in except for being nonconformist where it counts.
238 I just bought Painter's Proust bio for a buck. Maybe it'll have some tips.
An Onion "News in Brief" in its entirety from last November:
BERKELEY, CA--Citing a refusal to impose limiting social constructs on their offspring, parents Lucas Cady and Kat Loesel reported Monday they will not tell their 4-year-old, Quynn, whether the child is biologically male or female. "Who are Kat and I to say what sexual organs our kid possesses?" asked Loesel, who has dressed Quynn in dull gray smocks since birth and only allows the child to play with toy figures that have been neutered of any conventionally feminine or masculine characteristics. "We think it's important our child's frequent questions about girls and boys go unanswered so that Quynn can discover its true sex for itself." The couple also said that parents should be supportive of children who decide they do not have human genitalia at all
I have a whole bibliography of tips. The problem with everydayness is that as soon as you start writing about any particular example, it becomes exemplary, and then particular, and maybe even symbolic. The madeleine is no longer just a normal breakfast cookie, not for anyone. It's an incredibly difficult thing to write about.
Yeah, I was wondering at the not-telling-the-grandparents. My take on that probably depends on the grandparents. If they can't be trusted to observe the parents' preferences around gender and would immediately swoop down with either Disney princess wear or camo-colored onesies, then I understand the decision not to tell them. If you really don't want that behavior and know the grandparents would do it regardless, then you don't give the grandparents the information that would let them get started.
Or maybe the parents are a trifle controlling.
The more I think about, the more not-telling-the-grandparents makes sense. If the project is important to you and you consider the very high probability that even conscientious, well-intentioned people might slip up, then you don't tell them. It is very, very hard not to refer to someone's gender, 'cause of pronouns and all. Once you've bought into the concept at all, the only way it is likely to work is by rigorously minimizing the number of people who know.
238, 242: "How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives."
- Annie Dillard
238 and 242 sound like good candidates for writing "why I don't want to write this paper" as your paper.
This 2009 episode of This American Life contains an apropos, and very touching, story about transgender children and their parents. I suppose it does reinforce gender-conforming behavior, in a sense, so be warned.
To be fair to neil, I gathered the claim he wanted to make was that the parents are putting on the kid the responsibility for responding to people who are bullying him, and neil feels that the kid is too young to bear that burden on his own.
It seems, to me, unfair to conclude that the parents are forcing their kids to bear that burden on their own. The article mentions Jazz asking his parents to inform the good people at a nature center that he is a boy. Nothing to suggest they told him he had to deal with it himself -- and presumably he asked them because he trusts them to intervene when he needs them to. Jazz nodded in response to a (leading...) question about whether he was upset about questions raised at a conventional school about his gender. Let me tell you, there have been many things about school that have upset Rory at one time or another. I'm pretty sure this is true of most kids.
I wish there was something in the article about the parents teaching their children that the people who judge them are wrong, but there isn't.
Writers choose which details to include and which to exclude based, at least in part, on the reaction they want to shape. The stock story of "parents who try to raise their kids in a progressive way are damaging their kids" isn't exactly new or original.
187: Looking back though it appears that DS hasn't actually said what's so crackpotty about unschooling.
The part where unschooling adduces from "children don't learn the same way" and "children are natural learners" that it's acceptable to dispense with a model built around a curriculum provided by a teacher to a student in favor of an approach driven by the child's curiosity, which the un-teacher merely facilitates. That and everything that proceeds from it is what's so crackpotty about unschooling.
Unschooling is not alone as a crackpot alterna-pedagogy, of course. But it has traits in common with many of the worst: cartoonishly reductive views of traditional schooling and blathering about how hierarchical relationships between "teacher" and "student" are like this big drag; vague rhetoric about how if you give people free rein, they'll "naturally" discover what's most important to themselves and others; unsupported claims (flatly false claims, not to put too fine a point on it, as pertains to many educational systems) that more "traditional" models cannot accommodate different learning styles. The difference with unschooling is that while most of the nuttier alterna-pedagogies tend to be phenomena encountered at the university level, unschooling actually purports to provide the best basis from which to start a child on the road to learning. And I think that is, in aggregate terms, quite probably nuts.
Of course there are variants of unschooling, some may be less problematic than others. But they're all recognizable as unschooling by the common premise they proceed from, which just really strikes me as quackery.
248 -- I don't know whether or not we can conclude that the parents are making their five and three-year old kids kids "bear" the "burden" of the gender nonconformity on their own; I'm sure they're talking to their kids.
On the other hand, the article makes clear -- and it seems very fair to conclude, even granting the parents a lot of charity -- that the parents are putting a lot of pressure on their kids to be gender nonconformists, and are causing a fair amount of anxiety in their kids as a result.
Of course, the parents chalk it all up to an unfair and unjust world, but the fact is that they're putting a lot of pressure on their kids to behave in a certain way w/r/t gender, and are basically indifferent to the immediate consequences for the kids. You can chalk this up to being a long-term revolutionary strategy, but it's a pretty aggressive approach to gender issues in the lives of some really young kids. It's not just not making fun of your boy for wanting to wear nailpolish or whatever; it's making the gender bending a central part of their lives.
it's acceptable to dispense with a model built around a curriculum provided by a teacher to a student in favor of an approach driven by the child's curiosity, which the un-teacher merely facilitates.
really strikes me as quackery
And yet, it works!
And yet, it works!
Not suggesting it doesn't work, but how to you persuade a child to develop an interest in, for example, algebra without forcing it on their attention. And if you force it on their attention, aren't you reconstructing the teacher/pupil relationship?
You can't allow the child to ignore algebra, because without some understanding of the principles, they won't get a job requiring elementary numeracy, or using Excel or stuff. Back on the veldt, this didn't matter, but we've created a strange and unnatural society which requires non-obvious skills to navigate.
There's a continuum, though, no? Total lack of direction; largely child-driven but directing them more as they get older and trying to foster a broad spread of interests; wholly rigid and programmed.
I'd guess that very few home-schoolers are one extreme or the other, and very few schools, too, are wholly rigid and programmed for that matter.* Being educated at home doesn't have to mean total anarchy, just as while attending a normal school, there's no reason why you can't be pursuing your own interests on your own time. Just having a decent spread of books on the shelf [or access to a good library] and parents who aren't totally discouraging is more or less all you need for the latter.
* although the spread of standardized testing into primary education probably doesn't help.
My daddy left home when I was three
And he didn't leave much to ma and me
Just some unisex clothes and an empty packet of Quorn.
Now, I don't blame him cause he run and hid
But the meanest thing that he ever did
Was before he left, he went and named me "Storm."
254 - oh, you have to carry on with that one!
ttaM, yep, absolutely. And the thing about even the hardline believers in autonomous education is that they're not just ignoring their children, or leaving them in an empty room, but they're generally incredibly engaged: following up on any interests expressed, coming up with interesting things to see and do, and so on. It's definitely *not* a hands-off, laissez-faire philosophy.
chris - children will get interested in algebra for the same sorts of reasons that adults do puzzles. Some of them will be more interested than others. So the ones that enjoy it will do it anyway, and the ones that don't enjoy it will either successfully avoid it forever, or will reach a point where they need to learn it as a means to an end and then will learn it. It's just not actually a big deal. And that sounds like airy arm-waving, I know. But if you needed or wanted to learn some new skill, or find out about something, you wouldn't be worrying that you hadn't done the requisite groundwork when you were 11, you'd just get on with it.
children will get interested in algebra for the same sorts of reasons that adults do puzzles.
Sure, I was myself. And your argument seems generally good, except that I have a sort of "Had we but world enough and time" response. Modern society is hideously complex, and the stages at which it demands given skills are not set by individuals but by large scale interests like employers and politicians. There are a huge number of skill sets which are expected to be front loaded for no reason beyond the perceived intrerests of parties which have the power to do you long term harm. Failing to comply with these expectations shouldn't matter but does in practice make life incredibly difficult later on (I know whereof I speak - Mrs y left school at 15 and did O and A levels part time in her twenties; by the time she graduated she was being turned down for jobs on the basis of being too old.)
on topic: Slate is really kicking it up a notch with the old contrarianism thing.
256 - I do get what you're saying, and one of my aims for my kids is certainly to keep as many options open for them as possible. But it's not possible to be prepared for every hypothetical eventuality, is it - people retrain, change careers, have career breaks, etc etc etc. I dunno, I guess I don't have much enthusiasm for jumping through other people's hoops just for the sake of it, and I'm not going to tell my kids that if they haven't done x, y and z by the time they're 18 then their lives will be ruined.
I'm curious though - what did mrs y do in the end?
I should probably say that I don't believe that autonomous education works for everyone - I think it very much suits some personalities and doesn't suit others, and is far easier to do with younger children! But if it's not working for your family, you just do something else.
I'm curious though - what did mrs y do in the end?
She became a civil servant and now earns 50% (soon to be infinitely) more than I do. So you can say that these things pan out in some cases. But not for everybody, and she's frighteningly intelligent.
I'm not going to tell my kids that if they haven't done x, y and z by the time they're 18 then their lives will be ruined.
You certainly shouldn't tell them that, even if it were true, which isn't by any means the case. Probably most kids left largely to themselves will end up following a more or less conventional cursus through peer pressure anyway - if all your friends are obsessed with GCSEs, watcha gonna do?
He tormented my grandma and both of my aunts
By refusing to say what I'd got in my pants
And writing "n/a" in the "Gender" space on the form;
He said it was only right and fair
To let me decide how to wear my hair;
It's no joke bein' an androgyne named "Storm".
Well, I grew up to be a mean child-of-a-bitch
'Cause it looked like I batted both ends of the pitch
And broke damn near every societal norm;
But I swore I'd search every health food store
From Marin east to the Cape Cod shore
And find the goddamn fool who named me "Storm".
It was Williamsburg in mid August
And I'd just arrived, on the other bus
I thought I'd better find some place to keep warm
At the yoga center, cool as you like
Sittin' on the seat of his fixed wheel bike
Was the dirty, mangy dog that named me "Storm"
Great song. But, I think it should be noted that "Jazz" is a worse name than "Storm."
Now I want to hear someone singing it. Please.
Well I knew at once that he was my dad
From the three tattoos that I knew he had,
Two tribal ones, and one (ironic) nude;
I kicked his bike out from under his ass
And I threw it right through the window glass
And he just smiled and said "Whoa, you've got issues, dude."
Love it! But you had me at "and an empty packet of Quorn".
Well I ordered a coffee and drained the dregs
Then I punched him hard, between the legs
He kicked me with a ballet shoe and called it savate
I threw my man-purse into his face
And we crashed through the wall and out of the place
Kickin' and a-gouging in the mud and the blood and the latte.
252: Interestingly enough, Rory's "gifted" class learned basic algebra in third grade because they expressed an interest and their teacher ran with it.
I'd say that I've fought tougher guys
But that would be just a pack of lies -
They don't have many bar fights at Fresh Salt.
Still, I gave him one almighty smack
And I heard him groan and his iPad crack
And he wiped the foam from his face and called a halt.
He said "Son [or daughter] this world is rough
And if you're gonna make it, ya gotta be tough
And I knew I wouldn't be there to give ya correction.
So I called ya Storm to keep ya sparky
And strike a blow at the patriarchy
And muck around with their gender preconceptions."
Well what could I do? I knew what I oughta
I put my arms round him and called him my mom, and he called me his daughter
And I came away with different cultural norm.
271 is indeed interesting, but I can't help feeling that "gifted class" may be the key to it.
273: something's gone wrong with that second line.
Well what could I do? I knew what I oughta
I called him my mom, and he called me his daughter
And I came away with a different cultural norm.
I think about him, time to time
Whenever I subvert the dominant paradigm
And if I have a son, or daughter I'm gonna name hir ... Jazz! or Kio! Anything but god damn Storm!
Someone should put all of that in the comment thread of that article.
Actually, if all the authors don't mind, I'll put it up as a fresh post tonight. Presumably there's still someone out there who looks at the front page of the blog but doesn't read the comments.
And way back to Halford in 250: Of course, the parents chalk it all up to an unfair and unjust world, but the fact is that they're putting a lot of pressure on their kids to behave in a certain way w/r/t gender, and are basically indifferent to the immediate consequences for the kids. You can chalk this up to being a long-term revolutionary strategy, but it's a pretty aggressive approach to gender issues in the lives of some really young kids.
This is correct, and I wouldn't do what these parents are doing (and they sound like complete tools).
But a low-pressure approach where the parents don't put pressure to gender conform on their kids, but they also don't make a huge central thing of it, doesn't, I think, have much if any effect on the amount of pressure the kids feel to gender conform. Every adult they run into is going to be policing their gender conformity (and by the time they're a little older, all the kids too), and just having the parents lay off is, while it's better than having the parents join in, not really doing much of anything about counteracting the message of conformity.
If you actually wanted to raise your kids such that they seriously believed that it was okay not to gender conform, your options would be isolated commune where they didn't interact with anyone who didn't buy into the idea, or doing what these parents seem to be doing -- being very aggressive about holding resistance to knee-jerk gender conformity as a positive value.
(I say this as someone who took the low key "I'm not going to be the gender police around here" childrearing route, and was really impressed by the vigor and completeness with which the surrounding social environment filled the gap. This hasn't turned into any big issues, but the kids have absolutely internalized conventional gender roles, and the fact that I'm not pushing them and occasionally comment on the arbitrariness of it all is me being quirky, not anything that's changed their sense of norms.)
but the kids have absolutely internalized conventional gender roles
Because Buck wouldn't try to lacate.
But a low-pressure approach where the parents don't put pressure to gender conform on their kids, but they also don't make a huge central thing of it, doesn't, I think, have much if any effect on the amount of pressure the kids feel to gender conform.
IIRC there was also a much missed former commenter here who was raising their child much like this, and from their remarks it didn't seem like the kid was massively conforming to gender stereotypes or any other. Was their experience actually so much at variance from yours, or was just a function of reporting styles?
We're talking about Bitch, or am I missing someone else?
If we're talking Bitch and PK, I think she was quite a bit more aggressive about actively valuing resistance to gender conformity than I was -- not quite to the level of the parents in the article with Jazz and Kio, but significantly more than "I'm not going to put any pressure on you to gender conform, but I'm also not going to make any kind of big deal about not conforming."
I do know a Jazz, though it's not spelled that way. It's an acronym for his initials, so he's free to go by a more standard name at any time.
Mara's clearly been under some pressure to conform better to gender standards. She definitely prefers dresses now after definitely preferring boys' clothes before she started school. She's also sort of interested in princesses, though not in being one. We're basically being non-pushy about it, but that's largely because she's only 3.
but the kids have absolutely internalized conventional gender roles
Except that your son's hobby is cooking and your daughter takes engineering classes and their mom has an advanced education and a career.
I'll take that kind of progress over "boys with toenail polish" any day.
Thorn: here, for Mara's reference if necessary, is a real photograph of a 100% authentic real princess doing what real princesses do.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/britishmonarchy/4656200339/
I think she was quite a bit more aggressive about actively valuing resistance to gender conformity than I was
But not to the extent of being totally weird about it? And it seemed to work, at least for a while.
287. I like "tinkering with an engine", because of course the poor dear couldn't actually fix the thing, even with training.
Jazz definitely got the best deal there, because all he will have to put up with is people misspelling it "Jas" and assuming it's short for Jaswinder. Lots of Sikh names are unisex, btw, which causes lots of cognitive dissonance when a name you had previously associated with a hairy-arsed spotwelder shows up attached to a slim receptionist and vice versa. (god, she was a good spot-welder).
285: Oh, fair enough, my kids are all right on this stuff substantively, but in terms of interpersonal presentation, they're pretty darn compliant (Sally gets to cutely tomboyish, but it's femmy tomboy). And that's not particularly harmful, and it doesn't bother me -- it doesn't seem to bother them, and it'll make their lives easier -- but it wasn't the organic unfolding of their free choices, it was the result of heavy constant pressure from toddlerhood on up.
it wasn't the organic unfolding of their free choices, it was the result of heavy constant pressure from toddlerhood on up
Isn't that kind of what living in a society means.
Society blows goat balls. But, yes.
251: Wow, it's pretty cool that you can settle that question just by saying so! Neato!
As yet there are no statistics specific to "unschooling" to tell us whether it "works" or not -- it's usually lumped in with homeschooling, and hasn't been the focus of any studies or attempts at tracking results. The advantage of this is that, for proponents, everything can be kept nice and vague and declarative. (Or they can simply allude to made-up "statistics" as we see here.)
What we do have to work with is the history of education, and the process by which modern mass education evolved; the fact that more structured and hierarchical models consistently outperformed the alternatives (where the goal is providing a common base of knowledge), is precisely how they became the modern standard. This alone doesn't portend well for unschooling. We also have child psychology research; another profession notoriously vulnerable to fads, unfortunately, but one persistent theme that has survived multiple waves of fads is the (unsurprising) idea that children need structure, routine, rules and limits to be able to develop their full potential.
That "unschooling" essentially proposes to productively do away with structured education and the very idea of structuring a child's learning presents it with an awfully steep mountain to climb. It also, of necessity, rejects the idea of a common base of knowledge; this is a bad thing, as should be clear by now to a liberal America which is trying to cope with the products of four decades' worth of "Christian homeschooling" and Bible colleges who inhabit an entirely separate mental universe in which FOX news is credible. There's a good reason mass education focused on providing a common base of knowledge.
Going by all of that: yes, it's crackpottery.
253: There's a continuum, though, no? Total lack of direction; largely child-driven but directing them more as they get older and trying to foster a broad spread of interests; wholly rigid and programmed.
Again, in talking about unschooling, I am talking about that which programmatically rejects any direction for the child. Anything that does not do this is homeschooling, not unschooling. Unschooling is that, and only that, which rejects the concept of a teacher, a student, and any form of curriculum.
As you allude to, there is of course nothng "wholly rigid" about curriculum-driven learning (the supposed "rigidity" of having goals and standards is mostly an unschooler bromide). There is indeed a balance between structure and the encouragement of individual curiosities, which is why there are such things as "elective" courses. There's also a reason why education becomes more "elective" as one progresses toward the older end of the spectrum.
On the substantive issues I do occasionally wonder if I've managed to shelter the kids too completely. I had a funny conversation with Sally a couple of months ago, talking about her grandmother and why she was a flight attendant, and talking about how Grandma's generation was sort of the youngest end of when women really didn't have a lot of different options for jobs: a lot of possible careers were closed off. And we were talking about the sorts of things working women did before the sixties, and how some jobs were seen as appropriate for women and some weren't, and how there were always a few women in what were seen as men's jobs but not all that many. And after we'd been talking about this for forty minutes or so, she came out with "All right, but of course women have always been allowed to be engineers, right?"
I kind of left that one there -- I couldn't really face correcting her, but on the other hand I'm not sure how she's made through eleven years and not gotten the message on that one.
Unschooling is that, and only that, which rejects the concept of a teacher, a student, and any form of curriculum.
Okay, but if you're going to use the word like this, I think you have to accept that what you say about 'unschooling' doesn't apply terribly well to plenty of people who use the same word, correctly or not, to describe how they're educating their kids.
I think you have to accept that what you say about 'unschooling' doesn't apply terribly well to plenty of people who use the same word, correctly or not, to describe how they're educating their kids
It's like religion that way.
Again, in talking about unschooling, I am talking about that which programmatically rejects any direction for the child. Anything that does not do this is homeschooling, not unschooling. Unschooling is that, and only that, which rejects the concept of a teacher, a student, and any form of curriculum
I hate the word "strawman", but this really does look like a rather aggressive attempt to definitionally restrict the opposing side to a much stronger version of its position than anyone could reasonably wish to defend.
(Interesting essay on three different schooling models, one of them essentially a collective form of unschooling.)
299: It's a worthy caution. But since the term has a history involving specifically those propositions and people who have wished to defend them, I don't agree.
The subjects of articles like this are always going to end up as punching bags for the simple reason that they clearly see themselves as part of the counterculture and yet they are clearly privileged enough that some friend of theirs works for the New York Times.
Alan Thomas has done some research into autonomous education here, and he seems convinced of its efficacy. It's going to be a difficult thing to research and compare in a traditional scientific manner (obviously can't randomise children to learning methods), and who would fund it anyway? This Con-Lib government has spent NO money at all on education research. The number of (strictly) autonomously educated children is actually very small, and I think it would be really tricky to design a study which gave significant results.
I'm rather more sceptical about the aims of modern mass schooling, and see its goal more as providing a workforce than a common base of knowledge. And although I have not read an awful lot of child psychology, all the stuff about structure, routine and limits that I remember was about behaviour, not about having to learn to read at 5 and do algebra at 12 or whatever.
Unschooling doesn't reject any direction for the child - the whole point of it is that the child follows their own direction, and that the parent (or whoever is facilitating) encourages this, shows further paths that could be pursued, offers other relevant or tangential information, suggests ways in which the child could take their interest further, and so on. It's not about leaving them alone to start by reinventing the wheel, it's about giving them as much choice as possible.
School education becomes more elective as a child gets older because if you have a class of thirty 7 year olds who can't read or write, then 1 (or 2 perhaps) teachers cannot help them all to follow their own interests. Schoolchildren have to learn the basics as soon as they arrive at school to make school be able to work. An autonomously-educated child in a family doesn't have to. They can learn about molecular structure before long multiplication because there's always someone there to talk to them about it.
There may not be much research into autonomous education, but I've seen it work over and over again. My friend's 13 year old knew more about the Tudors when she was 6 than I ever have, because my friend read to her for hours, found out the answers to all her questions, took her to visit relevant places, etc. In school, you learn the National Curriculum-approved facts about the Tudors, tick them off and move on. It may be structured but it's of no fucking benefit to most children.
303 obviously to 295. And with all the glaring inadequacies in the British state education system (and from what I read, in other countries' too), I am bemused as to why anyone would get so het up about exactly when and what a few thousand unschooled children are learning.
Isn't it awesome? I was going to put it up as a fresh post, but if you wanted it as an update to this one, I think that'd work even better.
And after we'd been talking about this for forty minutes or so, she came out with "All right, but of course women have always been allowed to be engineers, right?"
Oh man. That is wonderful, and also tragic.
I know. I think of Sally staring into that abyss and LB lovingly drawing her back from it. She can learn that when she's older, if she must.
I think more people will see it as a new post, since this one has already slipped down the page a bit. But I can get it up now instead of waiting for tonight.
An interesting comparison point to unschooling is graduate school, where the advisor-advisee relationship is often much more akin to "unschooling" relationship between parent and child than it is to the traditional teacher/student relationship where the teacher sets the curriculum and the expectations.
303: So, you're convinced, and Alan Thomas is convinced, and a few vague swipes later about how normal education is about "workforces" and is somehow full of "glaring inadequacies" and is of "no fucking* benefit to most children" because-you-say-so, that's the end of it?
(* Who's "het up," exactly?)
I was asked to explain why I find this crackpotty and am doing so. I don't find it convincing and am especially not impressed by vague attempts to declaim about all the things mass education supposedly doesn't do and doesn't provide; I see no sign of these condemnations being based on anything real. And I certainly would be "het up" if thinking on these lines gained traction beyond the "few thousand" very special people for whom it obviously works wonderfully because they keep telling us so. I would want more than their word and their cartoonish "brick in the wall" style perspective on mass education to be convinced. The article linked in 300 illustrates some of the reasons why.
Mind you, your friend helping her daughter learn about the Tudor sounds pretty nifty... but also exactly like the kind of thing that could be an extracurricular activity. And one anecdote about one isolated subject does not address the objections I have to unschooling.
238, 242: "How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives." - Annie Dillard
I have this quote up in my kitchen.
307: Agreed. I'm not sure why LB pulled back on the engineering question, though: why not just say, "No, honey, I'm afraid women weren't really allowed to be engineers either"?
Of course that might have led to an additional 40-minute-long conversation about preconceptions about women's ability to do math, women as nurturers and men as builders, etc. etc. etc. Have that conversation another time!
311: The article you linked to in 300 was interesting. But I don't think the author would agree with you.
A friend of mine was pulled into a summer math camp for talented high school kids, and told to hold weekly workshops for the girls on being female in math. It was part of complying with some grant money.
It was a terrible experience. These girls were great at math, and didn't feel any drag for being female, and resented being separated out for an hour a week.
And yet there are very real issues, and girls are underrepresented at this camp, and return in drastically lower percents than the boys do. But it was just kind of too subtle for their developmental stage to really engage in a conversation about gender and math.
Seriously, it's like I said about gender conformity -- like most other kids, she generally conforms to the gender expectations she's aware of. If she's somehow managed to remain oblivious to the fact that mathematical and technical excellence are going to be perceived as gender non-conformist by a bunch of people, I'm not really sure I want to introduce her to it, in case she starts noticing the message from other people and feeling pressure to comply.
314: He's much more polite and circumspect in his judgments and language than I'm being. But he decidedly does not come down in favor of the SAU (unschooling) model in the sample he's describing.
Another interesting comparison point to "unschooling" is Montessori education. There's probably better data on Montessori than on unschooling, but it has a lot of the same student-directed-ness and emphasis on curiosity and discovery.
317: He criticizes it for being inconsistent. And he says kids do need some structure. But I'm thinking the second school is probably much closer to what asilon does than the first.
If she's somehow managed to remain oblivious to the fact that mathematical and technical excellence are going to be perceived as gender non-conformist by a bunch of people, I'm not really sure I want to introduce her to it, in case she starts noticing the message from other people and feeling pressure to comply.
She will eventually feel this pressure, though. Isn't it better to have the tools to deal with it consciously?
319: He criticizes it for being inconsistent
... and ultimately counterproductive in terms of its stated goals.
I don't know whether the Bellwether model is closer to what asilon does, but it isn't what she's defending. It is not a model in which "the child follows their own direction." The BW model provides pre-established structure and goals within which the "emergent" curriculum happens.
Would it be wrong if I taught my daughter that if someone said that girls weren't good at math, that she should punch them in the head? She really has the idea of "punching" down, so I think it would be appropriate for her level of development.
If the point you're trying to make is that the second school described in that article is better than the first school and also better than a typical elementary school then I'm certainly not going to disagree with you about that. However, to my mind the second school falls squarely within the "unschooling" continuum.
Montessori is self-paced, but it's very structured. There's a list of skills that kids are supposed to master. They do it on their own time, and they have some scope in choosing the order, but there's definitely a curriculum with clearly-defined goals. (That was my experience with my daughter, at least.)
Isn't it better to have the tools to deal with it consciously?
Spin that out for me a little? She's got the tools (in so far as I've been able to provide them) to push back against pressure to gender conform generally if she doesn't want to conform. As of now, while it's possible that she's running into people who don't expect her to be mathy, she seems to be oblivious to it as gender pressure, rather than as individualized odd behavior (and I don't know that she is, yet, getting any such pressure at all).
I'm not clear on how knowing that it's likely that some people are going to think that her gender makes her less mathematically competent is going to help her deal with it. It might, but I'm not quite seeing the clear benefit.
re: 321
It does sound a bit like 299 has a point. Asilon isn't describing an entirely undirected or unconstrained system.
325: It seems to be a very common phenomenon that in math having a single bad teacher makes people decide that they're bad at math. This seems to be a particularly acute problem with girls. I could definitely imagine that some sort of foreknowledge of "at some point you're going to have a teacher who is a sexist asshole, and that's that teacher's problem and has nothing to do with you or your abilities or whether women are good at math" might be useful.
323: However, to my mind the second school falls squarely within the "unschooling" continuum.
"To your mind" it may do so, but in unschooling's own terms, it doesn't. I propose taking unschooling's definition of itself seriously, just as the SAU community did, and object to it on those grounds. Trying to broaden the definition in order to blunt or avoid that criticism is not of interest to me.
(TBH, I'm not entirely convinced even the Bellwether model is particularly scaleable or how well it fits within a larger social fabric. Those are much bigger questions, and there I may well part company with the author of that essay. But it's certainly a less crackpot form of alternative pedagogy than unschooling is.)
I'm not clear on how knowing that it's likely that some people are going to think that her gender makes her less mathematically competent is going to help her deal with it. It might, but I'm not quite seeing the clear benefit.
What would have helped me is if someone had identified the specific scenarios that I'd run into, and draw my attention to that sort of thing. I kept getting advised to take the easier course, not to take Calculus in high school, that a math major would be too difficult for me, etc. etc. etc.
I was well aware that there was a bias against women in math, but I didn't think that was what was occurring - I thought they were seeing deep in my soul and giving me good, individualized advice about me personally.
To extend this, I never got any inkling that I was good at math growing up, though. I was bright, and terrible at arithmetic, and thought math was my weakest subject through high school. Zero encouragement, but I gave off signals all over the place that math was a terrible fit for me.
(I do think ultimately this is would have made the difference between me being able to enjoy life in math research or not. But I'm happy where I am, so whatever.)
328: And under Christianity's own terms the world was created in 6 days 5000 years ago, stoning people for disrespecting their parents is just under at least some circumstances, and polygamy is allowed sometimes. But yet, many (most?) Christians think no such things.
316: I'm not really sure I want to introduce her to it
I get that idea, okay, but it seems like what she'd be learning isn't just the descriptive proposition that women in engineering-style fields are gender-nonconformist (therefore she should avoid! avoid!), but the historical awareness that women in such fields were once considered inappropriate, and that societal gender conception lingers on, alas. Maybe it's a fine distinction, but presented in historical terms, it could be valuable. On the other hand, she's only, what, 11. For all we know, she could wind up being an organic farmer.*
* A friend's daughter, graduated from college last year, started with Russian studies and international relations, and has wound up into midwifery and organic farming.
On preview, also what Eggplant said.
Anyway if by "unschooling" you mean only the obviously wrong parts, then I'm happy to agree that those parts are obviously wrong.
I propose taking unschooling's definition of itself seriously
I am guessing that there is not an Official Institute of Unschooling, or any recognised Unschooling Uncertification Unauthority, so this seems like a bit of a quixotic quest. If you can't find a real-world example of the position that you're arguing against, that is a bit of a problem.
327: Hrm -- she's got a very clear sense of herself as good at math at this point, and I'd be surprised if a screwy teacher could shake that short of really overtly hostile behavior, of the sort that I'm pretty sure I'd catch in real time (like, I'd be very curious about what was going on in class the first time I saw non-stellar grades or heard her complain about not understanding anything.
We did have a weird moment in fifth grade that I think I mentioned here -- at her parent teacher conference, the (well-intentioned, female) teacher mentioned that although she was doing very well in math, she seemed bored, and the teacher was concerned that she was hitting that middle-school, puberty, age when girls lose interest in math. I managed not to get hostile, and suggested that maybe she was bored because fifth grade math is boring, and if there were anything more advanced the teacher could pull out for her that might help with the boredom. And the teacher did, and it worked fine.
I guess I think of expecting to be mistreated because of your gender as a serious psychic drain. There's certainly value in having a structure to interpret how people are treating you if it's bothering you, but where any maltreatment you're getting is minor enough that it's possible not to notice it, I think there's an argument that you're better off not noticing and adapting to it.
(like, I'd be very curious about what was going on in class the first time I saw non-stellar grades or heard her complain about not understanding anything.
It does sound like Sally's got a different sense of herself than I did, but neither of the above ever came close to happening to me. It's pretty subtle how it can shape your path.
329: I was well aware that there was a bias against women in math, but I didn't think that was what was occurring - I thought they were seeing deep in my soul and giving me good, individualized advice about me personally.
This sort of thing is true, and it cuts both ways. You would have been better off if you'd had a sense that what was happening to was sexism, but as you say, knowing that bias is a problem doesn't necessarily help you with identifying it when it hits you.
When I wrote 320 I was kind of thinking in more general terms that, as Heebie mentioned, it's useful for children to be made aware of such situations. I shouldn't have implied that Sally doesn't have the skills to recognize and react appropriately (judging by her mother, she will be capable of dealing with a lot of bullshit).
I've heard some really terrible anecdotal stories about Montessori schools for grade school level kids (there aren't many of those). It seems to combine the worst features of putting lots of pressure on kids w/out providing direction or structure. Seems to work fine for the preschool level, though, but at that level kids are cognitively different and "teaching" per se just plain doesn't work.*
*one of the ironies here, as parodie pointed out way up above, is that the whole "unschooling" conversation started with the parents in the article deciding to not enroll their 3 and 5 year old kids in a regar nursery school, and quite pompously calling that "unschooling," (these guys are blowhards) whereas in fact there's basically nothing but self-directed learning that goes on at any preschool and no formal curriculum or instruction.
326: She's describing an approach that focuses on maximizing choice for the child and rejects the idea of imposing structure on them (the child makes the choice, the parent-or-whomever facilitates it and provides more resources and more choices). That's the same kind of thing I am describing as unschooling; an approach that programmatically opposes the notion of a curriculum or hierarchical structure. It's the same thing described (with the appellation "libertarian" schooling) in the article in 300. These are all the same thing.
I'm sorry, there just isn't a problem of initial definition here (except perhaps in that asilon seems to think a superficially different wording, and erecting strawmen about how it's not about just putting a child in a room and leaving them there, will defuse objections). The nature of the doctrine means that there will be difference in the specifics of everyone's approach -- that's the entire point -- but it cannot concede the need for direction and curriculum to come from outside the child and still be "unschooling."
So for the most part I agree that awareness of these issues is just as likely to be harmful as helpful.
But I wanted to disagree strongly with something you said in 334. What often seems to happen to people is that they go from thinking "I'm good at math" not to "I'm bad at math" but instead "I was good at math up until [pick one of Algebra, Calculus, or imaginary numbers] but I wasn't smart enough for that advanced stuff."
If you can't find a real-world example of the position that you're arguing against
That would certainly be a problem if it were true. Fortunately, real-world examples are provided, over and over again, by unschoolers. Asilon has provided an example in this thread. John Holt is an example. The SAU community is an example. There isn't really a shortage of examples.
Do I have to blame my being bad at math on just being bad at math? Probably.
I second 340.
Also I've got to run, but I really love talking about this topic.
What often seems to happen to people is that they go from thinking "I'm good at math" not to "I'm bad at math" but instead "I was good at math up until [pick one of Algebra, Calculus, or imaginary numbers] but I wasn't smart enough for that advanced stuff."
That's true; I'm just figuring that up through anything she's going to run into in high school, I'll be there to (a) help her past any actual conceptual rough spots and (b) point out that the problematic teacher is smoking crack.
Really, I'm not committed to concealing the existence of bias against women in math from her. Just that if she can remain blissfully unaware of it a bit longer, that won't do her any harm.
FWIW, I can't speak for Montessori, but my experience with Steiner-Waldorf [a childhood friend went to one] is they excel at producing assholes.
342: I do think that on top of any gender issues, there's a whole lot of terrible math teaching out there, resulting in a lot of people who think of themselves as "bad at math" who don't have to be.
I think Waldorf comes from a very different place than Montessori.
re: 347
Possibly. I know very little about what goes on in Montessori schools, except a vague and possibly erroneous association in my mind with the arsehole-producing Steiner method.
And to be fair, the arsehole-producing is based on one particular school.
334: [1] I guess I think of expecting to be mistreated because of your gender as a serious psychic drain. There's certainly value in having a structure to interpret how people are treating you if it's bothering you, [2] but where any maltreatment you're getting is minor enough that it's possible not to notice it, I think there's an argument that you're better off not noticing and adapting to it.
This is really interesting. I want to agree what what I've numbered as [1], and feel oddly uncomfortable somehow with what I've sectioned off as [2]. I'm not sure why, and don't think I can say why without spinning off into analogies right now.
I must make lunch, though.
Well I certainly think that if you have the resources to allow it (which may not be scalable) it's better from an educational point of view to have a flexible and emergent curriculum rather than an externally set one, and that in a perfect situation the teacher's role is mostly a role of encouragement, guidance, and enrichment, and not a role of providing direction.
Where I differ from the more radical versions of unschooling is that I do think at some point you might have to make people learn to read, and that I think the best teacher's actively look for things that might interest the students, rather than passively waiting for the students to find things on their own. Also, I don't think homeschooling in any form is practical for most families, and I'm not sure to what extent the practices are scalable into a regular school setting.
My experience with Waldorf schools is that they produce the sweetest, queerest, friendliest young Ultimate players you've ever met.
My mom is a very cute 5'2", but she must have struck terror into my high school's administration. I complained one day that my bad physics teacher was making me dislike math and physics and I was moved to the good teacher by the very next day. Privilege!
Asilon has provided an example in this thread
She doesn't appear to agree with your definition, or to be following the extreme version that you want to argue against, though, and she does appear to be having success, so again, Senor Quixote, I beg you to consider that these are not giants but windmills.
What often seems to happen to people is that they go from thinking "I'm good at math" not to "I'm bad at math" but instead "I was good at math up until [pick one of Algebra, Calculus, or imaginary numbers] but I wasn't smart enough for that advanced stuff."
Or even just deciding that they're not that interested in math, all the while knowing that they are perfectly able to do it. And here is where you run in to part of heebie's problem: maybe the student just isn't interested in math! Or maybe there are societal forces that exert unequal pressures on the different genders, and a girl is more likely than a boy to conclude she's not interested. Nearly impossible to tease out at the individual level.
I am not sure a high school administration needs to be stricken by terror in order to accomodate a simple parental request to change classes.
355 - You are clearly not familiar with the LAUSD. I'll bet Megan's mom was hardcore.
Or maybe there are societal forces that exert unequal pressures on the different genders, and a girl is more likely than a boy to conclude she's not interested. Nearly impossible to tease out at the individual level.
Yep. This.
Going back to the story I told in 334 -- with a slightly less ideological parent, I could see that teacher having pushed Sally toward "Oh, what a pity that math doesn't interest you anymore." And it would have looked perfectly organic and natural.
356: christ on a bike, what a system. Is it true that school principals are generally former gym teachers and sports coaches? There is surely no good reason not to accomodate a parent's simple request "can Janey change classes? This one just isn't working."
Thesis: Math teaching would be improved by having fewer bizarre, resentful geeks in the profession. Math is the only subject where I remember teachers doing things like throwing erasers or being unable to communicate in a basic level in English, and these were classes that were either in Good Selective Urban Public School or Fancypants Academy, so who knows what goes on in the real world. I can't think of one even mildly charismatic math teacher I had.
359: What if everybody did that? Everyone knows Teacher A is better than Teacher B, so they would all want to be in the class with Teacher A.
Best just not to ever honor a parental request! Its a dangerous precedent!
Oh, it's Megan's mom. Well, we'll make an exception. She scares me.
I'll bet Megan's mom was hardcore.
She starts off so cute and sweet-looking. But there is only ever one outcome, and she knows what it will be when she walks in the door.
I'm biased by having been raised by someone so mathy that he (and my un-mathy mother) are out of the country on a Ma/yan Math Adventure right now, but I definitely never thought that it was unusual for me to be good at math because I was a girl, though I much preferred the writing side of things. This innocence was helped along by going to an all-girls high school. I remember being shocked on my first day in college to see girls looking around waiting for some guy to answer when a question was asked.
Related, maybe, Lee has several times made jokes while Mara and I are both using a water fountain that it's not too long ago that the situation wouldn't have been legal, though we haven't expanded on it too much. I don't think this sort of thing comes up as much for parents of white three-year-olds. I'm not sure what we've done about addressing gender the same way we do race, other than talk about different kinds of families and explain what a rainbow flag means, though.
360: Resoved: heebie needs to be cloned many times.
364 take two: Resolved: heebie needs to be cloned many times.
shocked on my first day in college to see girls looking around waiting for some guy to answer when a question was asked
This has been my favorite part of teaching at a women's college where almost all the students went to single-sex high schools. It really makes me frustrated with some of my women students at my public college job, because I want to know where their swagger is. Even the ones who do talk a lot in class tend to begin answers with, "Um, maybe this is just me? Am I crazy? But I guess I was thinking that um possibly..."
359: Is it true that school principals are generally former gym teachers and sports coaches?
Back in my day, and in my experience, yes. Likely less so these days, and it certainly depends on the area, but the official (job-seeking) qualifications to become a high school principal still seem to differ substantially from those for being an effective teacher.
At any rate, in many public schools, at least at a high school level, there simply are no other classes to transfer Janie to: there's the college-track class, the middling class, and the vocational-track class. Megan went, I believe -- though I admit I didn't follow it all in the other thread where school-changing came up -- to a school in which there might have been more choices.
Even the ones who do talk a lot in class tend to begin answers with, "Um, maybe this is just me? Am I crazy? But I guess I was thinking that um possibly..."
This made me laugh.
Is it true that school principals are generally former gym teachers and sports coaches?
The one dude I went to high school with who is now a high school principal was a violently anti-intellectual thuggish jock. This scares the crap out of me.
I have had conversations with four separate women in my classes this semester who have come to me to say that they find it really inspiring that I "just say stuff," as in, I don't apologize for presenting an idea, even though I'm a woman. I find the bar of inspiration is frighteningly low.
Even the ones who do talk a lot in class tend to begin answers with, "Um, maybe this is just me? Am I crazy? But I guess I was thinking that um possibly..."
I prefaced every answer I gave during my undergrad senior oral with "I guess," at one point venturing an "I guess I guess . . .."
"Um, maybe this is just me? Am I crazy? But I guess I was thinking that um possibly..."
I mentally preface each of my Unfogged comments with this.
My most frequently repeated piece of writing advice this semester was to go through your paper before handing it in and delete the words "I just think that" and "It seems to me that." Your name is at the top of the paper. I know whose ideas these are. Stop acting like you're afraid you're crazy.
Stop acting like you're afraid you're crazy.
I'm not afraid I'm crazy. I've accepted it. It still doesn't seem like a good idea to call too much attention to it.
372: There's pressure on unfogged to do this, not just mentally but textually (in print), especially for female commenters, because gender-conformity does still apply here.
371: To be fair, you were at the only place in the world where it's pretentious to say you're ignorant.
Did you ever mix in a "dokei emoige"?
And it's a reasonable point of view not only that your opinions may not be correct, but also that you do not perfectly understand what those opinions are. So "I guess I guess" is far from absurd.
We should just have a convention here where "Listen up, you ignorant fuckfaces" means "I know it sounds crazy, but I guess I think that. .."
377.1: HA! That is in fact true.
377.2: No, I wrote my senior essay on The Wife of Bath's Tale.
"I don't know."
"Look who says they don't know! Who do you think you are, Socrates?"
379: I would much prefer that arrangement to the one I learned when in school, which was that I had to add all sorts of stupid caveats to my own opinions so as not to intimidate others.
I got pretty good at it, but it still bugs me that it was necessary.
353: She doesn't appear to agree with your definition, or to be following the extreme version that you want to argue against
Since I just explained her definition is not functionally different from mine AFAICS, and that anecdotes about her experience are not enough, I'm not sure what you point is. Like I said, I don't know what she's "following," just what she's defended. I'm not the least impressed at being accused of tilting at windmills for defining what I'm talking about in the way that its proponents quite clearly define.
So what's so obviously bad about having students take initiative in directing their own education? Or is this another case of your style of "my argument is so incredibly awesome that I can't be bothered to actually tell you what it is."
385: is this another case of your style of "my argument is so incredibly awesome that I can't be bothered to actually tell you what it is."
It would seem to be another case of your evasive "I will now ignore any and all arguments you have provided and pretend you haven't provided them" bullshit. Didn't impress me last time you tried it, either.
(I mean, come on; don't fucking sit there and pretend I haven't said anything specific after 249 and 295 -- with further example provided in 300 -- about what I think is wrong with it. That's moronic.)
The article in 300 is not at all opposed to teaching the style that Asilon described. The second school described is very close to what Asilon described.
The other ones are attacking a strawman version of unschooling.
389: Wrong, wrong, and wrong on all three points. What Asilon described is the philosophy of the first school treated, not the second (what Asilon described is not presetting goals for the class, which is what the Bellwether model does). It's the first model to which the author is opposed and which is not, in fact, a "strawman" version of anything.
DS, I think that the unschooling you're against is not the same as what asilon describes, so you're on thin ground. Otherwise I'm staying out of this, because I haven't done the requisite reading.
391: You're only letting that stop you because of gender norms.
And I see that I really would have to read the article linked in 300 in order to participate. Sorry for being perpetually lagging behind in comments today.
391: I guess I'm just not seeing the difference based on what we have so far, as I explained in 339. So just being told it's "not the same as what asilon describes" is not very convincing to me. In re: asilon's specific perspective, I can only go on what I have, which presumably she'd be the best party to amplify.
In any case, this is becoming repetitive.
Here's the key sentence from 300 (this is the school that's doing a good job, and which DS sees as totally different from unschooling, but which I'm pretty sure is very close to what Asilon does, and also very close to the better educational experiences of people I know who are close to "unschooling" among the spectrum of homeschoolers:
The BW curriculum is "emergent." In other words, it is not pre-established. It springs from subjects both teachers and students are interested in. The teacher has only general goals in mind and the curriculum takes shape in the context of interactions between teachers, students and materials. Based on what happens in the classroom, the teachers make hypotheses about what kinds of activities might interest the students and prepare the classroom so that further learning experiences can occur.
I think DS is saying that this is totally different from unschooling because the teachers have "goals" even though they're only general goals. Certainly conjectural parents who actually have *no goals* for their children are bad parents. But I think that having very general goals (say: learn to read, enjoy learning, and learn some stuff about the world) is much closer to "unschooling" than it is to having a rigid set curriculum with goals like "learn the following 20 facts about the tudors in the next week."
Drat, that middle paragraph was supposed to be in italics.
Certainly conjectural parents who actually have *no goals* for their children are bad parents.
Yuppie.
Listen up, you ignorant fuckfaces, this all seems extraordinarily context dependent to me and I'm sure Asilon is a great teacher, while I'm also sure that this is a solution for at best a tiny number of kids. Comity, you shitnozzles.
You are correct, you gaping asshole of a worm.
I don't have anything to add, but I just want to call Halford a cocksucker. If that's okay.
395 has changed things, but I wrote this:
394: To shift the topic a bit, I'm not sure why you're so exercised about this. We're talking about a few thousands of parents who decide not to partake of public school education? Or rather, formal school education, since they bypass various kinds of specialist schools as well.
Granted, the Christian conservative homeschoolers, and bible colleges, are a bit worrisome. Is that the concern? Kids educated in highly insulated environments might become dangerously ignorant; of course kids raised in insulated UMC environments can become dangerous in the same way.
With respect to Asilon's homeschooling, I just don't see what the problem is.
398: As it is now it is probably not scalable. But the since the school system was optimized for social control, not for learning, we should expect to be able to make some widespread improvements in learning if we're willing to sacrifice some socialization. If we actually do this, it will probably involve some small changes in the direction of unschooling. The ideal state is probably close to 395.
I still have to go back through my posts and comments and cross off the "I think" and "I venture".
404: But are you doing that as an authentic expression of yourself, or in order to conform with our expectations of gender nonconformity?
Actually I do have stuff to add.
I think that happy, engaged children, busily following their own agenda and finding out about whatever interests them about the world is a Good Thing.
Also, my opinions about modern mass education are my opinions not "vague swipes". Every successive government and every man on the Clapham omnibus wants to fix education, so I don't think I'm alone in thinking that our system has glaring inadequacies. My "superficially different wording" is actually the English English that I use in my everyday life, which I used here for the same reason that I don't start talking about faucets when I comment on Unfogged.
And talking about children not being left to educate themselves wasn't me erecting a strawman, it was me addressing a commonly-held misconsception in case you also held it. Because I think that anyone who truly believes that that happy, engaged children, busily following their own agenda and finding out about whatever interests them about the world is a Bad Thing is a bit crackpotty. We probably don't need to discuss this further.
Really, all kids need to know is that power flows from the barrel of a rifle and that you need to line up the little stick at the front of that barrel in the middle of the little 'v' at the other end of the barrel.
At least, that's my understanding of Montessori.
403: Moby, are you asking to suck my cock? It is the lunch hour, pacific time. I'm not really sure that I'm ready to take our relationship in this direction, but I'm pretty easily persuadable.
408. Is that a fact? All I understand about Montessori is that the kids are apparently not allowed black finger paint. That carries the whiff of oppression, to my way of thinking. (I'm pretty sure that's Montessori, because a friend of mine ran a Montessori pre-school once, but it may be Steiner or Waldorf or Insalata Caprese because it was a long time ago.)
No, Halford, he wants you to suck his cock. Where can you meet?
410: It's a metaphorical ur-cock representing freedom.
Yeah, no black paint (or clothes) is Waldorf. No clothes with writing on either, at our local one.
411: Yes, 408 is unvarnished fact. The original Montessori program was mainly readings from The Prince and target practice. It got watered down as it spread from Italy.
Listen up, you ignorant fuckfaces, we all always-already have metaphorical ur-cocks.
Also, I would like to hear more about the Ma/yen Math Adventure Thorn's parents are on.
But are you doing that as an authentic expression of yourself, or in order to conform with our expectations of gender nonconformity?
On my psuedonymous blog, I'm doing it 1. so I don't sound like a chick and 2. because like AWB says, the entire thing is my opinion blog. I shouldn't be weighing down the text like that.
I read 411 and immediately though "nah, that's gotta be Waldorf." I'm quite happy that my "really goofy arbitrary rules means it's Waldorf" prejudice was confirmed.
I think that Montessori is more structured than Waldorf, but I don't have direct experience with Waldorf.
395: I think DS is saying that this is totally different from unschooling because the teachers have "goals" even though they're only general goals. Certainly conjectural parents who actually have *no goals* for their children are bad parents.
The leap in logic here is yours, not mine. Nobody has said in any general sense that the proponents of unschooling don't have "goals." Obviously the teachers in question have goals, the parents in question have goals, for the children: namely that they become happy, healthy children. In this case, they are about faith that the good in human nature will out if it isn't imprisoned within strictures of routine and schedule and curriculum and classes and hierarchical relationships with teachers, and the result will be happy, healthy children joyfully exploring themselves and the world with an untrammelled curiosity free of all the supposedly soul-deadening influence of the oppressive regime of mass education.
This is abundantly clear in apologia for unschooling and "autonomous learning." It has nothing to do with setting academic goals of any kind for the children. Its larger, more abstract goal consists in rejecting such concrete goals; its substance -- the reason there is an "unschooling" distinguishable from other forms of alternative pedagogy -- is in saying that the children should follow their own agenda, not someone else's, however disguised. Pretending that no real person has embraced this radical notion, and that therefore it is somehow "strawmanning" to treat it as a substantive definition of unschooling, plainly will not do. As the SAU example in 300 demonstrates, there are obviously people who have embraced and attempted to practice precisely this ideal.
(The outcome of Bellwether's own alternative pedagogy does seem better to me, precisely because it provides choice and "emergence" within prescribed limits and thus rejects the fundamental tenet of unschooling, but like I said, whether I would agree with the author of that essay about its larger social implications and practicability is a way bigger question to which the likelier answer is "no.")
Whether asilon is one of these people I really have no idea, nor do I honestly care overmuch. What she says is consistent with it, but if it proves otherwise, the general definition of "unschooling" does not stand or fall on that basis. Now, of course, it's tempting to say someone's criticism of a pedagogy means that they accuse all dissenters of being "bad parents," as you just tried to imply. But I don't believe, however unconvincing I find her arguments about the supposed ills of normal schooling, that asilon actualy believes this about parents who send their children to regular public schools. Likewise, that I believe unschooling is crankery unlikely to produce its promised results -- and likely to backfire on many of the children it's being practised upon -- doesn't mean the parents involved are bad, evil, neglectful parents. It means they happen to be, I think it likely, wrong.
406: Also, my opinions about modern mass education are my opinions not "vague swipes".
They can be both, you know. They certainly look like both.
Every successive government and every man on the Clapham omnibus wants to fix education, so I don't think I'm alone in thinking that our system has glaring inadequacies.
That everyone and his dog -- especially "every successive government" -- says "fix education" may simply mean it's a useful political bromide; it does not mean it's genuinely a thing that needs fixing. Education is a commonplace target of moral panics, exaggerated and misinformed and plain uninformed criticism, crackpot reform schemes and boondoggles, and so on. As I'm sure you know, your opinion isn't exempted from that possibility because it happens to be your opinion.
Moby, like Flannery O'Connor with holy communion, if it's a metaphor I'm not going to put it in my mouth.
Oops, sorry JM, my mistake! God, I'm so blonde sometimes.
Yes, Math Adventure stories please.
Montessori and Waldorf are as unalike as possible. Waldorf is full of weird mystical shit. Montessori is focused on practical tasks.
I think that Montessori is more structured than Waldorf, but I don't have direct experience with Waldorf.
Unstructured + arbitrary rules might give children a salutary lesson in what the world is really like, but I'm not sure it's a good educational principle. The thing about good educational environments is that they should shelter kids, so they can fuck up with trivial consequences. Randomising the rules makes the world look like a badly designed shoot-em-up game, which is irritating.
Anyway, I like black. Always did.
I say, Neill, I'm frightfully glad you told me where babies come from. Now I can stop lighting fires and hating my father!
This is the math trip. But since they're not back yet and not going to be in touch with me unless there's an emergency, I can't tell you more about their experience there.
Steiner on the color black:
Now submerge yourself in black; you are completely surrounded by black--in this black darkness a physical being can do nothing. Life is driven out of the plant when it becomes carbon. Black shows itself alien to life, hostile to life; when plants are carbonized they turn black. Life, then can do nothing in blackness. And the soul? Our soul life deserts us when this awful blackness is within us.
Black represents the spiritual image of the lifeless.
Wow. Malcolm X would have a field day with that...
295: It also, of necessity, rejects the idea of a common base of knowledge; this is a bad thing, as should be clear by now to a liberal America which is trying to cope with the products of four decades' worth of "Christian homeschooling" and Bible colleges who inhabit an entirely separate mental universe in which FOX news is credible. There's a good reason mass education focused on providing a common base of knowledge.
So, the Father Coughlins and Bull Connors and Phyllis Schlaflys and Anita Bryants who arose before the advent of widespread Xtian homeschooling must've just been pure evil to begin with, huh?
I am pretty sympathetic to the "unschooling" guys. Schooling is pretty brutal. Especially if you do poorly; every two weeks for twelve years you are given a test to prove that you still suck.
The function of schools is to encourage submission, dependability, punctuality, and persistence and to discourage creativity and independence. Because that is what the workplace wants from you. It isn't about knowledge; the workplace in general doesn't give a fuck if you know algebra but does care if you show up on time.
Now submerge yourself in black; you are completely surrounded by black--in this black darkness a physical being can do nothing. Life is driven out of the plant when it becomes carbon. Black shows itself alien to life, hostile to life; when plants are carbonized they turn black. Life, then can do nothing in blackness. And the soul? Our soul life deserts us when this awful blackness is within us.
Black represents the spiritual image of the lifeless.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRJxafiqHvw&feature=related
Black! Like the procession of night that leads us into the valley of despair!
430 is funnier if you substitute "Moby's cock" for the word "black."
It really is. And my soul life did desert me when that awful cock of Moby's was within me, so it's funny *and* true.
As in, "I'm Moby's cock where it counts".
Hang on, is this Moby's metaphorical ur-cock, or his real one? And has he sent a photo of it to nosflow?
Montessori and Waldorf are as unalike as possible. Waldorf is full of weird mystical shit. Montessori is focused on practical tasks.
Yeah, Montessori is all about grounding everything in the practical and physical, and in having "work" to do. The other pedagogical feature I know of is an emphasis on providing a physical environment that is set up to elicit the kind of independent learning and behavior that you want to happen. (Megan's sister would approve.)
Also it promises to teach your small children to take pleasure in putting things away tidily.
442.1 describes what I know of Waldorf as well. At least at early ages (kindergarten and first couple of grades). The mystical shit doesn't particularly inform what actually goes on in Waldorf education at that level, as far as I've observed: kids have tasks, they engage in group projects, they clean up after each project, and it's very focused on so-called "hand-work": manipulating and handling things, working with things.
Mrs. K-sky went Waldorf through the 4th grade, at which point two things happened that led to her swift removal: her parents finally figured out that no one had taught her to read and she was just very good at memorizing, and the teacher encouraged another students to surprise her with a dead snake in her desk.
(Megan's sister would approve.)
We did go to a Montessori school early on. Perhaps it worked.
438: I've started using soap to bathe again and it's not nearly so bad.
Re the OP: this could work out well for young Storm in the long run; imagine being able to say "Hello, ladies, according to the New York Times there is nothing ambiguous about my genitals."
We did go to a Montessori school early on. Perhaps it worked.
Me too.
296
I kind of left that one there -- I couldn't really face correcting her, but on the other hand I'm not sure how she's made through eleven years and not gotten the message on that one.
She's gotten the message "there is no prejudice against girl engineers and never has been". The message may not be entirely true but that is a different issue.
Another point: is anyone out there in the slightest doubt that Storm is, in fact, a boy?
434
The function of schools is to encourage submission, dependability, punctuality, and persistence and to discourage creativity and independence. Because that is what the workplace wants from you. It isn't about knowledge; the workplace in general doesn't give a fuck if you know algebra but does care if you show up on time.
This is seriously misleadingly. Another function of schools is to identitfy the smart students who can learn new material easily. The workplace may not care if you know algebra, it does care whether you are smart and can "get up to speed" quickly. And lots of high status employers value creativity and independence and don't particularly care if you show up on time (at least day to day as opposed to on specific occasions).
450: You're only saying that because of the penis.
450: Me? What's the tipoff that makes you sure one way or the other?
Not obvious to me either whether Storm is an outtie or an innie.
whether Storm is an outtie or an innie
I started to make a Coriolis effect joke about this, but then I noticed the opening sentence of this (now corrected) Wikipedia entry (google cache here).
453: There's no actual evidence but I am pretty certain based on gut instinct that they wouldn't be pulling this kind of stunt on a girl.
Really? If I were going to make that kind of guess generally, I'd go the other way --that it'd seem like a bigger deal to let a boy be effeminate than to let a girl be tomboyish. These parents have already demonstrated willingness to mess around with boys' gender presentation, so for them specifically I wouldn't guess one way or the other, but generally I think the freakout level is much higher for girlish boys than boyish girls.
Gender presentation enforcement seems to me to be much stricter and tenser for little boys than for little girls generally.
Really? If I were going to make that kind of guess generally, I'd go the other way --that it'd seem like a bigger deal to let a boy be effeminate than to let a girl be tomboyish.
Oh yeah, definitely.
The part of me that viscerally sympathizes with the parent guesses that they had a girl, because the pink ghetto feels so much more restrictive and boring than the equivalent boy world.
it'd seem like a bigger deal
Which is why I suspect ajay's hunch is correct.
461: You mean that they wouldn't have bothered raising a girl genderless because it wouldn't seem transgressive enough? I dunno, it still seems fairly transgressive.
They seem to have already been doing this de-gendering thing with their prior boys, right? Doesn't seem they needed the pink ghetto as a motivation.
451: Yeah, a big problem with all the pro-unschooling rhetoric (and commonly with alternative pedagogies more generally) is how dependent it typically is on arguing against absurd caricatures of The Existing System. My much-earlier crack about Pink Floyd wasn't exactly idle; a lot of the blather about schools supposedly crushing souls and creativity as they satanically mill children for The Man is exactly that deep.
460: Huh. You know, I know what you mean, but for little kids there's a lot more stuff that's verboten for boys than for girls. People may gently steer girls away from trucks, but they're not going to look at a girl with a truck funny. A boy with a Barbie is going to learn quite quickly that boys don't do that.
They seem to have already been doing this de-gendering thing with their prior boys, right? Doesn't seem they needed the pink ghetto as a motivation.
But (if it's a girl) for the first time, Society will try to impose the pink ghetto on their kid. They've de-gendered the boy, but this wasn't a component.
but for little kids there's a lot more stuff that's verboten for boys than for girls.
Right, boys have much stricter parameters, but cooler stuff right there inside their parameters.
I'm mostly dipping from my childhood memories, of how much I hated receiving gendered gifts. Except for the arts and crafts gifts, invariably there was nothing to do with the gift.
465: But if it's a boy, they'd evidently be doing the same thing, is my point. This indicates at minimum an equal fear of the blue... uhhh, morass?
464 is totally right, in terms of US marketing at least. There's a whole industy designed to promote girls-doing-traditionally-boy-stuff and no one thinks twice that my daughter is into race cars and trains. A boy who was into the Disney princesses would be treated . . . not in the same way (FTR, no one should be playing with the Disney princesses).
467: Sure. In fact, I bet they did not find out the sex of Storm before birth, and devised this plan no matter what. "This is our third kid, and it's time to be outlandish."
But, it's also possible that they knew this one would be female, and that fact jostled them in some new way that triggered this nuttiness.
My sister and I scored with a kid's gift recently. The kid is an effeminate boy, which his parents are easy with. We got him a jewelry making kit, which we guessed he would like because we actually watch him. Had the satisfaction of hearing him run to his mom asking if he could open it right now as we were leaving the party. We felt pretty smug, but that poor kid. Got a whole raft of stuff that isn't as interesting to him because other folks are giving gendered gifts.
Also, that kid mopes around a playground like he's listening to Morrissey already. Emo at age seven!
469 and 464 are both correct, but I'm uncomfortable with how they focus on how stuff sucks for boys more than for girls.
468: Lagoon, yes! Thank you. And nobody wants to raise a Creature from that sort of place.
470: I sort of had the impression that the nuttiness wasn't new, just the reportage of it.
A boy who was into the Disney princesses would be treated . . . not in the same way
Eh. My nephew had a streak of loving glitter, and the little boy I just mentioned has parents who protect however he wants to be. I admit there's a second of weirdness and then the conscious remembering that we don't care, and I wouldn't have that for a girl with trucks. But in my liberal and soft cocoon, that second of weirdness passes pretty quickly and hopefully passes without being expressed.
472: The range of gendered behavior acceptable for girls seems superficially broader now, but it seems to represent a camouflaging of the pink ghetto more than anything else. The codes of femininity have gotten subtler than skirt/not-skirt, but I don't know that they've really gone anywhere.
472: Well (a) patriarchy hurts everyone. (B) 'sucks more' is a bad way to look at it -- 'sucks different' is right. The gender enforcement little girls get is much gentler than the enforcement little boys get -- a lot of positive encouragement and reward for doing girlish stuff, and more of a cold-shouldering, low-reward response to boyish stuff than anything harshly negative. Boys get the flat prohibitions and harsh negatives for transgression much more readily.
OTOH, the range of girlish stuff is much smaller -- if you take two kids who are reliably gender conforming, the girl is more restricted than the boy. But the tactics used to keep her in aren't as negative as the tactics used to keep boys out of girl stuff.
The stereotypical stuff sucks more for girls than boys. The inability to escape their stereotypical stuff sucks more for boys than girls. THREAD OVER
But in my liberal and soft cocoon, that second of weirdness passes pretty quickly and hopefully passes without being expressed.
Hopefully California is cocoonier than NY. But IME of a reasonably urban latte-sipping peer group, there are still plenty of people willing to express and enforce for that sort of thing.
patriarchy hurts everyone
SEZ YOU!
My boy cousin always asked for a trip to the fabric store for gift-getting occasions. He'd pick out the most stretchy, glittery, flamboyant ones and get to take home a yard or two, and then he'd put on a fashion show for the extended family.
We all just rolled with it, but of course I come from a family that sent me to a sex ed class that showed a guy tasting his own jizz.
(Of course this cousin is gay. Very talented back-up dancer/musical theater type in NY.)
I loathed being a girl, growing up. Really hated it.
I was often thankful for my gender as a kid, strictly on the basis of the Toys & Toons Gap. We got Transformers and G.I. Joes and toy guns, the girls got My Little Pony (the shite version, far inferior to today's relatively awesome Friendship Is Magic version) and dolls that spat up. No contest.
Tbh, I would be mildly disappointed if my boy was into jewlery making and fabric (although if he would grow up to be like Santino from Project Runway Season 2 that would be great) but that's just because I'm not into either one, and I like to enforce my own aesthetic preferences. One of the great things about being a single dad is that you can say, eh, fuck this princess nonsense, let's buy some toy trucks and see how that works out. Crossfit kids eligibility starts in two years.
For the record, if I were grooming my little angel to live out my dreams vicariously, I wouldn't start with early-age Crossfit. I wish I'd done track as a kid, because running fast transfers to every team sport and team sports are what gets you laid in college. I plan to start Mini-Me in track and maybe gymnastics (for coordination) and let her put on strength in her early twenties, by which time she should be pinning her CalTech admittance to her swimsuit in beauty pageants.
I wouldn't start early with crossfit because of worries about joint damage, but then I don't really understand what crossfit is.
If I could control my kids' preferences, I'd have steered them into any sport requiring very little equipment and few other people -- track or basketball. Instead I have a swimmer and maybe a soccer player.
Being a swimmer requires more equipment than track or basketball?
Swimming meets your specs, LB. Are you counting the pool as "equipment"?
Yes. It's a hassle. If I had basketball players, I could shoo them outside with a basketball and tell them to run down to the courts in the park. Swimming has to be an organized event involving transportation.
In most places I've been, you can run or play basketball without joining a club, but you'd need to join a club to swim laps.
The only solution is an Olympic length pool on the roof of your building.
Or simply getting over our silly squeamishness about swimming in the Hudson.
I wonder that you didn't think of it already.
That's silly, LB. You can't swim in rivers. They dry up in the summer.
squeamishness about swimming in the Hudson
Yeah, stick to the East River. It's not even really a river!
493: I think I read somewhere that the Hudson is an actual river and the East River is more of a fetid tidal pool. But, I have no direct experience.
Then you run track.
Agreed! Now to convince Halford.
498: It's an estuary. Not necessarily fetid at all -- the tides sweep through in both directions twice a day. It's just sort of happenstancially fetid through being snuggled up in the middle of NYC, which though I love it is not a clean city.
Here's where I can brag that I just signed Mara up for Tumble & Splash, where every Friday this summer when she's not in preschool she can do 45 minutes of gymnastics followed by 45 minutes of swim lessons. She finished her first "Tumble with Me" class last night and I'm thrilled about getting her into a new one that doesn't seem to encourage/require parental involvement. Plus, maybe in an hour and a half she can tire herself out at least a little!
Mara's dentist (specializing in kids with special needs) pulled the bullshit "This is a princess chair and I need you to lie down in the princess chair since you're a princess!" thing Peggy Orenstein cites in her book and I was very annoyed about that. While not a princess, Mara does like wearing dresses, dancing with her dolls, and watching basketball. She's also really good about predicting which team will win, which is a little weird. Her color commentary is adorable.
502: And you've got the Harlem River and C-Rock cliff basically right there. It was good enough for Jim Carroll and the gang.
