Homeschooling Success File

I know that usually the only time you see mention of homeschooling in the mainstream media (those government school punks!) is when Ma and Pa H. Billy beat their kids and keep them in cages and feed them dog food, and guess what - they homeschool those poor kids. OMG, we need more governmental oversight into our lives - you just can't trust parents to take care of their kids like the government can! Whoops, I slipped into a rant.

This was actually supposed to be a positive post on a true homeschooling success. Of course, had young Justin been an axe murderer, the fact that he was a homeschooler would have been right there in the headline, but since it is a positive story about him, the fact that he was homeschooled is buried down in the middle of the story.

Out of rant mode now - here we have a 25 year old man who is practically a master shipbuilder - check out this quote from the story:

Home-schooled by his parents, Bob Armstrong and Betty Singer, Justin said his less-structured schedule as a young man allowed him the freedom to pursue his passion for building.

“I don't learn well from books,” he said. “If I get interested, I'll think about it and start figuring stuff out.”

His father describes Justin as a quiet young fellow who would spend hours working on projects as a boy.

“When he was 6 years old, he'd work on a project for 10 hours a day. Those practical projects were a vehicle for his learning,” Bob Armstrong said. “(He and his older brother Jeremy) had a can-do attitude. When I saw where they wanted to go, I tried to give them the tools and opportunities.”

I love it -- he doesn't learn well from books, he learns from actually doing. Well, guess what? We all learn better from doing than we do from reading about doing - but who gets a chance to do anything when we're young and our brains are just bursting with possibility? We're too busy plowing through the crap they make us do in school. Is Justin really good at something he is not interested in? No. He followed his passion and became really good at something he is really interested in. The world might be a very different place if more people were allowed to follow their interests when young.

I can hear the unschooling critics now: Well, sure he can build boats, but can he do long division in the [insert the name of whatever math "method" is currently in vogue] way? Does he know the capital of South Dakota? Did he go to the prom?

Well, for me, reading stories like this really encourages me in what we are doing with our kids. Sometimes that is difficult in the face of negative media coverage and negative feedback from general society about stepping outside the norm.

This is just a first post about unschooling - hopefully in the future I'll have time to explore more in depth the philosophy and realities of unschooling.