What does the Catholic Church teach about unschooling? Would it be sinful for Catholic parents to unschool their children?

[Hoosier_Daddy]

I’m not arguing that calculators and computer software aren’t useful. I’m objecting to you saying that it doesn’t matter if kids learn long division or spelling because they have programs that can do that for them now. Knowing how to use a program that does math is NOT the same as understanding what that program is doing. And technological advances will never be a reasonable reason to discount the value of learning fundamentals.

Also, for the record, I never said anything about your kids’ intelligence or curriculum. What I said is that someone who thinks skipping fundamentals is OK in any situation shouldn’t be teaching.

I didn’t say that.

My kids do long division till their eyes bleed. Nobody uses actual “calculators” anymore either.

I obviously think it is important that this is a large part of education. It is important for kids to learn how things are done beyond the push of the enter button. But as for a life skill? It is not necessary for me to judge if another parent chooses to ignore that part of education or as in the case of “unschooling” let it come naturally. Like you said, you use it every day. So it is fair to say that in living life one would learn this skill. I prefer a classical education for my children however, so the emphasis on things like sentence diagramming, long division, and handwriting are still a giant part of the curriculum. Which you might want to note that the public school system has moved away from. In fact they are less focusing on things like long division and more focusing on teaching technology. Probably more so than I do with my kids. Sure, my fourth grader knows how to Google something for a science project but she has never once used a “calculator” or calculator function to this day. Of course this will change as the math gets more advanced but I am happy with the idea of building the base.

I am curious what you have your kids learning. What curriculum do they use?

And I think on these subjects there is a little too much dog piling on people who choose differently than you or I do. SAINT John Paul the Second reiterated that parents are the primary educators of their children. And there are many many different systems to achieve that. Perhaps an "unschooling’ kid will get your drive-thru change wrong in the future because they are lacking in math skills. Or perhaps they will be your kids boss of a major corporation. What another parent does out of an intimate love of a child they know better than anyone else, especially Hoosier Daddy or QuasiCatholic, should be given the benefit of the doubt. It would be surely accurate to say that my kids have put in more long division math time than yours if you are not homeschooling. Any educator would tell you how important it is to learn basic skills. But the idea that “long division” must be used in life to be a functioning member of society is plain old wrong.
Do I think it is important. You bet. Do I think it is something that the future holds, nope. Same thing with Cursive writing which is not even taught most schools. But it is part of the classical and complete education I choose for my children. Others may have a different road to take and that should be fine with you, me, and Dave.

How about we just dial back the quick judgement about things that we don’t really know about on a level to judge someone else.

I hope, after my explanation, you are not “sad” anymore. I hope you can rest assured my kids are ok.

But just in case you wish to inquire more about my teaching philosophy or ability, here is a link to our curriculum.
setonhome.org/

 

[QuasiCatholic]

I didn’t say that.

I am curious what you have your kids learning. What curriculum do they use?

I only got married eight months ago, so no school-age kids yet.

But all three of my siblings and I went to a run-of-the-mill public school in a one-horse town that didn’t even offer AP courses and we all excelled academically without any special home-schooling, private schooling, unschooling , etc.

Two of us have master’s degrees, one has a doctorate. One went to an Ivy League school, one skipped the last two years of HS and went straight to college. All of us got very good scholarships.

On the other hand, I know at least two lifetime K-12 private Catholic school grads from different schools in different states who’ve both told me their schools were full of snotty rich kids and/or troublemakers got kicked out of public school.

So personally I think I’ll stick with public schools.

Not that there is anything wrong with homeschooling, just that I don’t see the need for it. (That curriculum does look pretty solid, though.)

 

[Hoosier_Daddy]

So personally I think I’ll stick with public schools.

)

And no one should tell you that your future children are done a disservice with that choice. And no one should judge your decision or be “sad” for your kids.

Not that there is anything wrong with homeschooling, just that I don’t see the need for it. (That curriculum does look pretty solid, though.

I’m glad I have your approval.

 

[Usige]

Wow, not sure where the thought that unschooling means doing nothing comes from. I always love when people complain about something they apparently have not actually researched.

One of the principle concepts in unschooling is to teach kids that learning can happen at anytime in anyplace. It is meant to set them up to see education as a natural part of life. Unschooling is an attempt to break down the concept that education only happens Monday - Friday from 9am - 3pm at a desk in a special building.

Unschooling being about only learning things you want is patently false. Students direct things by their interest, but it is up to the parents to integrate that interest into the delivery mechanism for their education. For example if a kid is interested in dinosaurs then you practice reading and writing stories about dinosaurs (English class). You do counting and sorting exercises using plastic dinosaurs (math). You might look at where different types of dinosaurs lived close to you using maps (geography). In essence you take the child’s interest and integrate their lessons using that interest as the delivery vehicle. Yes, you don’t sit down and say we are going to 23 minutes of math, followed by 42 minutes of science, etc. everyday. You might be doing math, geography, and English all at the same time. The next day you might be doing math all day if they are really interested in it that day.

Instead of a schedule you have educational goals for the month or semester and simply adjust the approach based on the students interest. That does not mean you simply ignore subject they don’t want to do. The whole philosophy is to instill learning as something that just happens, not as something that is forced on you against your will. Think about most jobs. Are you given task and left to figure out how to do it or are you told to do step one for 5 minutes, step 2 for 8 minutes, etc. ad nauseum?

One of the reasons that many parents home school is the flexibility to individualize the instruction to the student. Teachers with a class of 30 do not have that luxury. Some kids simply do not thrive in a rigid classroom environment so an unschooling approach is the best way for them to learn. Some of my kids learn better using workbooks other learn better through daily inquiry. None of them are uneducated though and if you tell my wife, a homeschooling mother of 6, that she is lazy? The first thing she will ask you is how much of your day is spend educating your children or how involved are you in their learning. She does it all day, everyday. No sick days; no vacation; no off the clock time. She teaches them continuously. I dare you to tell her she is lazy for using unschooling philosophies.

 

[KendraDZ1902]

I’m not sure if I understand unschooling. How will this help if this child wants to go on to pursue a college degree? Where you open up a textbook, listen to lectures, and have to take notes on what’s said in what’s in the book. They will have to learn to study/take notes in college? A little bit too late to learn on the fly. Will these kids tell their advisor, “I’m not really interested in learning 12 credit hours of a foreign language that my degree requires, because I’m not really interested in that” ??

Give me a text book, a highlighter, and index cards. Tell me the date of the test and what chapters it is on. Like the subject or not, this chick will do it and move the heck on.

 

[DaisymaeD]

Such a tempest in a teapot about my long-division example LOL!

Truly, I wasnt accusing anyone or insulting anyone. I just said I was the type of kid who wouldn’t have done the boring stuff without being made to.

I still hate the boring stuff of life and only do it for the greater good or because I don’t want to face the consequences of not doing it.

But anyhow–now I’m REALLY confused about what unschooling means–first one poster says it’s totally directed by a child who chooses everything they want and not a single thing that doesn’t appeal to them. Then another poster comes along and says “oh no, the parents find ways to make the learning fun so the kid will be interested”.

If it’s the second, then it’s homeschooling, no? Admittedly a different type of curriculum, but homeschooling nonetheless.

And, no, I don’t know any unschooled kids. How would I? This is a very new and obscure philosophy. But, if I do meet any, I’ll get back to you with my findings.

 

[kozlosap]

LOL! I’m trying to imagine a person who was unschooled explaining to a med school or law school professor that they chose their own curriculum and work at their own leisure. I’m sorry, but in this world there are deadlines and expectations required of all.

 

[Usige]

I’m not sure if I understand unschooling. How will this help if this child wants to go on to pursue a college degree? Where you open up a textbook, listen to lectures, and have to take notes on what’s said in what’s in the book. They will have to learn to study/take notes in college? A little bit too late to learn on the fly. Will these kids tell their advisor, “I’m not really interested in learning 12 credit hours of a foreign language that my degree requires, because I’m not really interested in that” ??

Give me a text book, a highlighter, and index cards. Tell me the date of the test and what chapters it is on. Like the subject or not, this chick will do it and move the heck on.

Kendra, by the time they get to highschool or college they are fully capable of reading a textbook, taking notes, etc. if they need to. While I wasn’t homeschooled or unschooled, I still made it through two degrees without ever taking notes, using highlighters and only skimming the textbooks. I would simply look at the syllabus or learning outcomes and figure out what I needed to do to learn the material. I learned less in 18+ years of formal educational classes than I have through self study during my life. Unfortunately most learning is geared towards testing and it is why many people could only tell you 10-15% of what they supposedly learned by looking at straight A’s on transcripts. They learn the material for testing, but do not retain it long term.

I have always done self directed learning and we use some unschooling philosophies to encourage the same of out children. Unschooling is not about rejecting textbooks, but instead is about engendering a sense of lifelong learning. Don’t learn for the test, but learn for the love of knowledge.

 

[catholicmamajoy]

For those who continue to not understand how Catholic unschooling works, would you please take the time to read this reply from an actual unschooling mother?

forums.catholic-questions.org/showpost.php?p=12904755&postcount=12

I have posted several links to her blog in my earlier posts. If you truly want to take a look at Catholic unschooling and see that it’s a viable option for education, even for those planning on college, please read her reply and take a look at the links I’ve posted directly to her blog where she explains how this learning method and philosophy works.

storiesofanunschoolingfamily.com/2014/05/twice-five-minutes-on-friday-does.html

storiesofanunschoolingfamily.com/2014/05/five-minutes-on-friday-what-is.html

storiesofanunschoolingfamily.com/2014/03/some-thoughts-on-unschooling-and-experts.html

 

[DaisymaeD]

Dear usige–here’s the problem with that definition…ALL education approaches, formal school, homeschool, unschool, claim to promote a lifelong love of learning.

Like you, I learn better at things I enjoy and put the effort into, but it was also good to learn the basics, and learn to buckle down and push through the unrewarding things.

 

[KendraDZ1902]

LOL! I’m trying to imagine a person who was unschooled explaining to a med school or law school professor that they chose their own curriculum and work at their own leisure. I’m sorry, but in this world there are deadlines and expectations required of all.

Right! I have a medical skills test coming up. I have to do 5 random (out of 22 already learned skills) skills in 25 minutes. Even if I do my skill properly, if I go past 25 minutes I automatically failed. An unschooler may not understand that time management is most definitely important.

 

[KendraDZ1902]

Kendra, by the time they get to highschool or college they are fully capable of reading a textbook, taking notes, etc. if they need to. While I wasn’t homeschooled or unschooled, I still made it through two degrees without ever taking notes, using highlighters and only skimming the textbooks. I would simply look at the syllabus or learning outcomes and figure out what I needed to do to learn the material. I learned less in 18+ years of formal educational classes than I have through self study during my life. Unfortunately most learning is geared towards testing and it is why many people could only tell you 10-15% of what they supposedly learned by looking at straight A’s on transcripts. They learn the material for testing, but do not retain it long term.

I have always done self directed learning and we use some unschooling philosophies to encourage the same of out children. Unschooling is not about rejecting textbooks, but instead is about engendering a sense of lifelong learning. Don’t learn for the test, but learn for the love of knowledge.

I understand every child is different. My little brother was able to pass with Cs and Bs. He never studied, he never did his homework (at least not at home) and he never took out highlighters. I, on the other hand, didn’t know I had ADHD growing up and I had to adapt. Being able to focus the last month has been amazing. Anyway, if I wasn’t totally interested/stimulated by a subject I HAD to force myself to learn it for the test and it was very hard for me. If I was unschooled, I don’t know if I would have been beneficial for me. I would be able to tell you everything about the human body, but nothing about anything else. lol.
Now, I am studying something that I enjoy, which stimulates my brain. I didn’t have to study and I passed my written exam with a 98. And I can honestly tell you what I have learned.

It’s just some things you NEED to learn even if you don’t love it. You NEED to learn math even if you don’t like it or appreciate the skill involved, especially counting back change. Computers fail and the cashier needs to know how much to give back. OR if you give money, you need to know how much you should get back. It isn’t interesting, though.

 

[KendraDZ1902]

Dear usige–here’s the problem with that definition…ALL education approaches, formal school, homeschool, unschool, claim to promote a lifelong love of learning.

Like you, I learn better at things I enjoy and put the effort into, but it was also good to learn the basics, and learn to buckle down and push through the unrewarding things.

I think everyone enjoys learning things they are interested in, it’s…interesting. lol. And I agree, you need to learn the “stupid stuff” too.

 

[Antegin]

30 yrs ago when I taught early childhood, we were taught to use unstructured programs that sounded very much like unschooling. They were very empowering and the children loved coming to school. They learned to write very early using inventive spelling, create stories. I was less impressed with the math being learned.

When I taught second year First Communion, I quickly discovered bright, hardworking children still using inventive spelling. I did not get a chance to see their math skills. Their ability to gleen information from the text, the group work or from the class presentations was very disappointing.

There has to be some middle ground so that children are introduced gradually into structure and content/objective curricula which prepare them better for a content driven world, without losing the wonder and excitement that exploration provides.

 

[Usige]

I understand every child is different. My little brother was able to pass with Cs and Bs. He never studied, he never did his homework (at least not at home) and he never took out highlighters. I, on the other hand, didn’t know I had ADHD growing up and I had to adapt. Being able to focus the last month has been amazing. Anyway, if I wasn’t totally interested/stimulated by a subject I HAD to force myself to learn it for the test and it was very hard for me. If I was unschooled, I don’t know if I would have been beneficial for me. I would be able to tell you everything about the human body, but nothing about anything else. lol.
Now, I am studying something that I enjoy, which stimulates my brain. I didn’t have to study and I passed my written exam with a 98. And I can honestly tell you what I have learned.

It’s just some things you NEED to learn even if you don’t love it. You NEED to learn math even if you don’t like it or appreciate the skill involved, especially counting back change. Computers fail and the cashier needs to know how much to give back. OR if you give money, you need to know how much you should get back. It isn’t interesting, though.

I also have ADD. I didn’t find that out until I was 35. To be honest if I had been given meds as a child or even early adult, I would never have been as successful in my career as I have been. Why? Because I would never be able to make the cognitive leaps needed to solve some of the toughest problems. I know this for a fact, because I took meds for 6 months and it was like tying 3/4 of my brain behind my back. Yes, I could sit down and write a 10 page report in an afternoon, but where I could look at a multi system failure and diagnose the failure in 15 minutes without the meds I might take hours or days on meds to diagnose the same problem because my brain could not function the way I was used to. I stopped taking the meds and simply told my boss he had to chose either bursts of brilliance or someone that can “buckle down” and write report after report. Being a smart man he paired me with someone that was good at organizing and could take my messy lightning speed mental processes and turn them into reports.

People seem to keep missing the point that unschooling does not mean not doing things you don’t like, it is simply doing it in a different way than traditional class room settings. It is more focused on teaching through life experience then through rote memorization. Learning is through going about your daily life, not simply saying that it’s now time to learn. It also recognizes that each of use are born with different abilities and rejects the one size fits all way of learning. Unschooling adapts to the strengths and weakness of the student rather than forcing the student to conform to an rigid educational regiment.

Let me give an example. One of my boy’s just could not get ratios and fractions down, but was fascinated with watching gears and robots. So instead of forcing him to do work sheets that made no sense we started playing with Lego gears. We just talked about how using a small gear (8 tooth) with a large gear (24 tooth) spun at a different speed then replaced the large gear with a medium sized, 16 tooth gear. We played for a little bit and I said lets see what the difference is and used a sharpie to mark a tooth on each of the three gears. We then turned them by hand and counted how many times each configuration turned. He then started building gear trains to see if he could make a motor spin a wheel at different speeds. It wasn’t until a week later that I told him we were doing ratios (1:2, 1:3, etc) and how he could use math to figure it out without trial and error. It wasn’t on a lesson plan and was something he didn’t like to do. Instead I used his interest to help him learn something. The goal was not to teach him ratios, but to encourage his curiosity. If he hadn’t learned ratios that way, so what? He knew that using larger or smaller gears could change the speed of a motor and that’s more than some people I know who hold masters degrees in education.

 

[Hoosier_Daddy]

LOL! I’m trying to imagine a person who was unschooled explaining to a med school or law school professor that they chose their own curriculum and work at their own leisure. I’m sorry, but in this world there are deadlines and expectations required of all.

bestcollegereviews.org/colleges-without-letter-grades/

My sister got her masters in education from one of these Universities. Chose her own courses and gave herself her own grades. She is a teacher in the Public school system.

As my wife stated last night. Unschooling is Montessori for homeschoolers.

 

[Usige]

As my wife stated last night. Unschooling is Montessori for homeschoolers.

I was kinda thinking the same thing this morning. It’s funny to me that many people pay thousands of dollars in my area for preschool and kindergarten Montessori programs, then balk at continuing that type of educational approach once they hit first grade. At that point it’s shut up, buckle down and just do what you’re told. Then they get into the work place and I am stuck untraining people from the mentality that I’m going to hold their hand and walk them through every step until they have it memorized.

 

[Selah_KY]

And accountants (good ones employed by major corporations) almost NEVER do long division or any sort of hand written Math at any time.

Nor does my unschooled daughter who is majoring in math at a public university. When she was 7 or 8 she did long division for fun, but there just isn’t time to stop and do that by hand once you are in higher math.

LOL! I’m trying to imagine a person who was unschooled explaining to a med school or law school professor that they chose their own curriculum and work at their own leisure. I’m sorry, but in this world there are deadlines and expectations required of all.

I hate to disappoint you, but Ivy League colleges and other top tier universities heavily recruit unschooled teenagers.

Then they get into the work place and I am stuck untraining people from the mentality that I’m going to hold their hand and walk them through every step until they have it memorized.

And THIS is why. Students who have been unschooled (and actually homeschooled using other methods) are more likely to be able to think for themselves, don’t need to be told what to learn, and are better able to adapt to the college environment. They haven’t had years of passive learning where they are expected to spit out the facts and details required by the teacher, in order for them to be ranked and categorized by bureaucrats.

We live in a time where technology in the workplace changes rapidly. Those who are successful are the people who take the initiative to learn on their own new skills and don’t sit around waiting for a “teacher” or a “class” to teach them what they need to know. That was true when I was still in the work world of the 1990s and it’s even truer today.

 

[Brianmcg321]

I was kinda thinking the same thing this morning. It’s funny to me that many people pay thousands of dollars in my area for preschool and kindergarten Montessori programs, then balk at continuing that type of educational approach once they hit first grade. At that point it’s shut up, buckle down and just do what you’re told. Then they get into the work place and I am stuck untraining people from the mentality that I’m going to hold their hand and walk them through every step until they have it memorized.

Exactly. I’ve never had a job where I sat at my desk for 8 hours while my boss lectured to me.

I think it’s funny how the number one argument is always “how will they know how to sit in a college class and take notes”. Lol. Like it takes years and years to sit and listen to a PowerPoint presentation, which they give you anyway.

 

[KendraDZ1902]

Exactly. I’ve never had a job where I sat at my desk for 8 hours while my boss lectured to me.

I think it’s funny how the number one argument is always “how will they know how to sit in a college class and take notes”. Lol. Like it takes years and years to sit and listen to a PowerPoint presentation, which they give you anyway.

I suppose I’m an idiot because it was very difficult for me to sit still and pay attention. I had to force myself, from a young age, to concentrate. I didn’t realize everyone else didn’t have to force themselves. So, not having years of sitting at a desk learning to force myself to focus, would have lead me to not be able to do that in hs or college. But keep laughing.