Man, I wanted to go to Summerhill so much. We were shown a doco of it at my school, and the takeaway from it for most kids seemed to be the teacher’s line that we would all end up goofing off and doing nothing as there were ‘no rules’. Whereas I was all, ‘Fuuuuck! That kid got to make a crossbow for his woodwork project?! And go to his lessons WHEN HE FELT LIKE IT?’
I still feel cheated.
Yeah, it wasn’t presented as a positive example when we watched the documentary either (probably the same one as you…)
Circa 1985 or so?
I think you normally just walk over to the philosophy department, actually… 
Maybe 1990/1? It wasn’t a new documentary by any means…
Exactly. Making it even more complex is the fact that we all have different opinions of what makes for a good education. And those opinions are even stronger when it comes to the education of our children.
And I agree with you about the study. It’s interesting, but we need more data!
That is a silly statement. Yes, it would be nice to have a more diverse history lesson. I get that point. But say the bulk of European and American history is boring because a bulk of it includes dead white men is a bit much.
Conversely, if you are tired of dead white men, try studying other regions, such as Arabia, Japan, India, Pr-Columbian Americas. Of course people tend to study history centric to their locality.
ETA - re other comments, I am horrible at specific dates, but fortunately I had several teachers who focused less on dates and more on the history and how events related to one another. A broader picture focusing on comprehensive. Knowing why WWII started, not when.
Yes, definitely. While studying linguistics I have met one or two. But I think both as a subculture and in public perception they are relatively distinct from the STEM nerds.
I wonder how many of them went on to learn a trade.
actually, my own topic is full of white guys (the business side of the recording industry), so it’s not that dead white men are boring (because obviously they are not necessarily), but rather that that “dead white great man” narrative is boring and in fact does history a disservice. That doesn’t mean that Washington, Jefferson, or Columbus are ignored or not talked about, or for that matter just made into historical monsters who exploited non-whites and women (which is part of the story), but to show that they are not the only historical agents who created change.
Example. When you talk about Native Americans, a great way to decenter the narrative that usually focuses only on the actions of European colonists and the US, is to focus on the Comanche, who basically had an empire in the South West for about a century. It gives you an opportunity to show the history of the US, not East to West, white centric, but as a series of clashing interactions between different groups of people, that moves as much from the west to the east, as the east to the west. The point is to give non-Europeans as much agency and complexity as Europeans and white Americans have had in our histories, not to replace focusing on one group with another.
I’m just using that phrase “dead white great men version of history” as a short hand for the sort of history we normally teach in high schools, which is still the inevitable march towards modernity with Europeans as the driving force of history instead of the more complex and interesting story that I think is more accurate.
I organize an educational institution modeled broadly on “unschoolish” principles – democratic schools, free schools, homeschooling resource centers, etc – and which considers itself a “hackerspace for kids.” I want to first point out that I consider these to be more-or-less the same concept – “place where you go to work on your projects” vs"place where you go to learn the stuff you’re excited about" – obviously you learn stuff in order to work on your projects, no matter what they are, and learning cool stuff is frequently its own project.
I think that the unschooling community will probably always reflect a particular subset of society, and I think that, at present, this subset overlaps a whole lot with “maker culture” (which label I put in scare quotes to acknowledge that it’s kind of a crazy label for a ridiculously broad set of things – I think that usually what we mean when we use it is “people like us” – which in this case I mean quite literally as “people who are reasonably likely to read BoingBoing.”)
Because of how strongly resonant “maker culture”, unschooling culture, tech startup culture (at it’s best – another caveat), anarchist-punky-activist culture, etc, are with eachother, it should be completely unsurprising that unschoolers go into STEM/STEAM kinds of careers/endeavors. Unschooling, like most subsets of society, is significantly less diverse than society as a whole (though it’s probably more diverse than you think it is! There is a weird liberal race-blindness that causes people to say things like “it’s too bad hackerspaces only have white dudes in them” while they’re at a hackerspace in the company of women of color.) It’s less diverse than society in a lot of the same ways that STEM/STEAM careers are less-diverse than society, and, since it’s primarily an ideological choice (which is to say, a choice deeply rooted in cultural values) this anti-diversity is certainly exacerbated.
(it’s nice to put the “A” in STEAM because then we have an acronym for “things we think are awesome.” More seriously, I’d probably drop the “M” and “T” and just have “SEA” – as an acronym to describe disciplines which primarily value doing things with your hands/in the world, experimentation, prototype, and incremental improvement – I’m not sure how mathematics fits in, but the whole idea of taking this acronym particularly seriously is ridiculous, so I’m not going to try to work it out)
So, sure, we shouldn’t be surprised when unschooled kids go into tech, or the arts, or are self-employed, or whatever. All of this is probably totally explainable using statistics that have nothing to do with what you actually learn when you’re unschooled versus when you’re in school.
And we’re right to critique small-sample studies (though we’re wrong, I think, to completely ignore them without thinking hard about what, if anything, they might be able to tell us.) And we’re especially right to critique small-sample studies in education, where, I think, almost everyone producing a study is ideologically driven and the realities of the discipline make it almost impossible to do broad, deep, rigorous research on anything (people as a whole really don’t like the idea of you doing experiments on their children.) It’s almost impossible for me to know how to read education research – it’s frequently oversold as meaning a whole lot more than it does, and it’s usually incredibly easy to find alternate explanations for the data that are opposite the explanations given by the paper-writers (I thoroughly enjoy reading research on “grit” and “determination” and willingness to stick with hard problems, and, instead of assuming that “giving up” is a bad thing, assume that it’s a rational decision that someone has made, and so reimagine it as research on “knowing when to quit”)
All of that said, I want to make a small list of things that kids who go through our unschooly programs spend some time doing or learning about, almost without fail, that I think kids in traditional school might not.
So I won’t be surprised in 15 years when lots of these kids I’m teaching end up self-employed or working in tech, or running organizations, or some combination of the three of these things.
I think it means the world has begun getting past stuffing particular opinions into peoples’ heads about all the dead white men. Also, the white men who wrote about the dead white men as if they were the only important factors of history are themselves mostly dead.
Coming soon, Killing Bill, a surfacey retrospective on the life of Bill O’Reilly by the same team of interns who lost their minds putting together the Killing series for O’Reilly… and killed him.
Before university education was common, there was the stereotype of the “boorish autodidact.” I aspired to that but I screwed it up by getting a bunch of degrees.
That’s why I labeled it as an assumption. Considering I was “off the mark”, filling in how I was could be helpful in continuing the dialogue.
You’re initial statement was:
Who’d want to study history when you can choose whatever else you’d like instead?
Either you are playing devil’s advocate and are trying to draw out discussion, or you actually feel that studying history is undesirable for most. Clearly at this point, not yourself.
The Prussian Model of education has a specific intent. To produce factory workers. How is it a surprise that when the same model is applied globally that it produces capitalist drones?
There is more than one way to teach people to meet their potential.
Well I know a bunch of people who work in philosophy who are nerds, if that counts. Right now my partner is dealing with philosophy in science and tech at a tech university. A number of sci-fi and gaming fans and such in the department. So lots of papers on computer ethics and gaming and geek examples and such. And your standard groan worthy philosophy humor that you have to have done alot of reading to get. Or at least have had alot of the reading explained to you over time.
Hmm. The more wind you blow, the further off course you sail. Assumptions,presumtions, interpretations.
I love history. I also happen to think it’s of extreme importance to our future.
I agree most schools tend to make it very boring and often off-relevance, but I feel that left to their own devices, we’ll end up with an even more narcissistic and ill-informed society than we have at present.
Schooling needs to change, but not to the antipodal of the pendulum we’re at now.
For that matter, why do we bother with STEM? Insofar as universities divide things up this way, creative and artistic aspects are often central to what is actually being done in STEM disciplines.
I am a philosophy nerd. I majored in philosophy with a focus on Cognitive Studies - a philosophical field related to artificial intelligence research and technology. This field is based on the idea that while we know scientific, neurological things about the brain, we know very little about how we structure and filter the raw information we receive through our senses in order to create our consciously known version of reality. Daniel Dennett is a fun leader in this field - here’s a link to his Ted talks:
I think that people who do not know what philosophy involves think it’s a bunch of people sitting around reciting the whole classic Cosby act about “Why is there air?” but, in fact, it teaches rigorous thought processes. I wrote more in my classes than I would have as an English major, and my writing was critiqued according to specific criteria of my ability to make a logical argument.
It’s a great major and it has a strong relationship to both computer science (because it teaches logic) as well as the legal profession (because it teaches how to develop an argument).
