yeah, we statisticians call that “confounding”.
and you certainly do perpetuate the pattern i’ve detected of unschoolers being smug, condescending pricks who aren’t necessarily as great as they think they are. on the other hand, maybe incessantly talking oneself up is the default condition, and public school crushes it.
Indeed, my partner also taught logic to pre-law students when adjuncting.
I started out in psychology, so phil of mind and cognitive studies is one of the places where my interests overlap with my partner, but it’s not an area where he’s done as much.
I paint now, so the other areas are aesthetics and intellectual property. His did his dissertation on intellectual property with alot of emphasis on Mill.
One person who really brought those great stories to life was Isaac Asimov, who wrote nearly 20 history books (http://www.asimovonline.com/oldsite/asimov_catalogue.html). Reading his books on American history really opened my eyes to how little I had learned (or at least retained) about history in school.
That said, one history class segment does stick out in my mind. Our class had to assign a grade to every U.S. president, and this involved many weeks of reading and debating. I can still picture the debate about whether or not Harry Truman should have given orders to drop atomic bombs on Japan.
I think the reason it stuck with me is because it encouraged the students to create their own interpretations of what had happened in the past, somewhat akin to the “Big History” method of teaching history, which I wrote about last year in another article (http://blogs.kqed.org/mindshift/2013/11/subverting-the-system-student-and-teacher-as-equals/).
Incidentally, the approach described in that article shows how unschooling principles can even be applied in a public school setting (i.e., it doesn’t have to be all or nothing – either learning in an institutional setting or being a self-directed learner). That school is exceptional in many ways, and not all the classes at that school are like that, but there are other types of schools or learning hubs (beyond just the Summerhills, and the Sudbury-model democratic schools) where students are the primary drivers of what to study and how. I keep learning about more and more examples (most of the ones I’ve heard about are in the U.S., but there may be examples overseas too).
How can you have any pudding if you don’t eat your meat?
Also, it’s not like the only available window for important learning is between the ages of five and 18.
In fact, some people say that history is wasted on the young. I think that’s too broadly stated, but I think there is some validity to what one retired educator (with a degree in American history) recently told me: “To really understand history, you have to have lived a certain amount of history.”
This article made me think back to my school days… I was sort of unschooled within the public school system. Up until ~8th grade they allowed me to go at my own pace for reading lessons – when I would get too far ahead I was either allowed to do whatever I wanted or I was given some task e.g. directing other students in putting on a play (without any teacher involvement). I was also allowed some flexibility for math/science, but because those studies tend to be more structured it usually consisted of letting me proceed ahead of schedule and then using me as a tutor/student-leader.
Thanks for the Asimov link. That sounds fantastic!
I’m actually optimistic about public schools eventually blending in independent learning. As long as there are teachers and administrators willing to try new things, there is hope for the bored student.
What, exactly, did he write that makes him a “smug, condescending prick?”
I sure hope that lady’s neck doesn’t get cold.
As a grown unschooler myself, I find Peter Gray’s research really interesting, and it seems inline with what I’ve seen in the lives of fellow grown unschoolers. I’m a cook and non-fiction writer, so I’m not in tech fields and not really the arts either, but I do feel that both those main pursuits of mine involve a whole lot of creativity.
I think there’s a huge potential for philosophy, as a profession, to move into the realm of translating knowledge between disciplines. For scientific disciplines, things like quantum physics need to be translated into terms understandable to the rest of us, even when the “us” includes smart people who have simply specialized in other disciplines. The same is true of every other specialization.
Too often, public philosophers tend to pop up in masturbatory debates over animal consciousness and artificial intelligence to promote arguments for why something that may or may not exist absolutely does/will or does/will not exist. So for every Dan Dennett there are philosophers like Raymond Tallis who end up looking like obnoxious twats or bias confirmers, depending on whether the audience member agrees with the philosophizing or not. See The Infinite Monkey Cage of 6 December 2010.
As a profession, philosophy managed to dethrone religion in importance to the real world, but was in turn dethroned by science. Now, to some extent, philosophy is competing with religion in churning out people who are skilled debaters. We don’t need debaters, however, especially when they ignore the veracity of what they’re debating. What we need are understanders, translators, and explainers. Basically, philosophy needs to go back to its roots in teaching and add a sideline in journalism. Otherwise philosophy will continue being the discipline dominated by obnoxious sophistry.
Philosophy is pretty much the only class I had in college that I though was actually, pragmatically useful for my life (I guess I must mention the program was Art, so the rest was mostly glorified crafts, but still…). My mind was boggled as to why things like logical fallacies and proper argumentation wasn’t taught much earlier. I felt like I had been missing out on something fundamentally important about language and discourse until then. When done/taught properly (and not diving too much into masturbatory woo), philosophy is fantastic.
This brief Neil deGrasse Tyson video about how to get (or rather keep) kids interested in science echoes the themes discussed in the article: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIEJjpVlZu0 (Essentially he says that all kids are natural-born scientists, but get discouraged by adults, and that adults should get out of their way.)
Funny you should post a link to this video, because I also wrote about this Independent Project recently (http://blogs.kqed.org/mindshift/author/luba/). What’s more, I think I may have learned about it from a post you’d made on some other web site. (I was trying to remember why your user name sounded familiar.) So, thanks for that!
That’s great! I’m just going to go ahead and imagine that I’m the reason you heard about it. 
That’s a fantastic bunch of articles you’ve written! I have much to read, now (much more to read, that is). Damn you.
In case you’re looking for similar material, there’s a fella outside Santa Cruz named Wes Beach. A science and math teacher for thirty years, he became convinced that high school, as it is, is a waste of time for many students. Students who wish to skip it, can work a bit with him, write a convincing essay as part of a portfolio, and he provides a legal high school diploma, which most then use to go to community college (as my son recently did), or simply free themselves from the work restrictions faced by teens who are still in school. He’s a fascinating person and we’re very thankful for his services and guidance.
http://www.beachhigh.education/viewpoint/
Thanks for this article and the many more I’ll be reading!
That is why I was so drawn to Cognitive Philosophy. Even though I did enjoy reading philosophy and learning the skill of crafting arguments, in the end it becomes just a mental exercise. But Cognitive Philosophy really solve a problem that was happening in the computer world, where they were trying to figure out how to program computers to have consciousness but then didn’t know even how humans had consciousness. It seemed so valuable to take the mental exercises about how the mind works and use it to serve a real, useful purpose.
I did have this guy in a lot of my classes, though - down side to a Philosophy major:
That sounds really interesting; thanks for the suggestion(s)! (So now I have another article to add to my already-lengthy pipeline, which, incidentally, also includes a book exploring the ideas behind self-directed learning. I guess that’s payback for giving you more material to read. Though I think the workload is quite asymmetric. 
… So I’ll throw another long article your way, in case you missed it when it was covered on this site too: http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/03/5-year-olds-can-learn-calculus/284124/)
I found Thomas Metzinger’s ideas compelling, and his book, The Ego Tunnel, is quite readable. In contrast to generations of philosophers who imagine states of altered consciousness as thought experiments, Metzinger actually digs into modern research in psychology and neurology to inform his account of consciousness.
I have a friend who went to Dartington Hall School. She talks about how on her first English lesson there was a funny smell in the classroom. By the end of the lesson she had found out it was cannabis, by the end of the second lesson she found out it was the English teacher who was smoking it.
It had closed down by the time I was secondary school age and my parents were borderline lower middle class/working class so they wouldn’t have been able to afford it anyway. I ended up at a state school with delusions of grandeur (It did have a big playing field though, it couldn’t be sold because it is a flood plain). All it’s strictness didn’t stop two mass student “strikes” of between 1000-1500 pupils when I was there though.
Who’d want to study history when you can choose whatever else you’d like instead?
Despite what you thought you were saying, there are multiple ways to interpret that statement. I’m sorry I didn’t point that out directly at first, but I thought it could be elucidated by showing one possible interpretation, that I also assumed you didn’t hold.
I also am sorry you feel people in general aren’t interested in history, and that left to their own devices they would prefer to ignore it. There is a lot that I think distracts people from getting engaged in educating themselves, but I don’t feel that people who are allowed to choose their educational path would choose to be ignorant about history.
I don’t know what to say beyond that.
