The author did enroll his kid into school for freshman after a break. Is this normally considered beneficial? Having a period of unschooling followed by traditional school?
I do hear a lot that there's some level of engagement with a traditional school at some stage, but that the experience goes very differently.
Even as an adult, I sometimes want to enroll in an enrichment program that looks a lot like a school class (was just researching culinary training options yesterday, in fact), but there's a huge difference between how that lands and how it landed when I was "stuck" in school as a kid.
When you choose to be there because you've evaluated its merits and found something you consider worth the costs (whatever annoyances come with it), and you also know you can leave, it loses the "prison" aspect "schooling" has for a lot of kids.
Our oldest daughter will be 16 next month. Last year, she decided to take a couple of agriculture-related classes at the local high school so she could be part of FFA and show livestock. This year she spent three hours per day there.
She’s currently spending the next three days at an FFA leadership event at a university about five hours away - despite never having been enrolled as a student in a public school, she will be the only person in her (small) FFA chapter to have ever qualified and attended.
She’s planning on doing “high school” for one more year, then attending our local community college to get an associate’s degree. While she technically “won’t be a high school graduate” when she turns 18, she will have a two-year college degree and about half the transferable credits necessary to graduate from a four-year university if that’s what she wants. For that matter, she could start university this fall if she wanted - but it doesn’t make much logistical sense to send a 16-year-old to live on her own, and that’s not what she wants to do anyhow.
I don’t think there is a true definition for “pure unschooling”. By its very nature, every child ends up valuing different things and making unique choices.
smeej|1 year ago
Even as an adult, I sometimes want to enroll in an enrichment program that looks a lot like a school class (was just researching culinary training options yesterday, in fact), but there's a huge difference between how that lands and how it landed when I was "stuck" in school as a kid.
When you choose to be there because you've evaluated its merits and found something you consider worth the costs (whatever annoyances come with it), and you also know you can leave, it loses the "prison" aspect "schooling" has for a lot of kids.
pyuser583|1 year ago
Much more common to unschool for a bit then head back.
Ancapistani|1 year ago
Our oldest daughter will be 16 next month. Last year, she decided to take a couple of agriculture-related classes at the local high school so she could be part of FFA and show livestock. This year she spent three hours per day there.
She’s currently spending the next three days at an FFA leadership event at a university about five hours away - despite never having been enrolled as a student in a public school, she will be the only person in her (small) FFA chapter to have ever qualified and attended.
She’s planning on doing “high school” for one more year, then attending our local community college to get an associate’s degree. While she technically “won’t be a high school graduate” when she turns 18, she will have a two-year college degree and about half the transferable credits necessary to graduate from a four-year university if that’s what she wants. For that matter, she could start university this fall if she wanted - but it doesn’t make much logistical sense to send a 16-year-old to live on her own, and that’s not what she wants to do anyhow.
I don’t think there is a true definition for “pure unschooling”. By its very nature, every child ends up valuing different things and making unique choices.