posted
I know a girl who recently graduated from Sudbury Valley School (http://www.sudval.org/), which sounds a lot like structured unschooling. That is, the students have to put in a certain number of hours, but what and how they learn once they're there is completely up to them. Then, they only graduate if a panel of "staff" and other students opine that they've learned enough to graduate. The girl I know admits that each year there are some slackers who aren't going to graduate, but most kids who go to this school thrive.
Posts: 1785 | Registered: May 1999
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posted
Wow, this thread really generated more info than I ever thought it would. I'm so glad to realize my first view of unschooling isn't apparently the one that everyone sees.
Many of the sites I went to that first day were parents who didn't really believe in any "rules" for kids. They say their kids had great behavior, and maybe they do... or maybe they are blind!
I find all this really interesting, even if I have already made my son's education choice.
On another note - I never found anything very lacking in my public school history classes. History was a true passion of mine, and my sixth and seventh grade history teacher was absolutely brilliant! I learned more in her classes than in some of my college level courses. In Texas we got two cycles history. 3rd Grade was World History/Civic Duty. 4th Grade was Texas History & 5th grade was US history. Then 6th grade was World History again, 7th Texas History again, and 8th US history. My 8th grade US history teacher stunk, but I'd learned enough in 5th grade to compensate, and that's the stuff they made us take again in college, so I don't feel I missed too much. All in all, I felt that I got a very good gloss over of history in public school. There wasn't enough time to do in depth studies of everything, but they exposed us to enough that I could go look for it on my own later!
I never did take any history in high school though - I'm not sure what they teach there!
Posts: 1321 | Registered: Jun 2006
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quote:I never found anything very lacking in my public school history classes.
Not surprisingly this is something that varies wildly between school districts. I would also bet that it can and often does change greatly over the course of twelve years.
For instance, in all of my twelve years of school (in the same district) we never once covered history past the civil war. This means that we never actually covered the run up to the world wars nor all of the stuff that followed. Although we did of course talk about black history every February and some of the civil unrest in the middle of the century. Generally looking back on my high school I think that it was incredible weak in the social sciences and relatively strong in math and science.
(Strangely we did however look at the history of Russia and China during the 20th century, but not really in context, more like "So let's study Russia for a few weeks...")
Posts: 1621 | Registered: Oct 2001
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