by flagamuffin

I agree and I don't agree. Or more accurately I agree but have lots of doubts.

Because as soon as we liberated ourselves from a concept of what our son’s education should look like, we were able to observe how he learned best. And what we saw was that the moment we stopped compelling Fin to sit and draw or paint or write was the moment he began doing these things on his own. It was the moment he began carving staves of wood into beautiful bows and constructing complex toys from materials on hand: an excavator that not only rotated, but also featured an extendable boom; a popgun fashioned from copper pipe, shaved corks, and a whittled-down dowel; even a sawmill with a rotating wooden “blade.”

Like, everything about this is screaming 'outlier'.

What I find so worrying about these sorts of movements, I think, is that they so casually dismiss everything learned in school as pointless or irrelevant -- "Day after day I sat, compelled to repeat and recite, and little of it seemed to have any bearing beyond the vacuum of the classroom." Now, in my experience that's bullshit. It's wrong and a little bit simple-minded. I learned a million things a day in school. Sure, not always at a quick pace, but in toto I now know a damn lot about history, physics, literature, biology, chemistry, economics ... I just don't buy the idea that going to school is worthless. I respect the classical education. Yeah, I don't know how to find wild onions -- not my fault, I tried, the Boy Scouts sucks -- but christ. I could figure it out if I wanted to. Maybe I will someday.

I don't mean to say that what we have is that great; that would directly contradict things I have said on hubski before. But it's not a waste of time.