Thoughts on unschooling

We just got back from swimming, where I took great joy in watching Jalen, Sierra and Jared play together, care for each other and have a great time as I chose to sit this one out and get some writing done. They really have a special sibling bond and it's wonderful to observe.

Here are some posts I gleaned from various lists today, that I really enjoyed:

From Dawn at AlwaysUnschooled, where swimming lessons vs. learning to swim naturally is being discussed:

~~~"When my daughter was 3 we were offered free swim lessons and alot of
our friends were going. We went two times and quit. They asked us
to do things that were uncomfortable for me and my daughter like
pushing her head under water - yuch! She didnt want to play in the
water for several months after that. I questioned why I hadnt
applied the values of unschooling to swimming.

Then we bought a house with a pool and I just relaxed about the entire
process, bought her alot of floaties and toys and we just played.
Didn't try to teach her a thing. She then started guiding me to help
her swim. She would ask me to hold her waist and she would try to
swim to the stairs.

The profound part for me was that she would start this 'mantra'
of "Dont push me, dont let go" over and over and over again - I
mean it, like hundreds of times a day! For me that is what
unschooling is - not pushing and not letting go."~~~~


From Shinewithunschooling, where the topic of trusting our children's interest in guns is being discussed:

Amy Carpenter-Leugs wrote:

~~~~~~~~"Some items are just powerful, mysterious, full of history and the
secrets of the human heart. They resonate with us on so many levels.

Guns, for instance (since that is the topic at hand ):

First, there's the cold steel wrapped around a tiny, amazingly
powerful bit of fire -- in elemental terms, that's not unlike our own
Selves -- the Earth/Body wrapped around powerful Spirit, and all the
responsibility that goes along with that.

Then there's the pure satisfaction of hitting a target square on -- a
satisfaction honed through the genes of our hunter/gatherer ancestors
for eons. That satisfaction ties into a survival skill that was
essential for much of the human race until quite recently.

And then there's the Hero factor present in guns and weaponry of all
sorts. I see in my own son a huge desire to save the world, to use
his own competence and strength and bravery to right all the wrongs.
Right now, that translates into lots of interest in weapons and
fighting -- that interest may last, or it may transmutate into
championing a particular cause. Either way is fine."~~~~~~~~~~


And from UnschoolingDiscussion, Sandra was posting about the insanity plea of Andrea Yates, and pondering some related issues:

~~~~~~~~".........just earlier
today I was thinking about how some people's personal preferences
(passions? obsessions?) get played out on their kids. It happens to
kids in school too, of course, when parents pressure them to be
perfect, or to be paranoid, or whatever. Sometimes we hear stories
of homeschoolers or unschoolers getting their kids into some kind of
extreme situations because the mom is anti-something (deforestation
or meat-eating or TV or automobile transport or R-rated-movie-
watching or Christianity or internet access or something) so she
builds an environment and a mystique and a set of threatening stories
all based on living out her extreme view. Some of them are anti-
school, and that can be scary. If those kids do end up having to go
to school for some reason, the mom's warnings might make them WAY
more fearful than they should be.

When people do positive things for positive reasons, that's good (by
simple definition "good"), and when they do negative things for
negative reasons, that's dark and bad, no matter how much Bible and
Jesus are cited on the way there.

If we limit our worlds and our children's worlds to smaller and
smaller places, physically or intellectually or any other way, we end
up in a hole from which we can't see the whole sky, can't see the
whole world. Give them MORE, not less. Let them think, see and do
MORE, not less."~~~~~~~~~~~