Unschooling? What the what?!?

I read an article yesterday about Unschooling. Rather than following a set curriculum, the Unschooling child is in control of his learning and is free to decide what he wants to study and when he wants to study it. And of course this produces fabulous results. One child became a successful entrepreneur, one became a mathematician. I’m sure one will become Albert Einstein. Apparently the Lord of the Flies had it all wrong.

I’m a skeptic, of course, and view this as another rationalization by parents who don’t want to do any of the hard work of parenting. Or it’s a rationalization by the Tea Party to eliminate funding for education. Either way, I had the opportunity to study and learn what I wanted when I was a child too. It was called a hobby. Not school. I learned a lot about Star Wars and electric football. It was awesome, but neither included reading, writing, or ‘rithmetic.

Regardless, I owe it to you to do some objective analysis on this educational approach. But there are precious few examples of Unschooling children in the world. Our data set is far too small for meaningful analysis. Lucky for me, there are tens of millions of people to observe who study whatever they want whenever they want. We call them adults.

So using adults as a proxy for children – not as big a stretch as you might think when you consider we use mice as a proxy for children all the time – I did a little observing to see what these adults were learning. I was able to draw a few conclusions about what the hot subjects might be if there were an Unschooling course catalog… which there never would be…

1. Internet pornography
2. Call of Duty
3. The Kardashians (and several geographic varieties of housewives)
4. Fantasy Football
5. iPads

I hear that there is a Kardashian-mother-Bruce-Jenner sex tape out there. I’m sure a lot of Unschoolers will want to learn about that.

There were a few interesting observations as well. A lot of us enjoy learning about what to do if we’re stranded on a tropical island with a bunch of strangers and have to vote one of them off that island every week. Many of us, particularly men, like learning about numbers. A touchdown is 6. Ted Williams batted .406 in 1941. A Porsche 911 can go 0 to 60 in 4.7 seconds. Numbers, not math. And almost everyone, especially famous Unschoolers, likes learning about writing, but only 140 characters at a time and not with a pencil.

And despite repeated opportunities, no one seems to want to learn about how credit cards really work, the relationship between fat foods and fat bodies, functional governments, exit strategies, or how to behave like a decent human being while driving a car.

So until I see some 8 year old Unschooler reading about Alternate Minimum Taxes I’m not convinced.