| | I had considered writing a fake article about "Un-Parenting". The philosophical reasons would all be the same as those for unschooling. The children know what's best for themselves. The parent shouldn't "force" or "coerce" the child. Etc. But it would apply to all things. Like feeding them, clothing them, teaching them to speak, etc. You'd just kind of throw them in the backyard and let them fend for themselves. Trying to get them to eat the right food, or not fall off cliffs, or any other sane act of parenting would be thrown out as "vicious oppression".
I would take quotes like "People often say that our child will never want to learn the basics she needs for her life if we don't teach them to her. Who, when she wants to know things about the world, wouldn't want to read?" and rephrase them to be about providing food. Who, after all, wouldn't want to acquire food if they were hungry?
My own analysis of the unschooling fallacy is simple. It's a bad analogy with free-markets. We argue against a top-down controlled economy and having it centrally planned. Instead, we prefer the market mechanisms where people will act in their own interest and end up with better results. Apply that to schooling. Instead of trying to figure out how to make education interesting for your child, or go through the difficult job of trying to find the most essential knowledge and skills that your child will need in life, you just trust them to fend for themselves. You don't plan...you just allow him to be free and he'll get the same results.
This is not a method of educating a child. It's an abdication of the responsibility. And the "UnParenting" idea is just taking it to the next step. If you're going to abdicate your responsibility to educate your child, why not abdicate it all and leave it to "the free market" (a child wondering in the dark, with no clue and no support).
Unschooling is a complete denial of the idea that humans pass on information to their offspring.
Of course, even the unschoolers won't take their theory all the way. While they personally won't educate their children, they'll allow the children access to educational material by other people. But why? If a child really wanted to figure out calculus, he'd invent it himself, right? And isn't the educational books, by telling the child what to think, just as coercive?
Maybe there's some kernel of truth the unschoolers are latching on to. For instance, it's plausible that children learn best when they're interested in something. So instead of having a detailed inflexible pedagogical method, you would adjust it to take advantage of their natural curiosities. This kind of position is not the slightest bit incompatible with actually educating your children, and in no way does it come close to justifying the "process" of leaving a child in a state of ignorance and making them fend for themselves. I imagine the same is true for any other valid "reasons" for unschooling.
Finally, this quote was added back when this thread was "hot" the first time. It's by Nathaniel Branden.
Overly "permissive" parents tend to produce highly anxious children. By this I mean parents who back away from any leadership role; who treat all family members as equal not only in dignity but also in knowledge and authority; and who strive to teach no values and uphold no standards for fear of "imposing" their "biases" on their children.
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