The case for unschooling

I have to thank reader samuel for leaving a comment, which led me to his unschooling blog, which led me to this excellent post on unschooling. I hope you'll read the whole thing, but I just wanted to excerpt one good point:

There is at least one more thing wrong with the conventional model. Judging sources of information on internal evidence is a very important intellectual skill. In the classroom, that skill is anti-taught. The pupil is told things by two authorities–the teacher and the textbook–and his job is to believe what they say. Here again, a sufficiently good teacher may be able to overcome the logic of the setting and teach some degree of critical thinking–but here again, sufficiently good teachers are rare.

One of the great advantages of the Internet, considered as an educational tool, is that it is so obviously an unfiltered medium, leaving it up to each reader to figure out for himself how much to trust his sources of information. It isn't perfect, but at least it is teaching the right lesson instead of the wrong one.

Being able to decide what you think the truth is, based on logic, evidence, your own prior knowledge, and so on, is not just critical to a given individual's education, it is critical to democracy. People will hear conflicting claims and predictions in every imaginable political debate, but what Americans too often do is throw up their hands, give up trying to decipher it all, and vote on the basis of personality. They'll say they just trusted candidate A or B a bit more, and voted accordingly. That's a hideous basis on which to cast a vote!

I also think that one reason we have such short memories for political and historical events is that we're not cataloguing our observations with the idea that they might be useful in interpreting future events. We aren't in the habit of puzzling things out for ourselves, and we don't plan on using our prior experience to decide what we believe about events yet to come.

The specific point about the Internet is certainly true for me. I honestly enjoy diving into a sea of contradictory theories via Google, tossing some out and finding others intriguing. Was Flight 93 over Pennsylvania shot down by the US Air Force? What was Sibel Edmonds on to when she was silenced? Who killed John Kokal? Is my daughter magnesium deficient? Is the caffeine in all this tea I drink doing me harm? I like investigating this stuff, the same way I like reading whodunit murder mysteries and loved those Two-Minute Mystery books as a kid. Contradiction is just interesting, not vexing. I'm very glad my kids' enjoyment of puzzling through things will remain intact!