Just when you think you've seen some of the most asinine parenting decisions imaginable something new jumps up. And here we have "unschooling". In watching this video I felt better about myself as a parent. I understand that there's a lot of people who are frustrated with the public school system. I understand that not everyone can afford private school and I'm a big supporter of school choice. I'm all for the right to home school and have many students who are home schooled. My karate classes can actually count as a physical education credit for home schooling.
But this "unschooling" is just wrong. It lazy parenting at its utmost laziest. This is what I see Clara from The Guild doing when her kids get older. And for a moment I was thinking there may be a little merit to it when I saw the family with the younger kids going to a store and the parents asked their children about how much money they had and they answered. That's providing real world experiences for your children which teach and reinforce good knowledge. I'm all for that. But then you see them having breakfast and the boy is eating a doughnut while sitting on the stairs because that's what he wants to do.
The kid is like five or something! Of course he'd like to eat a doughnut for breakfast! And when the kids ends up suffering from juvenile obesity in a few years, I'm sure the parents will be baffled as to how something like that could happen. Giving a child a choice as to what they get to eat is fine and dandy, but at least make the question multiple choice and have some items out that have some semblance of nutritional value.
Children should not have free reign over their lives. They do not know how to survive in the world. It is up to parents to teach them how. These parents aren't teaching.
Then we have the teenagers. Boy, they sure look happy. I'd be happy as hell too if I didn't have to do anything I don't want to do. You can actually see an aura of stupid upon the entire family. What's stunning is when the reporter asks the teens if they think they're prepared to go to college?
College? The hell with college. Are those kids prepared to get a job? Are they even starting to be prepared to support themselves at all? They don't have to do anything they don't want to do (and I'm sure their parents are their best friends too) so what happens when they decide that they don't want to work? What happens when they're at home at age 24, unschooled, with no hope of being successful? Well, by that time Obama's Healthcare debacle will be in place and they can go right on mooching off their parents until they're twenty-six, at which time they can start mooching off the Government.
This is flat out social irresponsibility. Its the laziest parenting I have seen in a while. Frankly, its at this point that child protective services should be having a really close look as to what's going on with these families.
But at least they're happy. So it is true: ignorance is bliss. As such these people are the happiest morons around.
2 comments:
Wow. I was homeschooled for third grade when the Army had my dad doing what were essentially night classes. And I can't fathom doing this for even a year. When I went back into the public system I was really ahead of my classmates; I can't imagine how far behind I'd have been if I'd been allowed to fritter my time away on my own devices.
These kids are just doomed. Someone really needs to step in, be it a family member or someone with some legal authority. Those parents are just flat out lazy.
Post a Comment