... Summa Cum Laude and became a teacher (at Crocket HS, a school of about 80% immigrants and immigrant children, where she won an award for having 96% of her classes pass the the old TAAS testing), my youngest who had a job feeding the sharks at the aquarium in Corpus Christi, graduated from Texas A&M Summa Cum Laude and is an oceanic archeologist. Both girls attended the circus school in Evenston, Il, both were reading by kindergarten. I was also a custodial single father with my daughters. My son owns Blue Sky Bee Supply in Ravenna, Ohio.
I taught at a Montessori school in Akron, Ohio while I attended Akron U. I have a pretty good idea of how it works. Unschooling may be a good idea for a child who actually has the foundations required to delve into a subject, but I am afraid motivated children like yours and mine are exceptions not the rule.
I see the level of "home schooling" here in central Texas and I know how abysmal it can be. Totally abrogating responsibility for educating their children under the guise of "unschooling" is self serving rationalization for failure to keep up the goal of getting children educated.
My siblings consists of two lawyers, two teachers, a mechanical engineer (who got a lot of his education by unschooling but only after he got an education in mechanical design and became a production engineer in window factories in Iowa and Nebraska), a grocery store manager. All of our w kids with with only four kids out of 28 grandchildren have further education past high school.
My girls play piano, alto sax, flute, clarinet. So please. My maternal and paternal grandfather came bare foot off farms in Ohio and Kentucky (where two of my ancestors were governors, one was a senator and both were Congressmen) and further back there's a governor of North Carolina - he started Union Carbide and gave $120 million to the University of NC. One grandfather became a lead machinist with Goodyear Aerospace, the other an electrical engineer who became chief light and signal engineer for the Nickle Plate and then the Norfolk and Western Railroads. Education is paramount in my entire family.
I know personally valuable and important education is. At 73 I'm starting to take college classes again. Most kids are not going to be motivated to educate themselves when they have trouble motivating themselves of the couch and put electronic entertainment down and use it for educating themselves. I do have a nephew who supervises beta testing for an Austin gaming developer, but he got an education first.
You and I are exceptions.
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