i've talked about this before but it's been a while: i was homeschooled my entire life, except for a brief period of a few months when my parents sent me to public school, and it was a massive culture shock around learning for me
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The biggest thing I remember was how much time was wasted. I remember standing around, waiting for teachers to talk, my life existence was just soaked up and poured down the drain, time i could have been spending doing other vivid, skill-building stuff
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The amount of learning I did at school took SO much more time. At home, I sat down with my books and did my work usually in between 2-4 hours. At school that same amount of work could often take two DAYS.
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i spent my extra time at home developing my own skills. I read books nonstop, wrote fantasy fiction, learned to juggle, i taught myself how to carve wood and build crafts and photoshop and learned in a huge amount about personality systems
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and maybe you'd be like, but aella you're kinda weird, most kids would just play videogames
and maybe you're right, but also maybe you would play videogames too if for your entire life, all the learning you'd done was forced onto you by other people
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in the years after i left home, i made friends with people who'd gone to school, and our difference in attitudes towards learning was super obvious. I was really *active* about exploring and learning from my environment, and they tended more towards learned helplessness
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i had never learned shame around nerdiness or loving learning. For me, learning and education had been much less associated with trying to please a system or teachers, it wasn't about being uncool. It was just a natural state of being, like walking or breathing.
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and tbf I wasn't unschooled; there was still a lot of "parents forcing me to learn this thing" - it just took up a much smaller fraction of my life. I can't *believe* that most kids do this for the majority of their waking hours, that's insane to me.
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how much of your childhood education do you remember? How many of the facts forced into you both stuck and were useful for your life? Probably not many. For me, 90% of the useful education I remember from childhood comes from the hours I taught myself.
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My school education (in Germany) was quite useful. For instance, I couldn't write these lines without English class, talk to my coworkers without French class, do my work without math and computer science class, or understand what's going on in the world without history class.
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could you not? Would you not have been curious about these things without classes? I had pretty terrible history education but have spent a lot of time teaching myself about history since then and I didn't need a class to do it.
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I mainly taught myself about specific periods I found interesting. School provided a shallow basement, covering western history from the Persian Wars to the present. For ex., I never really cared about medieval history but I still know about Charlemagne or the walk to Canossa.
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One could say that curiosity motivates one to seek information - but it's usually a depth-first-search, not a breadth-first-search. School provides a shallow but broad foundation of knowledge which might someday prove useful - sometimes unexpectedly.
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