OK, via prompt by @vgr, 1 like = 1 opinion about unschooling https://twitter.com/vgr/status/1206334761058258944 … …maybe more.
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10. By framing its superiority in terms of rights, humane-ness, and ethics (as opposed to, e.g., efficacy), unschooling opts for the losing side of the political economy in conversations about the future of learning. This is a harsh critique of both unschooling and education.
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11. Unschooling hand-waves at the reasons school exists (e.g. "industrial revolution factory model"), but has failed to develop a coherent analysis of school's robustness to change and staying power. "What's adaptive about school for whom?" is an underappreciated question.
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12. School [and un-schooling] have much more to learn from kindergarten and the world of work than either appreciate.
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13. It is a deep and important question why, for the most part, graduates from graduate schools of education (having nominally studied how people learn and grow), are not some of the most highly paid and sought after designers/managers in fields where knowledge work dominates.
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14. A basic incoherence in discussions of unschooling, learning, and education, is that [mostly] people treat learning as a domain-independent activity. Domain specificity of methods' relevance/efficacy is ignored because of the political functions of discourse around learning.
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15. The set of things people worry about learning is ~arbitrary, a minute sliver of what's out there. The process of identifying, creating curricula for, and developing educators to support learning a topic is so slow so as to make content-first reformers largely irrelevant.
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16. Most discussions of learning wildly overindex on "fit" of topic-defined interest. Learning and motivation are driven by the social and cultural contexts in which people find themselves.
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17. When given the chance to focus on "cognitive" or "affective" factors in someone's learning, returns are almost always higher emphasizing the affective. We don't yet have fundamental explanations for this, but it is a fact largely ignored by unschoolers and schoolers alike.
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18. At most conferences, you hear about new ideas and new work. Unschooling/alt-ed conferences are much more similar to a political caucus coming together around values. Whether this is cause or effect, the intellectual stagnation has yet to even be identified by the sector.
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19. Unschooling [and school] has never really grappled with the reality that choice amongst "education options" is better understood as choice among "insurance products" than "investment products". i.e. it is about raising the floor to which you can fall.
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20. The timescale required to capture the long-term returns of human capital development mean that for all intents and purposes, only governments, churches, universities, and visionary billionaires will be in a position to meaningfully experiment with new K12 institutions.
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21. Much of the work of unschooling has as little to do with school and learning as remediating an unhealthy relationship to body image has to do with the theory of nutrition.
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22. One of the greatest unrecognized reform strategies is to leverage new, salient skills (e.g. programming) to create cover for new pedagogy. Doing this in K12 requires inventive, intellectual work connecting these skills to all the disciplines for which school is responsible.
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23. Dewey, Montessori, Reggio Emilia, Waldorf, etc.—the extent to which these have succeeded or not has ~nothing to do with their pedagogical efficacy. It is a political/financial/cultural fact. Efforts which do not have a historical analysis and story about this are unserious.
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24. One of the most important [false] things you learn in school is that you learn by being taught. In unschooling, many people never unlearn this, instead substituting other classes or courses for the classroom that's now gone.
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25. Many explain away counterfactuals about people who drop out/unschool/homeschool by pointing to privilege. This is a fascinating datum. If it were an honest point, then educators would be interested in the pedagogical and managerial insights of the upper-middle class family.
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26. There are approximately as many people homeschooled as there are in charter schools. "Charter school" is a design and governance mechanism. As is "homeschooling". Talking about them as though they are pedagogies—e.g. "Does homeschooling work?"—is pure confusion.
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27. Just as corporations have offered us new [often dark] visions of what the next nation states look like, so too will the first entities to figure out how to leverage tools like income share agreements to securitize human capital offer us new [maybe dark] visions of cities.
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28. The bias to emphasize the cognitive in education leads people to vastly overestimate the power of remote technologies and experiences to transform learning. If it is fundamentally social, much of it will be fundamentally local.
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29. To the extent unschooling recognizes learning is a slow, social, high-touch, and therefore local process it has one up on every company tackling this space which aims to be the first in history to create a large-scale, high-touch organization anyone wants to join.
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30. One of the most valuable skills those who unschool and support others who unschool develop is the ability to introduce people to a map of an intellectual territory without confusing exposure for attempted mastery. Formal education could learn a great deal from this.
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31. The most important ratio in the future of learning is the relative balance of dollars and minutes which go into (a) investigating how school works and could be improved, (b) investigating how "non-traditional" learning works, & (c) inventing new tools/approaches.
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32. Pick any organizational unit (company, lab group, whatever). The first 100h of activity on-boarding a junior colleague to that group likely represents 1000h (8–10m full-time) of rigorous activity for a young person. Unschooling should focus on organizing access to this.
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33. One of the cleverest sleights of hand—whose provenance I'm still mystified by—is that we discuss learning's future in terms of methods instead of entrants/products. Learning is one of the most "execution-dependent" and "recipe-resistant" activities I can imagine.
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34. Once you assume the moniker of "alternative", you've lost the whole ball game.
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35. Unschooling is really a battle against legibility. Competing with school will mostly be about subverting or competing with its measures of legibility. School's measures are far less meaningful than most will admit. In whose interest is it to improve them?
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36. To the extent that unschooling (and school reform) must confront legibility, as work product becomes increasingly structured and digitized (e.g. Figma, GitHub, etc.) there is a growing opportunity to leverage passive process artifacts for analysis and evaluation.
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37. Conversely, most attempts to leverage portfolios or similar dramatically underestimate the sensing bandwidth constraints they're up against. Last I checked, MIT spends an average of eleven (11) minutes evaluating a candidate.
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38. Unschooling rightly recognizes an opportunity to unbundle (often leveraging online and community resources). Its efficacy requires knowing youth well (which dramatically increases CAC). No one knows whether, including that, there's any value to be unlocked by unbundling.
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39. Many undertake alternative educational arrangements/endeavors prompted by their own children. Though an authentic motive, it is not durable: Starting and growing the organization will outlive your kid's needs.
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