What was the reason for your parents to unschool you?
Did you have siblings that were unschooled, how did they deal with it?
How did you spend most of your time unschooling?
How did you meet and play with age peers?
What were the main drawbacks?
They both had pretty negative experiences in grade school, and felt that school was more about “warehousing” and “preparing kids to be cogs in the capitalist machine” than actually teaching and nurturing kids. I agree with that to an extent.
I’m an only child, which may have exacerbated some of the problems I’ve mentioned in other comments. Growing up in the Bay Area, there was a pretty active community of unschoolers, and we’d meet up at “Park Days” once or twice a week. Unfortunately, the homeschooler community can be pretty fragmented based on which philosophy of homeschooling you follow. I remember there being many instances of clique-y-ness among the parents (less so among the children somehow), cases of parents not talking to other parents, and groups splintering off into other groups. The result was that the group my family was “in” with was pretty spread out. I had a community, most of them just lived 1hr+ away.
Thank you for bringing this personal perspective.
What was the reason for your parents to unschool you? Did you have siblings that were unschooled, how did they deal with it? How did you spend most of your time unschooling? How did you meet and play with age peers? What were the main drawbacks?
They both had pretty negative experiences in grade school, and felt that school was more about “warehousing” and “preparing kids to be cogs in the capitalist machine” than actually teaching and nurturing kids. I agree with that to an extent.
I’m an only child, which may have exacerbated some of the problems I’ve mentioned in other comments. Growing up in the Bay Area, there was a pretty active community of unschoolers, and we’d meet up at “Park Days” once or twice a week. Unfortunately, the homeschooler community can be pretty fragmented based on which philosophy of homeschooling you follow. I remember there being many instances of clique-y-ness among the parents (less so among the children somehow), cases of parents not talking to other parents, and groups splintering off into other groups. The result was that the group my family was “in” with was pretty spread out. I had a community, most of them just lived 1hr+ away.
I’m sorry to hear that, it sounds incredibly lonely.