How important, in our world today, is formal institutionalized education? A relatively new and growing segment of families are deciding to not only go against the majority by choosing to homeschool, but taking it to another level by choosing to embody a complete lifestyle called Unschooling.

Unschooling is a parenting and lifestyle choice that revolves around freedom and child-led learning. Un-schooled children are not subjected to any curriculum or learning routine whatsoever. That’s right — no math worksheets, no memorization note cards, no reading assignments, no essays, nothing.

Instead they have free reign of what they learn.

Children are encouraged to explore the world without parameters, guidelines, or expectations. Children are set loose and the parents serve to support and facilitate the natural process of curiosity-based learning. Unschooled children are allowed to realize their natural interests and parents facilitate this process by providing resources that allow the child to pursue his or her interests.

As you can imagine, there are major critiques of this method of parenting as well as very passionate proponents and everything in between. Like most things in life, unschooling could happen on a sort of sliding scale. Where there are a lot of parents who drift from homeschooling into a less structured style that could be called unschooling, but who may still create or enforce some degree of structure, there are inevitably those on the very far end of the spectrum- a segment called ‘radical unschoolers’ who take the unschooling philosophy to the utter extreme.

Radical unschoolers can include those families with almost no perceptible structure for their children whatsoever. There are of course mainstream media stories about unschooling and as you might guess, some of them not-so-surprisingly based their news stories around examples of unschooling families that would fit into the radical category, as it makes a more interesting story and also, an easier target of insult.

Granted, unschooling is a genuinely radical concept relative to conventional schooling. In a couple of these news stories families were featured who didn’t impose any kind of hygiene rules, bedtimes, mealtime standards, or any traditional rules on their children at all. These news stories were happy to point out that at times radically unschooled kids would choose to eat a whole bag of cookies or stay up until the middle of the night at times, for example, making unschooling seem outlandish and almost uncivilized.

The perspective from an unschooling parent, is of course, more favorable. The belief of the parents who adopt this method is that as human beings, we are naturally curious, we are built to be self-starting, self-motivated, and that given the right conditions, we are designed to learn and to enjoy learning. From this paradigm, traditional educational institutions hinder the freedom of children, stifle their individuality and creativity, and force them to learn lots of useless information. Rather than force-feeding the same information to every child across the spectrum, unschooled children, ideally, will be able to hone in and learn the specialized types of information that will facilitate their development as individuals, will engender their independence and problem solving skills, and will allow them to pursue things that actually reflect their unique talents and strengths.

Another major drawback of public schooling, acknowledged by many, is the over-diagnosis of behavioral disorders such as ADHD. Children are naturally high-energy, high-curiosity, and physically active. It is not until a certain age that children are able to really focus on a single task and keep their bodies comfortably still for longer periods of time. It has been noted that children who display behaviors which lead to them begin diagnosed with a disorder, were behaviors that weren’t a problem until they were in a school setting. This could mean that the high amount of children being diagnosed with behavioral disorders could be a result of the unnatural state of school environments rather than an indication that there is something wrong with the children.

As a rule, public schooling is highly structured. There is almost no time during the day when students are not required to be doing something specific and this explains why there are always those students who are outliers, cannot seem to ever follow the rules, disturb the learning environment for others, and end up often in trouble or receiving discipline. Every child is unique, so it makes little sense that each child should be expected to learn the same way and then be punished if they cannot succeed in such an environment.

Considering the major downsides of school, it is easy to understand why unschooling is an attractive option to many people. It allows the free flow of the child’s natural energy and state of being so that he or she can be and explore who they are and what makes them tick. Without expectations for a certain performance and standard, they would never be subjected to criticism or comparison to other students which can be harmful to self-esteem.

In many ways, it seems like unschooling could be a fantastic option for many children and families; but what about the future?

If a person receives no formal education, can they still attain higher education and a career? The answer, surprisingly to some, seems to be yes.

A study was carried out on 272 adults who had either partially or entirely been unschooled. There is a link to the study in the sources listed at the bottom which provides full details of this study.

To sum it up, out of the participants, the ones who had received no homeschooling or traditional schooling whatsoever, were actually the most likely out of the participants to have successfully pursued higher education. Not only did the great majority of participants state that they were able to attend various colleges or vocational schools, but that they felt they were better equipped than their peers because they were self-motivated and self-directed and were not burned out from many previous years of institutional education. In fact, many responded that they were disappointed with the lack of intellectual stimulation in social interactions because many of their fellow students were more interested in parties than in discussions and ideas.

What’s more, the study revealed that the great majority of participants were, at the time of the study, financially independent and employed.
Interesting also, more than half of the unschooled participants were working in or pursuing creative jobs and many were entrepreneurs in creative fields.

It seems that unschooling could give people an edge over the general population by freeing them to be self-motivated and to pursue their true gifts and interests. What do you think, would you unschool your children?

Make sure to respond in the comments and check out some of these interesting links about unschooling:

sourced:

A Survey of Grown Unschoolers I: Overview of Findings

How do Unschoolers Turn Out?

Originally published by Douglas Carswell June 16, 2023

Why is economic output per person seven times higher on one side of the US-Mexico border than on the other? Why is the average Canadian twelve times richer than the average Moroccan, despite having similar size populations?

We are often invited to believe that a society’s relative success has a lot to do with its geography or climate. Not so.

There are plenty of resource-rich countries in Africa, blessed in every imaginable way by geography and climate, that still produce only grinding poverty. Conversely, there are plenty of resource-poor places, such as Japan or Iceland, that prosper.

Much more important than a country’s natural resources is its political economy.

If property rights are insecure, power arbitrary and taxes high, a society will remain poor. If, on the other hand, people are free to spend more of their own money and make their own choices for themselves and their families, society overall will thrive.

Perhaps the single best illustration of this is Korea. Since the end of the Korean War, the Korean peninsula has been divided. North Korea has been run by a communist dictatorship, under which there are no property rights and rules for everything, including what you can wear. South Korea, especially since the 1980s, is an open, free-market society, with relatively low taxes and light regulation.

The North today can barely feed itself. The South is as wealthy as Europe or the US.

Korea shows us what happens when a society is subjected to two different extremes – one free market, the other a tyranny.

Making sure that every society is run along free market principles is essential to maximize prosperity. But even with the most liberty-minded policies in place, would everyone in a free market society flourish?

In the late 1960s, a Stanford psychologist, Walter Mischel, undertook a famous experiment. He offered kids a marshmallow on the understanding that they could either eat the marshmallow right away, or they could wait a few minutes and have two.

What Mischel was doing was measuring each child’s time preferences. Those kids that were prepared to wait had what we call a low-time preference. The less patient kids that opted to have one marshmallow right away, had what we call a higher time preference.

Having assessed each kid’s time preference, Mischel then tracked their progress over the years that followed. He discovered a startling correlation between having a low time preference (being prepared to wait) with academic and other kinds of success. Those inclined towards instant gratification, his research seemed to suggest, would be less successful.

Time preferences, it seems, play an important part in how we as individuals do. Might time preferences also have a role in explaining the different trajectories societies take?

Could it be that the USA, Canada, Finland and Japan are relatively rich because they are countries with low time preferences? There is a body of evidence to suggest that poorer countries, like Mexico and Russia, have higher time preferences, and that really poor countries like Tanzania and Nigeria have really high time preferences.

The conventional explanation for this is that prosperity produces lower time preferences. Might it not be the case that lower time preferences produce prosperity?

If being wealthy explained your time preferences, not the other way around, you might expect that people with comparable incomes in different countries had similar time preferences. They don’t. As with Mischel’s marshmallow experiment, the implication is that time preferences impact outcomes, not the other way around.

Mainstream economists have a lot to say about how individuals transact with other individuals. They less often look at how we as individuals transact with our future selves.

Surely how people in a society transact with their future selves is critical in explaining economic outcomes? In a society with a low time preference, people are more likely to defer consumption and save. Dropout rates in education are likely to be lower. Capital and knowledge will accumulate from one generation to the next.

Time preferences are a key factor driving a society’s economic development. What about propensity to commit crime? Presumably, if you are willing to risk seeing your future self sent to prison in return for the chance of an immediate material reward you have a different time preference to someone that isn’t?

Time preferences can clearly be influenced by public policy. Hyperinflation, for example, would give people a powerful incentive to spend, rather than save. Some research has suggested that exposure to communism had impacted the time preferences of East Germans, compared to those who lived in West Germany (albeit that the effect is wearing off and Germans overall have some of the lowest time preferences in the world.)

When considering some of America’s deep-rooted, inter-generational socio-economic challenges, we ought perhaps to think a little more about time preferences. Here’s a heretical thought; how might time preferences vary across the country?

What can we do to lower time preferences? Can one actually lower time preferences, or is it perhaps a case of not raising them?

Idealists believe that if only we adopted the right policies, we would get better outcomes. A conservative idealist should recognize that there are some aspects of human nature that we can neither change nor perfect. Time preferences might be one of them.

Douglas Carswell is the President & CEO of the Mississippi Center for Public Policy.

This article was originally published by RealClearPolicy and made available via RealClearWire.

Originally published by Reddwebdev December 5, 2017

When a client comes in and is willing to pay for your product or service it can be a good day. We work hard to provide that product or service and each sale or contract is a direct validation of that work

Recently whilst perusing our social media accounts I happened across a link provided by an account we once followed over on Twitter — @RWD posted a link to an international brand for extreme outdoor wear, extolling the presumed virtues of a site written well using the Responsive Web Design standard.

@RWD posted to Twitter, “Here’s an incredibly impactful—and important—piece of responsive design:”

Fair enough I suppose. Here’s someone with some seeming authority on the platform taking on a presumed instructional role hoping to again presumably educate the masses on the practical and useful application of Responsive Web Design.

Upon after clicking the link in the tweet provided I was disappointed to see “not” the practical and useful application of Responsive Web Design, but rather a full panel political statement with regard to the President and how he was presumably stealing land from the poor and downtrodden masses.

I proceeded to the site anyway, completely ignoring the intended divisiveness that this company had hoped to promote via it’s poorly applied splash. The company site boasted of being “Green” but yet promoted or otherwise sold items that were non-biodegradable.

Lesson learned — Trolls exist I suppose, and the sad fact is that we’ll never be fully rid of them on the net. I had never once thought that Ethan Marcotte, who coined the term “Responsive Web Design”, and administers @RWD on Twitter, was a troll, but I was wrong.

When we go into business for ourselves, it’s up to us to pursue a path that we feel might best suit our needs with regard to that business. We find ourselves writing our business policies, following various different business models, and generally hoping for the best end result as it might apply to our bottom line. We want to be profitable, and in becoming profitable, we might find ourselves sharing the wealth by hiring more employees, passing out performance bonuses, and other what nots.

Demographics plays a critical roll as well in most businesses – Who, what, and where, are all questions we continually ask ourselves every day.
What can we do to make our business as profitable as we can in the shortest amount of time? It’s important to get the word out and demographics helps us to do just that as we apply that resource in trying to reach as many people as possible.

Even still, and at the end of the day, we understand that your business is yours to do with as you please – You could scream your political angst from the mountain tops if you so wished, but why would you?

Target, Hobby Lobby, and many others have done this very same thing and look where it got them.

Do you really want for your business to exist in a bubble?

Do you really want to cut off your true business potential by choosing to only serve the select few?

If history has taught us anything, it’s that the political winds shift constantly in this country. What might be all true and acceptable today, might not be all true and acceptable next week at 2 o’clock.

Your products and services are a given — Political ideologies are not. This is why it might be wise to avoid the rhetoric of the day and concentrate instead on growing your business.

Money doesn’t care who marries who or what bathroom gets used — Money is an equal opportunity entity – So should your business be – Save the preaching for the pulpit, or the street protests.

If you find yourself refusing to sell a car, build a website, bake a cake, or not conducting any other kind of business with someone because they don’t think like you do, then you are a part of the problem and your business isn’t as successful or profitable as you somehow seem to think it is.

If you’re a new business owner you might do well to become a part of the solution by focusing your efforts on your business whilst saving all of your social angst for your off hours. Money talks and Bullshit walks in the true world of business, and becoming distracted, if even for a moment, could very likely spell the end of whatever business goals you are trying to accomplish.

Your business isn’t a business if you plan to use it to brow-beat John Q Public with regard to your political leanings or ideologies. Save that stuff for the people who might actually listen to you as you march down the street protesting over your favorite gripe of the day.

Most people who purchase are usually not interested in your bemoaning anyway. They simply want a decent product or service for a fair price and that’s it. They’ve got their own deal going on and surprise, surprise, their deal might not be your deal. So you should remember to get over yourself.

We here at ReddWebDev really don’t care who you marry, or what church you attend — Folks are just as equal across the board.

If you hire us to do the job, then the job will be done, because we are pretty aware of the fact that your deal might not be our deal. As a business, it’s not our job to sell political strife.

This business of ours has been around for exactly how many Presidents? Well lets see — We had Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Trump — See how that works?

We serve people, and by doing so, we’ve chosen to be a part of the solution.