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This summer, a TikTok video of a mother showing off her son’s literacy skills went viral. “Not comparing myself to other moms,” said the social media influencer Onami, producing a notebook belonging to her six year-old son, Rainer, filled with crudely scrawled words in crayon. “Look at this: Lamp. Egg. Jar. Lion. This is him, doing this, by himself!”
The clip made the rounds online, eliciting outrage and indignation for reasons the 36-year-old swears she was not anticipating.
Onami, who goes by a single name, is one of many parents – increasingly visible on social media, more unassuming offline – practicing a radical form of home teaching dubbed “unschooling”. Also known as “free schooling” or “self-directed learning”, it is an informal educational approach in which the direction is dictated by a child’s interests. It eschews curricula, testing (standardized or otherwise), homework, recess, other pupils and all the other hallmarks of conventional education. True believers regard it as a corrective to a flagging public school system, which leaves so many children behind. Critics, meanwhile, say that it’s little more than a form of educational neglect and abuse.
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a tip of the hat to Sukie
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