Well I went to religious, private, public schools and college. I also went to a private electronics school at the age of 12. My mother did some homeschooling with me, primarily typing and music (she was a professonal at both) and I did a lot of unschooling on my own (hobbies).
All the school systems did was screw me up. Each system had its own format of long hand and didn't accept the other systems. Things like "Rs" and "Vs" and "Ws" are drastically different. As a result my penmanship sucks and I always got bad marks in penmanship.
I'm virtually blind in one eye and as a result never did good in sports and PE teachers as well as students gave me problems until, as an adult, I realized I don't see in 3 - D. I see the world as flat and judge distances by object postion.
As such I could NEVER see the strike zone or safe hit zone in baseball, I could never judge how to toss a basketball and couldn't not be tennis at all.
So school basically did a number on my head that took until my 30s to undu.
My mother was a professional musician and she taught me things since I was young, include the sheet music format and clefs. In 4th grade public school the teacher put up the clefs and asked what that was. I raised my hand she called on me I said, proudly, G Clef and she said, loudly: "WRONG!"
She called it the treble clef. I was devistated and felt my mother had betrayed me, until I got home and she showed me the dictionary and there it was known as both Treble and G clef.
At that point, I realized teachers were idiots.
YOu have a COLLEGE DEGREE and teach music and you don't know it's also called a G CLEF, then you should be stripped of your teaching credential.
You don't SLAP down a 10 year old for giving an ALTERNATIVE, LEGITIMATE answer.
My mother should have gone to school and reamed that teacher out in front of the Principal, but she didn't and I didn't want her to, but she should have. IN FRONT of the students and faculity my mother SHOULD should have shown them all HOW LITTLE that "MUSIC" teacher -- and she was exclusively a MUSIC TEACHER, nothing else -- knew about music.
This is my school experience and it left me with a bit of a chip on my shoulder but to the fact that they let people with only a 4 year degree teach. I'm a strong advocate of MASTERS only for teachers, even in grammar school.
Now, my mother taught me touch typing at the age of 6. Back in those days you didn't learn until Middle School, now days kids work computers at home ("unschooling") and by the 3rd grade are typing, if not sooner.
So there's your first example of how UNSCHOOLING unintentionally works.
Some kids as young as 5 are working computers and can draw and type. Maybe not touch typing with all fingers, but if a parent is smart they'll work with them.
My mother used the THINK system. Shades of The Music Man!
Rows, hands and fingers.
One row up, left hand, little finger, what is it (Q)
Middle row, right hand, first finger moved on key to the left, what is it (J)
We'd switch. SHe'd ask, I'd answer. Then I'd ask she'd answer.
I got cute and started going for PUNCUTATIONS
I then started writing at the age of 7 and by the age of 8 wrote my first book which I read to my Religious school class and my teacher, who usually hated me, strongly told me to submit it to the Art Fair, which I did.
It got panned for Not Glorifying God
It was a space story about visting the planets. Gee, if I recall correctly God made the heavens. Isn't visting them and learning about their wonders GLORIFICATION OF GOD?!
You can start to see how SCHOOL and I were at odds.
SCHOOL is about PROVIDING ANSWERS YOU TEACHER WANTS TO HEAR, even if they aren't the right or most correct answer.
In Middle School don't EVER write a paper suggesting COMMUNISIM is a good and viable system of economics and goverment.
NEVER do that.
Don't ever write a paper suggesting that briefly teaching Creationism is presentive an alternative view that has no more or less merits than teaching the Big Bang.
UNLESS of course, they invite you to do this and take a side.
YOu don't write about the evils of war or that Hiroshima shouldn't have happened.
In college, yes, but not in High School.
You aren't allowed to be ANTI-NATIONALISTIC in school
My country change it or lose it is not a valid point of view until you reach college, where they encourage that kind of thinking, but still expect you to answer the questins properly.
Now my typing skills got me an automatic A when I finally had to take typing in 8th grade.
I got my first tape recorder at the age of 10, my first movie camera at the age of 11 and a telescope around that same time.
I did sound recordings, we had mock radio shows, I did movies and taught myself to do lap dissolves, fades, split screen, superimposed titles. All in camera on 8mm. I did double system wild sound and learnd to synchronize it.
I used to stay out half the night with that telescope and look at everything. I saw Jupiter and Saturn and Venus and the Ring Nebula first hand, not in books.
To this day I know what is basically up in the skies.
My observations of a lunar eciplse got me published in Sky and Telescope at the age of 16.
Now this is ALL unschooling.
I took electronics learning from Engineers at the Admiral Television plant in Chicago.
This was back when the US actually MADE things in this country. America was ONCE the leader of electronics and Japan was considered a joke. Made in Japan back in 1960 was MADE LIKE JUNK
Then Sony introduced the Triniton in 1970 and the Japanese dominated the world Market and actually produced some excellent stuff.
Now it's all made in China and MADE LIKE JUNK again.
Anyway, back then if you wanted a color picture tube you had to go to RCA. Then ENTIRE WORLD had to do this, because they held all the patents.
So I learned all about how broadcast TV and color systems worked when I was 12. I studied for two years and MY MOTHER got involved and had ME teach HER.
So she got a book and paper and after each day at the electronics school I'd teach her what I learned.
At 14 I started teaching myself photography, mostly to take pictures of the moon through my telescope. I bought a little kit from a camera store with tank, trays, contact printer, tri chem pack and turned my bathroom into a dark room.
When I was 5 I used to play with stereo-optigans, someone not seen much anymore. The most famous being the the one from GAF that used a disk with little pictures and you flipped a lever and the pictures changed. It was called a Viewmaster.
Well, I discovered if you put a flash light behind it and held it near a wall it projected a reverse image on the wall.
Now I was 5 years old, doing this.
I remembered this and at the age of 14 I took a magnifying glass, a toilet paper tube and a shoe box and made my own enlarger, becuse contact prints off 620 film weren't good enough. The moon was the size of a marble.
My little enlarger worked just fine. So I was doing optical work at 14.
On my own. No books. Just experimenting.
My mother bought me an enlarger a year later and my cousin got me a color kit so I started doing color printing.
This got me an A in Photo when I was in High School at 16.
High school DID teach me about sheet film, sheet film holders, processing holdering, view cameras and the 4x5" format. We worked with nice Calumet view cameras.
But I already knew printing methods although I never used a professional Bessler Enlarger so that was an experience. So was using X Ray timers and resetting timers, things I never could afford.
Taking Spanish in the 5th grade at private school (they taugh French in 4th, which I missed and Spanish in the 5th, probably German in the 6th but I only went there one semester) got me an A in High School Spanish my first 10 weeks, but after that things got hairy and I squeeked out with a C.
Public Schools don't teach language until High School, 9th Grade.
Anyway, another good thing High School taught me was to run the professional dishwashing machine. A common one used by most places that runs on track. You put racks of glasses and dishes and run them through the machine.
It got me a cush job in the Army when I got drafted and we had to do KP.
So did my experience working as a janitor, which taught me to use the floor buffer and I could do it with no hands by doing the hulla (any Janitor will demonstrate that for you). You brace it against your body and swing your hips and the machine goes side to side.
I also used that trick in the Army as they had the same buffers.
My first job was working an AB Dick offset. A small one, like PIP uses. I learend to take it apart, fix it,clearn it. I invented way to extend life on masters by running clones first that way I could do 300 prints on paper plates which disintegrated quickly after 75 copies. I had 5 clones which worked just fine.
No one EVER though of doing that before. It was my innvation and they all looked in amazement and soon everyone else was cloning masters.
I moved to 16mm movies and 35mm film at 19. I still have my Minolta SRT 101 and my Bolex R-16.
I got a book on filmmaking, the Lenny Lipton book and learned how to checkerboard invisible splices and started working with professional Labs.
When Dokkorder (Denkio Onkio) put out the first low cost multi-track recorder my friend and I each bought one and we started a small multi-track recording studio.
At 17 I started teaching myself guitar. I picked up on and did bass line and said THAT'S ALL THERE IS
Famous last words!
Anyway I bought a Beatles book and taught myself rhythm guitar, then a friend of mine who played much better than I, although I had to teach him arrangements because he couldn't hear them, told me to switch to bass. I did.
I played guitar all morning and worked out BASS with bands.
I also got a little keyboard and started teaching myself by ear and later tried sight reading but I'm not good at that. My mother reads a whole page in advance.
My mother started teaching me theory at 17. She taugh me the "number system" which is something you won't learn in high school. You learn that in a private Music Conservatory, sometimes. 1, 1 1/2, 2, 2 1/2, 3, 4, 4 1/2, 5, 5 1/2, 6, 6 1/2, 7,8 (or octave 1).
Once you learn the numbers you can figure out any chord or change any key to another key.
Majors are 1,3, 5. Minor is 1, 2 1/2 (flat 3rd) and 5. Sevenths are 6 1/2 (flat 7th), major 7th are 1, 3, 5, 7
So I became a wiz at arranging. A singer comes in and in 2 minutes I find her key for a song and re-write the charts to fit her voice.
I learned the basic patterns of chord changes (1,4,5, etc.) and I could figure out any song.
So that plus my unschooled recording skills from the age of 10 made me a pretty good producer-engineer-musician in the studio.
We ran the studio for many years.
Then a friend brought me into a situation because I had a Bolex movie camera and I produced my first television commercial that ran all over the area at the age of 28.
I got invited to do sound on another project and got to watch video editing (linear editing) and I learned how to edit U-Matics that way, so when I worked with another band I did their video and was able to edit it quite nicely.
All of thise eventually got me introduced to a variety of people in the entertainment scene, including #1 hit artists, I worked with people who did music for Ghosbusters, 48 Hours, people signed to EMI, CBS, Pasley Park.
We hosted Bill Idol's manager (who also previously handled KISS) and learned a lot from him.
I started writing for Music Connection, Mix MAgazine, TEchnical Photography, Moving Image and then moved into mainstream publications doing pieces on health insurance and home brewing.
My pictures were published in international magzines in color on page 3.
All of this came from "unschooling"
With money I made producing an album I bought a computer and Atari ST fully dressed with a ton of software and I taught myself BASIC, Modula2, C and a little assmbler.
Then I switch to the PC, also the Mac and the Amiga.
I also did some initial work on CP/M machines like the Kaypro
I imassed about 50 books on BASIC and C and wrote the most complete book on conversions, substitutions and cross references that got rejected by EVERY publisher, probably because it was over 1,000 pages.
In my 20's I started learning college level stuff on my own buying every book in the Barnes and Nobel series. I still have the math book, but math gives me a hard time, despite the fact I use Trig and Geomentry and Algebra in programming work.
I also went deeply into Physchology and once had about 30 books on the topic, having read Freud, Jung, Adler, Lang, Horney, Deutsch, Janov, etc.
I put out a variety of comptuer programs which sold a little, but had my name been Microsoft they would have sold better!
This is ALL from UNSCHOOLING.
When I got into College as a Cinema Theater major I found myself tutoring the class becuse they didn't understand the professor. I had to explain the difference between T/stops and F/stops.
I did learn a few things in Pantomime (From a Marcel Marceu student) and acting from a man with an MFA from the Pasadena Playhouse.
I also learned a few things in Poly Sci
Some people do quite well in the traditional school system.
I, however, didn't. I excelled on my own learning by doing.
I'm a REAL WORLD person. Abstracts bother me. School is too abstract.
HOmeschooling works when parents get involved and turn it into a family project.
My mother proved this was typing, music theory and electronics.
Unschooling works if you do it from the point of view of a hobby where you learn and take things one step beyond.
It fails when you just watch TV, listen to music and play games.
It works when you plug a bass into your CD player and play along with the artists, learning the bass notes.
Then unschool works and does some good.
Unschooling is my mother taking me to the Field Museum at least once a year and to Adler Planetarium and to the Lincoln Park Zoo.
The Field Museum is astounding. You playing with all the physics toys and see how things work. You play with the electronics toys and see how colors are made on TV.
The next best thing is buying stuff from Edmunds Scientific.
I always wanted their optical bench. I might buy one and some lenses and just play around with it all.
It's only like $50, but it never served a totally practical purpose so I never invested.
That and two low power laser pointers and some smoke from a cigarette and you can see how light bends from one lens to another.
I learned that from the Discovery Channel.
Anyway, I eventualy worked for an archive and provided film footage to Discovery and ABC and WArners and I worked on some videos and TV shows in post production
And we taught college teachers. We had a major collection of classic animation, music and women filmmakers on film.
We'd teach every college in the country about Alice Guy-Blache and had her Solax films from 1911 and they started teaching their Cinema History students.
So I taught the teachers
Interesting last story. We'd talk with JC teachers and State University Teachers and they'd write Alice in on the spot and order one film.
ONE Ivy Leage University. I'm talking TOP 10 in the WORLD with a name that will floor you that I won't say. That guy said
I don't have time to change my sylabus.
So it took that Ivy Leage school (No, it's not HARVARD, nor YALE, but your next choice might, indeed, be it!) that charges $50K a year to go there 2 years to start teaching Alice Guy-Blache
Now you know something about schooling, homeschooling and unschooling.
And if you work at things REALLY hard one day you can write a dissertation like this off the top of your head. If YOU REALLY, REALLY, REALLY work hard at is, with far better grammar and spelling.
Hey, I'm not being paid, so I don't re-write here.
First drafts only, and a PHD from a college does, indeed, writer a better draft than I ever could.
But I'm publishe and most of them aren't!