This is a great article about the fundamental premise behind unschooling. It is titled Children Will Teach Themselves to Read When Ready by the Foundation for Economic Education.
Children Will Teach Themselves to Read When They’re Ready
Late last week, The Washington Post highlighted a bit of a rant titled “What the modern world has forgotten about children and learning,” by author Carol Black.
In essence, Black’s article takes issue with the modern education system’s insistence that every child fit into its timetable of learning. Nowhere is this seen more clearly than in the area of reading.
According to Black, Americans during the time of the Founding Fathers were regularly reading difficult material, and learned to do so from many sources, only one of which was the education system of the time. “They could read,” she notes, “because, in a literate population, it is really not that difficult to transmit literacy from one person to the next. When people really want a skill, it goes viral. You couldn’t stop it if you tried.”