> So in your view, it sounds like being able to perfectly diagram a sentence is more important than understanding tax law?
What's being described isn't the ability to diagram a sentence, but to write above a certain minimum standard. That skill is certainly more important for the average person than understanding tax law as most jobs that would require you to know tax law have good writing skills as a pre-requisite.
As part of my previous work in education I did a lot of interventions for "unschooled" children in the Bay Area and can confirm the results of even well educated parents were almost uniformly disastrous.
There's a lot of value in:
1. Being well socialized
2. Having the standard set of skills that are a base requirement for being a white collar worker
If you're missing either of these (as most homeschooled kids are) it can be very difficult to find your way in the world.
Actually yes! I've helped children with almost any challenge short of, say, Down Syndrome.
In short, children who don't learn to read or write well in school almost certainly would not learn to read or write well when unschooled, but most unschooled children who don't learn to read or write well do learn perfectly fine in a traditional schooling environment.
Schooled children who don't learn to read for different and harder to deal with reasons, a quick top 3:
1. English as a second language (ESL)
2. Learning disability that was never addressed
3. Severe behavior problems that interfere with schooling (this is often caused by problems at home)
These problems are exacerbated by parents who are poorer or themselves ESL.
Unschooled kids, conversely, tend to have relatively affluent parents who speak fluent English. Overwhelmingly, the reason they can't read or write is that either no attempt at teaching was made, or it was made with no reference to educational theory. This failure mode is much rarer in schools.
P.S.
I don't want to give the impression here that I think the US education system isn't a tire fire or that there aren't different pedagogical approaches that might be radically better for most children. I'm just saying I have nearly a decade of experience showing overwhelmingly that "unschooling", even when performed by some of the most educated and affluent people in society, fails overwhelmingly compared to even the sub-par experience of standard schooling in the US.
Well, to understand tax law, you need to understand language quite well (see another post these days on the frontpage...) - which usually comes with some skills in applying it. It smells a bit fishy, if you claim a person can do the first, but not the latter.
I don't know, but I guess that the intricacies of tax law are written down. And to study that (https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/1/112b here?) you need to be able to be quite proficient at reading. And usually proficiency at efficient reading of laws translates to an ok command over speaking/writing as well (which apparently is not the case here)... if you read weird words a 100 times, I expect a moderately intelligent person to remember how to spell them...
I work in tax. Yes, you need to be able to read and write well to understand the changing tax law in the US. The tax code is also used as social policy in the US, and it's important to know for liability reasons that even the person you're paying to do it for you is doing some parts correctly. Did your payroll employee not withhold key taxes? That's a pretty large headache and fine you have coming.
What's being described isn't the ability to diagram a sentence, but to write above a certain minimum standard. That skill is certainly more important for the average person than understanding tax law as most jobs that would require you to know tax law have good writing skills as a pre-requisite.
As part of my previous work in education I did a lot of interventions for "unschooled" children in the Bay Area and can confirm the results of even well educated parents were almost uniformly disastrous.
There's a lot of value in:
1. Being well socialized
2. Having the standard set of skills that are a base requirement for being a white collar worker
If you're missing either of these (as most homeschooled kids are) it can be very difficult to find your way in the world.