Great unschooling article

A great article about unschooling that was passed around my list this morning:

http://tennessean.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070128/FEATURES01/701280371

My kids and I were just discussing this yesterday (and I hadn't read the article so it was unrelated). Where DO carrots come from? Rose remembered Hubby's garden from the last few years and piped up, “you put seeds in the ground”. Thinking about that myself brought up my own question – “OK, but where do the seeds come from? When the carrots are harvested, they don’t have seeds on them.” I had to look it up. ;)

The answer, in case I’ve piqued your interest (and you got as *great* an education as I did in school [wink,wink]):

Most of us never get a chance to see carrot seeds, however, because the plant is usually pulled out of the ground before it produces them. We harvest carrots in their first year so we can eat the tasty orange root, but carrots are biennials—they produce seeds in their second year.

As I was reading the article this morning, this quote struck me - "If they're focused on one area, the child may know everything about gardening but won't know multiplication tables." I literally laughed out loud. How ludicrous to think that you can learn *anything* about gardening and it not turn into a math and numbers game!! LOL Just shows how flat and stagnant the education system has become in their thoughts. Same with this quote - "My 11-year-old, given his druthers, would never do spelling and always do math." At the very least, if he loves math THAT much, some day he will have to learn to read and therefore, spell, in order to learn more math. It's just amazing that people don't see it. What can we do to explain this better to people??