I decided to blog on the "unschooling" story because letters appeared in the Times today. A letter writer from Candor, NY repeats the notion that "when a child is ready to read, he will read." When a child is ready to spell properly, he or she will do so. When a child is ready to learn calculus, he or she will do so, same as Galileo. The basic philosophy of the "unschooling" troops seems to be that "government" schools "force" kids to learn, brainwashing them rather than enlightening them. Reminds me of a tour of schools in New Zealand I made while reporting for the Los Angeles Times. I was telling an ed-school prof there that I had come to report on the whole language reading instruction methods so popular down there. "Oh," she said to me in her lovely New Zealand accent, "instruction seems so, I don't know, medieval." Had I been quicker, I would have replied: "Oh, really. I've always thought of instruction as rather Renaissance."