I think the question is how much of the grind is necessary. When our oldest kids were very little, we would work on the alphabet and numbers and track milestones carefully. At some point we realized that we could either grind hard at stuff they just didn't quite get, or we could wait a few months until they were older and just tell them stuff and they'd remember it. And obviously it wasn't quite that easy, but it felt kind of like magic at the time. When the kids were ready to learn, they just did, no grinding required.

Naturally, something like playing a musical instrument requires grinding (though it's not grinding if you like it!). But I think other than like, the times tables or the periodic table, there's almost nothing in school that inherently requires a grind. It just feels like a grind, because school is often unpleasant.

I think an average, literate adult could learn basically the entire American K-12 history curriculum in a few months of reading. Most of what passes for history in elementary school could be compressed into... what, a hundred pages, maybe? And high school is another thousand pages.

I think math is the same way. It's a 10 year grind to teach reluctant kids what could be taught to an eager adult in a few months.

I think we'd do much better to try to create eager adults, which I think unschooling is really well-suited to.

Yeah! Bit of a tangent: in my experience even the times table isn't inherently a grind, though at a higher level maybe arithmetic might have to be. When I was in school faced with memorizing the times table conventionally, I decided "this is silly and boring, what I'm gonna do instead is keep the table visible while I do arithmetic problems, and it'll get memorized automatically along the way", and that worked fine.

It's the same principle as learning touch-typing with the keyboard layout visible on a card in your field of view (not the same as looking down at the keyboard, which I agree is a bad habit that slows you down).

'It's a 10 year grind to teach reluctant kids what could be taught to an eager adult in a few months. I think we'd do much better to try to create eager adults'

Well stated.

It's only a 'grind' if you don't enjoy the process though, right? If you're getting good at doing something you love because you love doing it so much, I don't think 'grind' is a word you'd use to describe that time consuming process.

I think 'grind' is caused by a disconnect between what the learner is being made to do and what they want to do. Grind can therefore be reduced by providing people with the opportunity to study things that interest them, for instance by offering a broader range of educational 'tracks', or by reformulating lesson plans to make the material more interesting (explaining the real world applications or consequences of the subject matter.)

>It's only a 'grind' if you don't enjoy the process though, right?

That's the thing though, even with something you enjoy you will, or should hopefully, hit 'the grind'. That point where it gets hard and you force yourself to keep going even through.the parts you don't enjoy.

School forces you to do this, if you're teaching yourself something, you need to force yourself to do this.

I can't count the number of times i've heard someone say something like

'I tried learning/doing this new thing and it was fun for a bit but it ended up being way harder than I thought.'

And that's usually the point where they've given up or moved on.

But that's usually the point where learning breakthroughs happen and getting through the grind tends to cement those new facts or that new activity better.

That's usually the point where it starts being fun again too, until the next hump to grind through.

It's like an old nintendo game or something. One of those really hard ones that forces you to replay the same thing over and over again just to gain the tiniest bit of progress. Even though the game's probably fun, that's the point where people start throwing controllers and stuff. Yet when you get past those hard sections and make some progress. Suddenly, you feel good and have fun again.

Learning things is very much the same process. Even things you enjoy. The secret is to push yourself through the less fun parts.

Just quickly too, more of an aside, I feel like modern games lack this aspect and i think it's a big part of why many people complain about modern games. They don't stimulate and teach you through failure and repitition, there's usually no consequences, you have no breakthrough 'Aha I can do this now' moments, there's no learning or lessons to be had. Just mindless progression that never really feels like progress.

> School forces you to do this

School often forces you to do a grind, but it's often an endless-treadmill grind, not a over-the-hump grind.

Good teacher can help to overcome barrier. Unfortunately there are not many good teachers. As other pointed out maybe one or two in public school.

I'm with you that practice is a king but blind struggle ruins passion. I've took salsa lessons for several years, drummed it wrong, have to unlearn bad practices. I've took guitar recently, overcome in a few months what could not in school (good enough instrument and youtube videos).

Ancedotal, but all that sounds pretty foreign to me. I don't really think i learn like that.

I've gotten good at a few things in life that required a "grind." The violin is the clearest example. Getting decent requires an hour or so a week -- you can generally fart around and play whatever's accessible to your skill level. Good requires an hour or two per day, of deliberate and focused practice. People don't play études for fun. Excellence requires several hours per day. Even Itzhak Perlman describes his practice regimen as tedious, and I once heard him say that he practices while watching TV, to alleviate the boredom. Paganini, on the other hand, played all day to forestall his father's physical abuse.

I was "good," for a time, but pursuit of excellence never met my cost benefit analysis

Surely the grind of learning to play a violin would be far worse if you disliked violins in the first place, right? If you force somebody who hates violins to practice playing one for hours a day, the grind would be intolerable and they'd probably hate their life. The people most likely to find the grind tolerable are the people who really want it.

I was answering your question:

> It's only a 'grind' if you don't enjoy the process though, right?

I'd summarize my answer as "no, it's still a 'grind'." To answer your followup, "yes, it can be even worse if you hate the basic act."

On a meta level: life sucks and involves hardship. There's value in grinding on things you hate. If you've only succeeded at things that you love, your success is quite likely fragile. Resiliency is developed by accepting, and grinding, your way to success at something you hate.

> People don't play études for fun.

I do. I wish I could play them well.

> I do.

Wow, I'm happy for you and only a little jealous.

I wish I could play them well, too. The sound and feeling of butchering them is what makes me dislike the experience.

This is true on its face for anyone who's spent hours and hours trying to beat a tough level of a video game -- we even call it "grinding" (at least in some contexts, namely RPGs), and to some extent it's not really "fun," but it also has a satisfying and compulsive aspect that drives you onward despite the challenge. I can't recall public education ever stirring the same sort of feeling in me (and I did quite well in school).

Pleasure vs. satisfaction. Grinding is not pleasurable (in fact quite frustrating at times), but the satisfaction of completing the challenge may be more sustainable as a source of happiness.

Types of fun: Type 1: Fun while performing the activity Type 2: Bad while performing the activity, fun in hindsight Type 3: Bad while performing the activity, bad in hindsight

I would argue that Type 2 is desirable but doesn't fit in this framework.

source: https://www.rei.com/blog/climb/fun-scale

I'm of the opinion that while it's a necessary part of learning to repeat exercises to advance your skillset, school is much too focused on this element of learning, and in doing so to an unnecessarily rote extent (I suspect because it's the easiest way to try to get it done).

The problem is that this mishandling gives people a bad taste for associated activities, especially STEM subjects, and it's rare for people to subject themselves to what seems like an incredibly boring process when they're not being forced to. As such, most of the competency they may have been forced to gain is lost, along with potential passion.

Even repeating exercises can be fun when you understand the motivation behind it. For example, if you have a real passion for understanding Newtonian physics, the parts of calculus that might be 'rote' when unmotivated and part of a purely rote process can become some of the most enjoyable.

> and in doing so to an unnecessarily rote extent (I suspect because it's the easiest way to try to get it done)

That's likely part of it. I see another reason: I believe schools' incentives make them risk-averse. I think they have a stronger incentive to make one failing student do passably well than to make ten students go from doing well to doing very well.

I agree with everything else you said. I also found academic contests to be a good motivator to teach me to check my work.

I think the best way to think about grind, is to imagine "time spent grinding" as a scarce resource.

Your kid only has a very limited amount of it to spend; trying to make them grind more than that amount will be absolutely counter-productive and reduce grind "efficiency" to zero.

Which is exactly what schools do: they try to cram as much working, studying and focusing in a kid's daily life as they can, long past the point of diminishing returns; because they assume that a kid's attention is infinitely extensible, and they do very little to actually get their interest.

When you can order a kid to get into a room at set times and to look at a set piece of text and to listen to a single person for arbitrary amounts of times, there's very little to stop you from making every single day a grind a calling it a job well done.

The main benefit of homeschooling is that, if a kid isn't engaged by the teaching materials, you can see it immediately because they'll say so and ask to do something else.

> The grind is only harder if you don't have a good book or teacher because the practice you do could potentially be actively harmful.

This is neither an argument for or against traditional schools (or homeschools or unschooling).

From the article unschooling apparently eschews textbooks.

It doesn't make them go through textbooks. But it doesn't stop them either, and often a decent textbook is the best way to learn about a subject.

As someone who chose to learn some subjects outside of school (usually years before they would have been taught), I tended to read textbooks my older siblings had used—did this for algebra, physics, and calculus—although I didn't do that many problems from the textbooks. (I also read lots of what might be called popular science books.) The article does say "[The McQueen] parents spurn curriculums, textbooks, tests and grades", but I know some unschoolers, and I suspect if I asked them, I would find that they read several textbooks.

One unschooling mom's website quotes (seemingly with approval) another unschooling mom's email on the subject. Ultimately it seems to be saying that, while textbooks shouldn't be the primary tool, they are a tool that is sometimes appropriate. https://sandradodd.com/school/textbooks

The grind is interesting.

I think one of the things the pandemic exposed is how much time is wasted in class for discipline and "class management". Really, without it the quiet kids can pretty much get the regular curriculum in half the normal time.