My gf works in inside technical sales for an industrial instruments rep/distributor, and therefore a large part of her job is passing information between customers and manufacturers while trying to keep both happy and process orders. On a good day, she probably is forced to send the same requests for information at least two or three times on average before finally getting an answer. People just refuse to read even extremely short emails asking for straightforward information like shipping addresses which simply must be provided to proceed with the order. I wouldn't last a month doing her job without losing my damn mind.
Here is a screen grab of a typical email. https://imgur.com/5d36jpq
The first questions I get are "when is first practice".
all the information is there for an active reader to figure out what they need to do, but I can see how a linear reader (who isn't holding all the information in their head to begin with) could miss it. I had to reread the email to know exactly when the first practice would be. an extremely pedantic reader might be unsure whether "see you next tuesday!" refers to a second informational meeting or the first actual practice.
Good point either way.
Both require literacy, but one of these things is fun, while the other is a chore.
Perhaps they are unrelated. perhaps I drew a wrong conclusion. But perhaps they aren't hurried, they are just lazy.
It's okay for an adult to be lazy. It's okay for a kid to be lazy. It's probably not great for a homeschooled kid to be lazy, but you can invent games and rewards and other incentives and make this work.
But it's irresponsible parenting to allow your homeschooled kid to be illiterate at 10. You're not going to convince me otherwise with comparisons to lazy parents not wanting to read your boring emails. It is so obviously not the same thing.
The whole concept behind unschooling is that you allow a child to find the things that they find interesting, and then allow them to voraciously teach themselves as much as they can, as fast as they can. This doesn't work at all if your kid can't read.
For example, I know a lot of people who say they are too lazy to watch a movie with subtitles. When you dig deeper, they then tell you that it's hard to follow the movie because they have to concentrate on the subtitles or that the subtitles go too fast. That shows that they are actually not very good readers and.
For the specific example of the OP. You might be right, it might just be laziness but those parents do take the time to reply to the email to ask for clarifications. So, either the email was ambiguous or a lot of people just have a hard time reading a block of text. In my experience, the later is often true.
That said I fully agree with you that allowing a home schooled kid to be illiterate at 10 is criminally irresponsible. Reading is the key to knowledge and any parent homeschooling their kids should make damn sure that their kid will learn to read and see the value in it.
I have a minor quibble with this. I consider myself a "good" reader, at least as far as literal comprehension goes (I was never much good at literary analysis). I can understand pretty much any entry on cppreference. on the rare occasion I lost points on vocab/grammar quizzes in grade school, I was almost always able to persuade the teacher that they themselves were mistaken. FWIW (not a whole lot imo), I got an 800 on the critical reading section of the SAT.
I am however a very slow reader. I absolutely cannot keep up with the subtitles on a foreign film while also taking in the action of the scene. most of my friends in college could probably do a reading assignment in half the time it took me or less. perhaps this is just to protect my delicate ego, but I consider speed at reading words to be one of the least important parts of being a "good reader".
What's the role of literacy if you don't use it? What's the use of literacy without engagement?
There are lots of ways to learn things without reading. While I personally taught my kids reading at an earlier age than 10 (they are also not home-schooled), I've also seen kids learn "late" but still learn as needed. I also see a ton of kids who can't read even though they were "taught it" early.
On a side note, Montessori methods for teaching are quite interesting in how they use materials to teach concepts most traditional schools rely on abstract ideas and worksheets. They don't need to read to do the Montessori materials, but worksheets certainly require some level of reading to understand what's to be done.
If an adult doesn't want to use their literacy, that's their choice, but the unschooling method requires that a kid be able to use their literacy to learn things that interest them at their own pace. A lazy child is going to need additional motivation for unschooling to be effective. An illiterate child is going to have an "at their own pace" that's close to zero.
If you're a parent, and you think you're homeschooling your kid with this "unschooling" method, and they still can't read at ten, then you, as a parent, need to drop the charade that unschooling is working for your kid and teach them how to fucking read, stat.
TLDR - just because someone can read, doesn't mean they will, and my experience is that they won't.