Unschooling Discussion Lists

I appreciated Vidyut Kale's observations about established communities in a conversation about unschooling discussion lists at Unschooling Talk:

I think it's a side effect of two equally precious things coming together.

- When an experienced person volunteers to guide a community, inevitably they end up answering a lot of very similar questions, seeing very similar problems emerging, etc. They end up giving a lot of the very same, very solid, very generous advice many, many times. Somewhere in the process, the 'expert' (no disrespect intended) stops seeing askers as individuals with unique situations, which may be same, but not similar. When solutions fail to be accepted, they are irritated with the asker for being blind to something so obvious (to the expert). This manifests as subtle insult, which gets picked on by an asker.

- An eager learner pays a lot of attention to details. They are alive to the nuances of impact of small details on what is happening, and the tiny unique details are something significant to them. They don't yet have the experience to go with broad patterns and trust the rest to fall in place. When seeking guidance from an expert, they do expect that the important considerations are... considered, and because they are highly intelligent and have astute insights into the matter, they expect that resource to be utilized. Usually, they will be fine with it being refuted, because it adds to their learning, but summary dismissals make them lose respect for the expert, which manifests as subtle insult and gets picked on by the expert.

This brings up a power struggle, with the asker usually resenting the experts authority to overpower them in the space. However, the greatest loss in this process is usually to the expert, because then their own learning is stopped to a snapshot of knowledge to be served at request. No questioning reaches in to shake that and enrich it with further discoveries.

Any learner through conscious choice - as most who unschool with constant introspection are, cannot respect a didactic form of "unschooling training", so to say, so being exposed to this is very damaging if not reflected on, as they deprive themselves of learning because of their judgments of the source.

Frankly, I think this is more about rigidity than intent. If an expert is able to look at dissent as an alert that there are unconsidered factors, and an asker learns to test the advice they get before either of them being judgmental, this will not happen, but that's tough. Like you said, happens everywhere. Once one person starts it, unless the other consciously disengages....