PoAC: Home schooling

[velvetpage]

An interesting article at CBC got me thinking, again, about home schooling.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/viewpoint/vp_ekoko/20060816.html

Here are my thoughts: when done well, homeschooling can be a valuable experience, however it has certain glaring drawbacks. The first is social. Most adults have a certain common ground in public, or at least institutionalized, education. There's a whole cultural vacabulary surrounding things like pop quizzes, lockers, schoolyard bullies, and report cards that a homeschooled kid is not going to understand in quite the same way. Then there's the type of socialization-by-age-group that occurs at school, which is missing from homeschooling. I'm not certain if that lack would be classified as a drawback or an advantage; I suppose it would depend on the child. But there is a certain value to learning to work with one's peers, that is harder to develop when homeschooling.

The second is exposure to a variety of viewpoints. For many people, the main reason for homeschooling is to give their children a religious education, thereby excluding certain values that don't fit with the religion. The Southern Baptist Convention is one of the largest associations worldwide to promote homeschooling. Their viewpoint is that the public school system promotes a "secular humanist" ideal that goes against Christian teachings. Aside from suppression of exposure to other faiths, there's the lack of breadth in the life experience of parents-as-teachers. How is a child of non-musical parents going to discover a gift for music, if not at school? How could I, who can't draw a stick person, teach my child art? As a teacher at school, I can either trade off the subjects for which I have no passion, or I can hope that the teacher they get the following year will have complementary skills to mine. Homeschooling associations need to be big and broad to emulate that. How many of them manage to teach languages other than English at all?

Thoughts, anybody?

Comments

[stress-kitten.livejournal.com]

Socialization can be provided by adequate after-school and sports-related activities, so the socialization aspect can be overcome, generally with relative ease if the parents have the will and inclination to address it. It's also often more productive socialization as such activities focus on team-building and goal-oriented activities rather than the free-form associations that occur on playgrounds and can get kids into trouble.

The cultural vocabulary, I'm inclined to believe wouldn't be a huge issue. You access a fair amount of it through contact with those who do go to school and through television, books and other cultural-indoctrination practices.

My concern with home-schooling is your second point. The viewpoints available to your child are more limited if they are restricted to your values and beliefs. It can be harder for them to acknowledge alternate points of view. My other big concern is the quality of education. I have known several people who were homeschooled who thought it was the greatest dis-service their parents ever did to them. They found, when they came to go on to higher-education, that they had vast holes in their knowledge, that they had not recieved enought of a background in subjects that were not their parents' strengths, or that their work-ethic or expectations were not at a level where they were able to transition with any degree of comfort.

I agree... done well, homeschooling can be a valuable and enriching experience. However, like many things, I think that only certain people will be able to bring such an experience to a positive conclusion. I think there are many people out there who try to homeschool who just don't have the education,training, or habits of mind that will allow their children to succeed and flourish in that type of environment.

[paka.livejournal.com]

The homeschooling thing - yeah, I feel like it's been allowed and promoted as part of the right wing agenda to corrupt the United States into a theocracy. But on the other side, the USA has public schools which are failing, which are practically prisons for the crime of being a child or a teenager, and if they're smart children or teens it's only worse. I can't blame anyone for wanting to get their kids out of that.

Maybe homeschooling is a good thing at an early age - with the idea that you're training the kid to have a good sense of self, and that part of that good sense of self is that it's okay for other people to be as they are and that there's more to know than just what Mom and Dad know. Then, when they have a core that can't be destroyed by abusive teachers and peers, you send them packing off to public schools to learn that the world has a far greater extent.

[girlydoll.livejournal.com]

In Saskatoon we belonged to a church, and ALL the parents home schooled. Now, one set did it straight from birth, another set pulled her kids (after they were diagnose ADD and she was not happy about that) and started hers. You were either part of their "moms who home school click" or you were not and didn't feel very welcomed.

Now, that really has nothing to do with it I guess, but I did note a few things. The mother who had 3 kids all home schooled were very well behaved, and seemed intelligent enough. But they were defiantly lacking the kid aspect. These kids could have survived being born in the 1800's. At 4 years old they were well behaved little working machines. They cleaned everything, did exactly as they were told, and generally very sheltered. Now there were more families in the church, and they all shared material but never socialized their kids outside of church time. They were all like this, behaved like this, it was cult like and very scary. The second you had a child they swarmed on you about home schooling and why you should.

The second woman, well her kids turned out horrible. She was unable to effectively deal with the problems her children were (very accurately and truthfully) diagnosed with. They got worse and worse, and she flower coated what her kids could do, compensated in their stronger areas and let their week areas get weaker and weaker. She was a minority in the group, but there were other parents just like this.

I also recently saw one of those swap children shows on the BBC kids channel. A little girl who was home schooled traded lives with a little girl from a city who went to school. The home school child struggled to keep up with the basics at school because of the shortcoming of what the person teaching her at home was able to do, but she excelled at other areas, this is true in most people who are home schooled. My one friend was kept home for elementary but sent to high school, and he said the same thing that he found some areas he was much weaker at when EVERYONE was able to at least do it, but other areas he excelled at without trying, he was also painfully shy and didn’t really know how to interact and found himself trailing a lot in our group of friends. If it was not for the fact that he was painfully good looking he would have had a terrible time in school I think.

All in all I decided that for a general well rounded knowledge and social interactions I was going to send my kids to school. Now I was ousted from my church because of it, but good riddance to bad rubbish. I would rather my children can keep up academically with everyone else, and maybe have to work a little harder to find what they can flourish in than cater to it right from the get go and let other things slip a little. In the end every kid who wants to go to university or college will have to go to school since that is one thing that can not be home schooled. I will gladly give up the well behaved robot children for the children I now have.

[girlydoll.livejournal.com]

"with the idea that you're training the kid to have a good sense of self, and that part of that good sense of self is that it's okay for other people to be as they are and that there's more to know than just what Mom and Dad know. Then, when they have a core that can't be destroyed by abusive teachers and peers, you send them packing off to public schools to learn that the world has a far greater extent."

But don't you think that most of that can be taught before they become of age to go to school? I also think it is an evergoing process of the parents responsiblity to teach their children this even while going to school. Teaching never stops, I taught my son english while he attended a french speaking school, I also teach him on a fairly ongoing basis that it is wrong to bully, that it is ok to ask questions, to not be pushed around, to let others be themselves, along with the standard don't drink, smoke, do drugs or have sex.

This might seem a little extream since my son is only turning 9, but I strongly feel that since I made the decision to become a mother it is my responsibility as well.

[dagoski.livejournal.com]

Politcally, I think the homeschooling movement, along with the charter school movemetn, are nothing more than plans to deprofessionalize education and ultimately get rid of it. We should not even talk about homeschooling in the US. Instead we should be talking drastic tax hikes to actually do things for children instead of using them as political footballs.

Now, stepping off my soapbox for a second. If I was raising a kid in the Philadelphia school system, I would have littel choice except to home school or private school because the shcools here are that bad. There's a real problem in going your own way. I sort of did this myself by going to The Evergreen State College as an undergraduate. I got one of the best college educations you can get in the US. Small class sizes, gifted teachers and extremely innovative curricula were the norm for that school. The downside was that no one else did things the way Evergreen did and that made it occasionally hard for me to apply to grad school. If the grad school was deluged by applicants, they just weren't going to read the narrative evaluations that comprised my transcripts. Also, Evergreen didn't have distinct majors and lots of places guestimated that I did a double major in Physics and Chemistry with a minor in Psychology. Again, that doesn't wash with some grad schools. The homeschooling situation is very similar and I'd think that homeschooled kids could have problems getting into, let alone adjusting to higher education at larger institutions.

In terms of getting exposure to culture, I grew up in the fearsome inner city. Naturally, arts programs weren't available due to budget stress even in the 1970s. To make up for that my parents were able to find teachers in the community. I think they used these lessons as a form of cheap daycare to tell the truth. But, really, you have to be in a pretty eclectic community, like So. LA was in the 70s and 80s, to find teachers like this in the community. I doubt you'd find these people readily in suburbs. I know you can find college extension classes for adults prettily easily, but for kids it's really hit and miss. You have to find professional artists and musicians who give lessons make up the gap in their income.

[dagoski.livejournal.com]

Pardon the typos. I'm switching between keyboards.

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

Considering how often these days I type things one-handed and don't have the energy to go back and fix them afterwards, this is definitely not a problem for me. :)

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

The problem with public education in the States is that the districts are too small, comprising only inner-city schools or only suburban schools or only rural schools. The result is a vast funding disparity between the inner city and the suburbs. In Canada, our school boards are generally based in the cities and service the surrounding suburbs and some rural areas. This means that the funding is more evenly distributed. It's not perfect, because when funding cuts happen, the suburbs make up their losses through fundraising while the inner city schools simply do without. But it seems to me you don't get the same kind of disparity that I hear about in the States. (Please, if I'm wrong, correct me - this is an impression formed from articles about inner-city schools in the States, and that's all it is.)

In the States, three things need to happen: the funding needs to be increased to meet the actual needs of students, it needs to be equalized across all areas, and it needs to pay, in part, for better teacher salaries. If anything, the schools getting more funding should be the ones doing poorest, and the funding should go into extra training for the teachers and extra early-childhood programs at little to no cost to parents, to make up for the lack of early childhood stimulation that puts poor kids at a disadvantage from the get-go. As for teacher salaries - people need to earn a living wage, especially if they've got student debt to pay off, and if you want professional people you have to be prepared to pay them professional salaries. If those things happened, you'd see a marked improvement in school performance quite quickly.

Arts programs should not be a frill reserved for rich kids - who can, after all, afford private lessons. They should be a part of the educational spectrum at all public schools, all the time. Period.

And of course, the political will to do all of this doesn't exist, because too many people are looking at it as someone else's problem - they're going to homeschool their kids as their church demands, so why on earth would they care to improve public education?

[mysirensong.livejournal.com]

I have basically the exact same feelings about homeschooling as you do. I had a friend from church when I was in high school who was being home "schooled" for those last years of high school and man oh man did her education suck. She was supposed to be two years ahead of me but she was miles behind me academically -- and I'm from an inner-city school that did just ok . Granted, I was at the top of my class, but still. Anyway, she was the only view of homeschooling that I had for a long time and I decided long ago it was not for my kids if that was how they'd turn out.

When I went to college I met a couple more kids who'd been homeschooled and I saw them totally flounder when they actually had to do things like attend class on a schedule and participate in group work. Then again, I floundered in college, too, because I suddenly had the freedom to not go to class if I didn't want to and no one was going to put me in detention for it -- maybe there's something to be said for teaching that self-reliance that a homeschooled kid learns? I never had to pay the price for slacking off until the 15 week semester was up and it took a good year or two of that before the lesson sank into my late-adolescent brain.

I know a lot of homeschooling proponents will answer the point about involvement in extra-curriculars by saying, "Well, I can just put my kid in ___ extra-curricular activity." That's great for them that they can afford that, but one thing public school did for *my* family was allow us to be involved in things for free that we wouldn't have had the money to do otherwise -- choir, vocal ensemble, the school plays, the newspaper, band, debate teams, sports, art classes, etc. I realize programs are getting cut all over the place -- the answer to that is not to pull our kids out, but to *fix the problems* and get the programs *back in the schools.*

[anidada.livejournal.com]

My personal experience of school was that it made everyone except the popular and average kids anti-social. I didn't hang out with kids my age. Grouping kids of the same age together doesn't make sense to me, socially speaking. Since when do adults only socialize with people who are the same age as them? I always had more friends outside of school, thanks to sports and other activities, and the cottage kids. Since we lived in the middle of nowhere, getting together with the few school friends I did have was a rarity -- after school, everyone got on a bus to wherever, and in the summer, I had no contact with them at all. What I learned in school was not how to work with my peers, but rather the opposite, to be wary of them. That it was every kid for themself -- remain a geek and try to keep your head down, conform, or become one of the bullies. So the socialization argument against homeschooling has never worked for me.

There's plenty of secular homeschoolers, using secular materials. They just aren't as well-publicized, well-funded, or as (I hesitate to use this term because I've seen the craptacular study materials put out by certain factions) "well-organized," as the religious ones. Religious parents could just as easily send their kids to a religious academy, if there's one in their area, or form their own (my ex went to just such an "academy" for his last year of high school). If religious schools are allowed, then religious homeschool must be, too.

Many folks homeschool with non-religious group support -- African-American and Native homeschoolers have formed culture-specific networks. Military families have similar affiliations, as do children who are professionals in their own right (actors, musicians, circus performers, etc.).

Obviously, homeschooling by parents who haven't, themselves, studied anything, or who can't afford the resources, is hardly ideal. But I honestly don't believe that an educated parent can't help their child successfully educate themselves, barring extreme developmental/learning disabilities. If folks can afford to homeschool, then they would hopefully be able to find someone who can tutor their child in a specific area, if they can't teach it themselves. (I wouldn't dream of trying to teach my child advanced math and science!) Kids with actual talent are going to need extracurricular attention in any case -- RCM studies, conversational practice with a native language speaker, coaching, etc. There is also the option, in many areas, of having one's child attend a local school for specific courses of study, not as a full-time student, giving them access to science labs, for instance. Also, exclusive tutoring (having a governess) amounts to the same thing as homeschooling, esp. if the tutor doesn't have a teaching degree, and many don't.

The proof of the efficacy of homeschooling is in its graduates; as with any school system, it's a mix of the good, the bad, and the ugly. If you really want to know how well it works, it's probably best to read/speak to/seek out folks who've done it.

The first book I ever read on homeschooling (prior to that, I'd never heard of it before; I was 19, so it was too late for me), was this one (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0446389862/103-5430019-1620642?v=glance&n=283155). It's a first-hand perspective on homeschooling from parents who homeschooled their four kids, three of whom subsequently went to Harvard. And this is prior to the internet, with little in the way of local resources to assist them. Their perspective is, every child is gifted, you just have to figure out where their gifts lie, and work with them to enhance the others.

I also recommend Grace Llewellyn's books:

Guerrilla Learning (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0471349607/sr=1-2/qid=1155759953/ref=sr_1_2/103-5430019-1620642?ie=UTF8&s=books)

The Teenage Liberation Handbook (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0962959170/sr=1-1/qid=1155759953/ref=sr_1_1/103-5430019-1620642?ie=UTF8&s=books) (oh, how I wish that had been around when I was 15...)

and

Real Lives (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/096295912X/sr=1-3/qid=1155759953/ref=sr_1_3/103-5430019-1620642?ie=UTF8&s=books).

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

I have actually known several families who did it, from the Baptist church I attended for a couple of years. I had a fair amount of contact with a few families, because I taught their kids piano. There was some talk of hiring me to teach French, but that never panned out. I did participate in their choir group for a while.

Here's what I found out.

a) Socialization - most of them socialized really well with adults, and not well at all with kids of any age. If school promoted anti-social behaviour, homeschooling promoted hermit-like behaviour. I see your point about socializing with your own age group, which is why I didn't list it as necessarily being a drawback. There are pluses and minuses to that.

b) behaviour - these kids were generally really poor at following directions from anyone except their parents. They didn't have a lot of adult role models other than immediate family, and tended to talk to adults the way their parents did - which would make for problems when they eventually went to high school or tried to get a job. Those whose parents weren't good at getting compliance were raising absolute holy terrors, and no one could do anything with these kids ever.

c) academics - some were great. Some were awful. Most, not surprisingly, were in between. There were some who were going to be in dire straits in the future due to their lack of skills, and their parents didn't realize how far behind they were because there was no one to compare them to. If there were learning disabilities there, they went undiagnosed due to lack of experience on the part of the parents - they didn't know what normal looked like outside of their own family.

I think you're right - well-educated parents who access a variety of special resources for their kids will be able to raise well-educated kids. However, that's at least two qualifiers that are going to be judged by the parents themselves. Remember the truism that seventy percent of people define themselves as above-average in terms of intelligence? What does it say about homeschoolers?

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

I forgot a bit.

The homeschooled kids I knew were invariably very, very sheltered. The people they knew had exactly one worldview, and they never encountered anything else except, occasionally, in books - I say occasionally, because many of the books they saw supported their worldview rather than challenging it. This is not a factor of all homeschooled kids - it was very particular to a religious homeschool situation - but it could be a problem even in a non-religious setting, depending on how the parents handled it.

I suppose my bottom line is that we live in a global village, and I question the ability of any parent(s) to be everything to their children until puberty. I think that in order to function well in society, they need more interactions, more exposure, than that. School was often painful for me too, and my mother would have been quite capable of homeschooling, but I'm glad she didn't. I needed the independence to grow my own way that school provided, and if I grew as a loner, at least I grew as a being separate from my parents.

[ghostwes.livejournal.com]

Indeed, most of the homeschooler types I've encountered have been anarchists rather than religious types. I couldn't say whether the kids are smarter or better adjusted than your average public school kids however.

[sassy-fae.livejournal.com]

From the age of about 9 until sometime in my 20s, I resented my parents for not pulling me out of school and homeschooling me. I hated my school and begged to be pulled out. Much of the teaching was mediocre, my year of classmates was the worst the school had seen (until my sister's class a few years later), and I was excluded for being smart, but didn't escape notice enough to avoid being picked on.

It took quite a few years of thinking on it to realize that my mom did the right thing by leaving me in school. My parents both speak english as their second language, and neither have post secondary education (due to circumstances beyond their control, not due to a lack of smarts). English grammar, algebra, Canadian history.. all were things never covered in their own education, and they had no idea how to go about teaching it. My mom could and did nurture certain areas, but there would have been large frustrating gaps in my education had we gone that route.

The other reason that school was a good thing was.. not so much the positive experience of socialization (as it was largely negative), but the chance to see what my peers were like, what cliques were, what ostracization meant (and yes, I knew the word), and how to start coping with all the difficulties that I'd eventually have to manage. Getting together with other kids in things that our parents arranged was not the same thing at all. Kids were on their best behaviour and often had much in common with us, as our parents got along as friends. Kids at school were more "real", more like the adults one encounters in the real world.

This being said, it could be argued that those early school years (most of the years before highschool) scarred me and hindered my ability to function in public social situations, and this might be true as well. I've decided it's a moot point as homeschooling wasn't an option for me, but it's all certainly food for thought.

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

In other words, school kept you from being as sheltered as most homeschooled kids become. Again, there's an upside and a downside to that, but I tend to think it's better for kids to learn to deal when they're young, than be forced to deal after the time they should have learned. A parent's job is to support that learning, not shelter a child from it.

[curtana.livejournal.com]

One issue with homeschooling that I haven't seen addressed in the previous comments people have made is that it's nearly always the mother who winds up doing the teaching in the families I've known who've undertaken it. Not only does that mean giving up her own career chances for a decade or more, but it's a lot of pressure to place on one person who's also busy keeping a household running. One mother of my acquaintance found that after a couple of years, she was simply far too stressed trying to do everything, and was worried she was letting her child's education slide in favour of keeping up with the chores and trying to do her own work on the side, so wound up sending her child to public school and supplementing her education with lessons at home that addressed, for instance, ways in which they didn't agree with what the school was teaching (things about US history and politics, mainly, I believe, but also additional teaching about sex ed and more advanced math and computer programming and so on). As far as I know, that child is doing fine in elementary school, and has had the advantage of learning early to question whether everything that her teacher says is absolutely true.

On the flip side, the community centre I went to in TO had programs for kids most mornings (things like arts and crafts, music, or even just letting the kids run around the gym and play with toys and each other), and a lot of the families who came there were homeschoolers. It wasn't expensive to have a membership there, so it wasn't as though only the rich had access. In an environment where there are opportunities like that to be had, then the problems of enrichment and socialization aren't insurmountable.

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

The stress on the mother is a very good point. I've known two families whose doctors ordered them to put their kids in school because the mother's health was suffering.

[lee-in-limbo.livejournal.com]

I think home schooling is a mistake, unless you really do want your child to grow up in a petrie dish and thus be completely unsocialized and incapable of understanding how to behave in mixed society.

If your child's education is that important to you, take the time to go over homework and lessons with your child, to make sure they understand what they are being taught in school.

L o L,
nodding quietly

Systematic Mediocrity

[neosis.livejournal.com]

It seems to me that public education is a system that, by itself, provides an average education to the students attending it. Homeschooling can provide a superior or inferior education depending on the qualifications of the parents. That's not quite true, the idea is to normalize the education of the public and produce predictable consistent education for the vast majority of people.

There do seem to be problems with the American public education system, some based on funding, some based on poor design of the system as velvetpage points out above.