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

[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.