PoAC: Home schooling
Aug. 16th, 2006 02:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
velvetpageAn 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?
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?
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2006-08-16 10:23 pm (UTC)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?