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

[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.