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Ask Slashdot: Pros and Cons of Homeschooling?
VorpalRodent writes: I went to a private school for about 6 years, then completed my education at the local public school, going on to get a couple undergraduate degrees and a postgraduate degree. My wife dropped out of high school and got her equivalency many years later. Now, she wants to homeschool our son.
There is a significant body of literature which indicates that homeschoolers outperform their traditionally schooled counterparts academically, regardless of the level of education of the parent, and she certainly cares more now that she's older. I don't like anecdotes, but I certainly haven't seen the research borne out in any of the people that I know who were homeschooled. More importantly, it seems like the only reason my wife wants to homeschool is because she doesn't want to let go.
Our son would be going into Kindergarten this coming year. I'm interested in some rational discussion on this, since it seems like the only viewpoints I've ever seen on the matter are "Better academics" vs. "Social interaction," both of which are gross oversimplifications. It doesn't help that I can't find any statistical information on post-schooling outcomes.
There is a significant body of literature which indicates that homeschoolers outperform their traditionally schooled counterparts academically, regardless of the level of education of the parent, and she certainly cares more now that she's older. I don't like anecdotes, but I certainly haven't seen the research borne out in any of the people that I know who were homeschooled. More importantly, it seems like the only reason my wife wants to homeschool is because she doesn't want to let go.
Our son would be going into Kindergarten this coming year. I'm interested in some rational discussion on this, since it seems like the only viewpoints I've ever seen on the matter are "Better academics" vs. "Social interaction," both of which are gross oversimplifications. It doesn't help that I can't find any statistical information on post-schooling outcomes.
The child will lose out on a huge amount of 'non-curriculum learning'. Things like 'how to avoid the schoolyard bully', 'how to read a schedule and navigate to classrooms', 'how to meet project deadlines without parental intervention', 'how to negotiate the fickle friendships that happen in life', 'observe adult role models outside the family'. There are dozens of things like this.
"Avoid the schoolyard bully," I never learned this, all I did was suffer. Come on, school being a totally miserable experience is normal for a huge number of kids.
"how to meet project deadlines" - never learned this either. As a programmer I'm still terrible at it.
"how to negotiate the fickle friendships that happen in life" - uhm that will happen if they're homeschooled too unless homeschooling means "no friends." By the way the answer to this is "suffer". You're welcome.
"Observe adult role models outside the family." That I got to do, and lost all respect for authority. Of course reading history books contributed. Hint, if you want a well adjusted kid don't have him do a report on the Holocaust after reading two or three histories on it and meeting a survivor like I did at age 8.
1) Mum and dad don't have to be teachers. 1-on-1 instruction is so much superior to classroom education that there is really no comparison.
2) Trying to emulate a school environment at home is a recipe for disaster. That's not how it works, and that's not how it should work.
3) All of those are quickly learned upon entrance to college, or during the large quantities of socialization that homeschooled families tend to be very careful to procure for their children. Homeschoolers actually tend to be considerably better socialized than their public school peers. However, dropping a homeschooled child into the wolfpack of public school is a recipe for disaster.
4) Exactly right. Thus, unschooling. http://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/nature/Unschooling-The-Case-for-Setting-Your-Kids-Into-the-Wild.html It works very well, if the parents can get their head around that kind of freedom.
5) I don't know what your experience was but forced separation from parents is traumatic. Of course, once children hit puberty, they tend to break free on their own, thus handling the overly-attached problem.
Sorry your experience was bad. Most are not like that.
We home-schooled our children. One already has her baccalaureate degree and will soon pursue her masters; while her sister, is married with three kids, pursuing her baccalaureate transitioning to her dream, a Nursing degree. My youngest is a aspiring professional artist...and my eldest is professional programmer. Their academic success is due to my wife's dedication and the curriculum that best fit the children. I agree with other poster--meet the state requirements and socialization is important --so join home-school groups where interactive activities are rife and joint teaching efforts are used. So much to learn--but you control what is taught, respond to learning situations, and limit exposure of 'questionable' teachings (which are dependent upon the parents). We are proud of our children and their quality of education is on par or exceeds public education (dependent upon the child native tastes for subjects). It's worth the effort...in my opinion.
My wife has worked as a teacher and has a related degree. Out oldest daughter went to a private preschool when she was three and quickly became bored with what they were teaching. We learned that the same curriculum would be covered in their four year old class so we decided to start homeschooling at that point. She is currently seven years old and is working on curriculum that is beyond what her nine year old friends are working on in public school. She has more friends than I did when I was her age and they are of a wider age range. She has played soccer, takes dance classes, attends church, and and we meet monthly with a homeschool meetup group.
We also have a four year old daughter who is working on similar curriculum to six year olds in public school.
We homeschool primarily for academc reasons as we have seen the horror that is "common core" and the waste of time that is "no child left behind". We have taught Astronomy, Robotics, Weather, and Bird Studies so far so we aren't just teaching the basics.
We live in Texas which has some of the most homeschool friendly laws on the books. Homeschooling falls under the same statutes as Private Schools. There is no attendance reporting, no mandatory testing, no approved curriculums.
The requirements for homeschooling in Texas are as follows:
The instruction must be bona fide (i.e., not a sham).
The curriculum must be in visual form (e.g., books, workbooks, video monitor).
The curriculum must include the five basic subjects of reading, spelling, grammar, mathematics, and good citizenship.
The State of Texas assumes that if you care enough about your kids to want to teach them yourself that the state will just get out of the way. The Texas Homeschool Coalition holds conventions every year were we take seminars and shop for curriculum.
I Don't Work Here
Who would you be doing this for? The child or the parent?
As a parent I taught my kids to read before they went to school, and their times tables before they were 8. I think this was helpful but I will never know.
Some of my neices and nephews have been home schooled out of necessity - living in isolated African areas who have gone to normal school age 13. They have integrated well mostly and one of them was Head Boy at his school.
What their parents did say is that a lot of the home schooling material is produced for children who are being home schooled to ensure that they don't learn some things. Evolution and certain facts of life mainly. Suspect it might be a bit light be a bit light on Climate Change as well!
My vote is to send to normal school and supplement with targeted extra help and trips to stimulating places. My kids now think it was really cool I took them to Bletchley Park before it was full of Benedict Cumberbatch etc !
One point I would make is that because of the internet, kids now learn at least as much from each other as they do from adults. They no longer get one single version of the truth, and the sooner they learn to sort the wheat from the chaff, the better.
I would have to ask - Is there another (?work-related) reason that your partner wants to do this?
Humorous signatures are over-rated.
First, some background. We have 4 kids, in their late teens and early 20s.
A full gamut of personalities - from the artsy kid, to the social diva, to the mathy/introvert, to the football stud. Gross oversimplifications, to be sure, but they hit the archetypes.
Our decision was ultimately *against* homeschooling. Does that mean we were universally happy with our choice to public school our kids? Not entirely. If we knew then what we know now, we'd have looked harder for some sort of private school or charter school that we could have afforded. Our local public schools were terrific in elementary years, mediocre as junior high schools, and pretty nearly horrible as high schools. The high school experience was nearly wasted, with bored unengaged teachers, listless classes, challenges that petered out by 11th grade, and an administration that seemed capable of only making the worst possible choices whenever presented. We should have pulled our kids in junior high and sent them *anywhere* else. Oh, they still did/are doing fine academically - ACTs all 30+ - but this was despite the horrible high school system, not because of it.
The reasons we chose against homeschooling, in no particular order:
- simple expertise: while a reasonably educated parent (we both have Bachelors' degrees) can certainly teach pretty much every elementary and general junior-high subject simply by 'staying ahead of the kid' in the materials, but by high school and certainly in terms of anything advanced placement, nobody's well-rounded enough to be a teacher of everything.
- don't just like what I do: the fact is that if our children developed special interests or things that they loved that we didn't anticipate, there's little we could offer them. We in no way wanted to constrain their interests to our own, which would be natural given our own enthusiasms.
- the "social" thing: humans are social animals. We all exist in a hodgepodge of organizations (formal and informal), status structures, power relationships (formal and informal), with countless others ranging from direct family, relatives, friends, acquaintances, and strangers. *Fundamental* to the emotional and social development of a child is being involved in those evolving relationships *particularly* at certain stages of maturity with others going through the same learning curve. Generally, this is going to continue through our whole lives - at school, at work, in relationships, clubs, volunteer organizations, churches, etc. Simply put, we felt this was very much a 'time served' sort of thing; an hour playdate once weekly (or whatever) wasn't going to give our kids the sort if intrinsic, long-term give and take that primate children and adolescents need to learn those structures and how to navigate them. To best learn the gamut of situations that they would have to deal with would involve not just social experience, but social immersion. And let's be absolutely candid: the teen years for both boys and girls are awash with hormones and their follow-on effects. Learning to come to terms with this (& themselves) in-context is not something you as a parent can deliver by lecture.
- 'bye mom & dad! - following-on to the reason above, the primary thing a kid needs to learn as they mature? Doing without you. Really, how can you teach that?
- sports: if you're in the US, youth sports at a certain level are pretty much only through schools. I think sports are important to the development of a child, learning about competition, to win, lose, deal with others, trust others, as well as important values about diet, physical fitness, and the pure joy of physical activity when you are at the most perfect physical condition you'll ever be in your life. That choice isn't much available to homeschool kids, or if it is it's in a sort of stilted "we'll let them be on the team" sort of way.
- want to give your kid more intensive, in-depth learning better than what schools offer? Nothing's stopping you. School is really only a teeny
-Styopa
Home schooling is a great way to ensure that your children get the same singular viewpoint and misinformation that their parents grew up with, and that they aren't burdened by the intellectual challenge of deciding which of the conflicting ideas they might encounter from classmates and teachers, is correct.
Just as a healthy immune system needs exposure to a variety of germs during the formative years (with some vaccinations to take care of the worst ones), a healthy intellect needs exposure to a variety of ideas, good and bad. Involved parents at home help to quash the most irredeemable ideas that kids will be exposed to (like vaccines do), while letting children reach their own conclusions about the rest of them (and generally landing pretty close to the tree).
It's bad enough that adults are increasingly getting all of their news and information from singular ideological sources (Fox News, HuffPo, etc), but to restrict the intellectual diet of a child to what Mom and Dad teach them will isolate them before they even leave the nest. One of the great achievements of the American publication education system in the 20th century – something that was worth breaking down separate-but-equal to accomplish – was to bring together children of different ethnicities, religions, races, and even (to some extent) economic classes, teaching them a shared history and a shared set of values. Which they learned as much from each other as from the teacher. As a member of a Middle-Class White Protestant Republican family, I'm a better person – a better citizen – now because of the time I spent learning side by side with kids who weren't all of those things ... and in some cases none of them.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
All I had to do was do time student teaching, get the requisite C's in teacher school, and pass multiple guess tests. Nothing actually evaluated my ability to teach. Fortunately for the students, I cared, and still care, so I study pedagogy, but it's not, shall we say, common or encouraged.
get a degree in something plus training as teachers
Again, the dirty little secret of US education: no they didn't. Math teachers take less math than Arts and Science students. Math education at most colleges don't have a single class in common with math majors. I have a relative who has a post-doctorate in high school education in history; not a single class he has taken will apply to a history bachelor's degree, much less a history masters.
Education classes are about teaching classes, not the subjects.
I was homeschooled until high school, and had to deal with exactly that problem.
My father was at work (as an programmer/engineer/manager), and my mother was not particularly strong in the sciences at which I excelled. By 7th grade, I had surpassed their knowledge of basic science, and especially anything computer-related. My daily lesson plan devolved into a cycle of reading material I mostly already knew, asking questions to which I wouldn't get answers, and eventually doing a half-assed job in other subjects to meet the required level of completion that would let me escape to more entertaining things, like teaching myself another programming language.
In retrospect, the single thing my parents did right, above all else, was to teach me how to learn. By the time I got to the public high school, I was able to appreciate my classes as a source of knowledge, rather than a daily prison forcing doctrine into my head. That survives to this day, and is one of the main reasons why I continue to find new fascinating things to explore and learn about the world.
My advice, as someone who survived, is to see homeschooling as a chance to influence the core values your child uses through the rest of his life. Emphasize sportsmanship, creativity, logic... whatever you hope for your child, you can instill at an early age, but you should also be aware of your limits. As soon as your child needs something more than you can supply, you must put their needs first, and send them somewhere with more resources.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Homeschooled children run the risk of being socially stunted
I agree with much of what you said before this (homeschooling is not for everyone), but it is very wrong to say there's any risk of social stunting for homeschoolers. In fact the risk is far less for homeschoolers - because they spend the majority of the day interacting with other adults, learning how to behave like an adult.
In school you are spending a lot of time learning behavior from other kids who also do not really know what good behavior is, how healthy interaction with others works. You learn that a lot better homeschooling than you do at school, as a result you are more mature going into college.
Are you sure she has the perseverance to homeschool your children? (Amount of perseverance required of her depends on the amount of perseverance of your children.)
This is a pretty key factor, how much will they be able to learn self-directed without her watching over them all the time?
If they can learn some math and reading/writing with minimal guidance, you are probably set. The rest can be tailored to children interests which makes them a lot more self-directed anyway.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The flip side comes in some of the non-core subjects or in areas with high demand and low supply of teachers. I taught a foreign language in public schools for a while, with no education classes behind me, only graduate-level work in the language. Likewise, we hired a computer science teacher who had been a programmer, had run his own business, and had never attended education classes. Even in the core subjects, a number of the math and science teachers came from a military background (it was a Navy town) and had solid educations and practical experience with STEM but no education classes.
It took all of us at least three years to get the hang of teaching. Knowing the field is only half the battle: the other is getting your troops in order. Teenagers may well be creative geniuses and precious snowflakes, but they are not rational adults. They are growing into the role, and they need help doing so. Most of the education classes I had were worthless (the "philosophy of education" course was utter bullshit taught by an aged hippie), but the ones on classroom management and adolescent psychology were immensely helpful. Three years of experience solidified what I learned in those two classes. You might well be able to walk into a room of adults and brief them on any topic adeptly -- that's what people do in business meetings and training all the time -- but it's a far cry from being able to handle a room full of teenagers who haven't reached the age of impulse control, are only starting to come to grips with the hormones raging through their bodies, and honestly don't know why they decided to bring that porn mag or knife to class today.
I became good at civilizing the savages, and I found that the students learned far more when I had learned how to do that. I moved on later back into the adult world, but I still find that I can manage children when I have to. It's invaluable on airplanes when I get seated next to some little germ factory whose mother can't get him to control himself and doesn't understand him or why the airsick bag and everything else in reach fascinates him so. It's amazing how much time parents can spend with kids and yet have absolutely no clue what their kids see in the world; they only see the kids as time-drains to be put in front of a tablet or screen to get them out of the way for a while, or as potential embarrassments who need to be threatened constantly. Neither gives a kid the ability to reason and control himself.
One of the biggest takeaways from the whole experience, both while teaching and afterwards, is that most parents don't have the first clue how to raise their children to become decent adults. Some do, and they homeschool their kids well: my cousin homeschools her two kids for religious reasons, and they behave like adults, but she also had a few years experience in Christian education along with a degree in the same. Most parents who do homeschool their kids do have an active enough engagement in their kids' lives to teach them the control they need to become effective learners, and I've found that a number of homeschooling parents form collectives or co-ops that not only distribute teaching among parents with strengths in subject fields but also share knowledge of how to reach the kids most effectively. These co-ops are usually of such a small scale that they know the kids well and individually, something missing from large public schools. That works for them, but they're a small minority of all parents. I'd doubt that the majority of the population is capable either of organizing effectively or of handling children well. Here I'm thinking especially of the kids I taught who never dealt with their biological parents but lived with their grandmothers (parenting skips a generation in some communities, because the mothers are too busy carousing to raise their own children, and the fathers are unknown or incarcerated). Those kids' parents abdicated the responsibility of raising their children, and school is the only place that they'll find the struc
the whole point of why home schooling is perhaps not the best option that in the public system you don't get to choose what you teach them.
the "great" thing about homeschooling is that they get to pursue what they want and that's also the worst about it, because well, you could just as well start calling it no-schooling at that point.
and keep in mind that home schooling will require that at least one parent stays home every day to teach, there's not much security in that - either one of you might drop dead - and to keep the kid able to transition smoothly into the public school system in case you need to change the arrangement then you would need to match the curriculum anyhow to some degree.
if you want to create your own republic of dave then sure, homeschooling is the only option. but if you want to control them 100% and control what shows they look and what friends they have and what news they read.. then they're fucked already.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
What is more important ... schooling, or learning?
Not all the learning happen within the context of a 'school', no matter if it is home school, private school or public school. In fact, most of the learning average kids had/have were/are from OUTSIDE of the schools
Nowadays parents seem to forget that. They seem to think that once they throw their children into a school, it's the responsibility of the teachers in the school to teach their kids
NO !!
I have met people from public school backgrounds who are, while not very technically savvy, they are super streets smart, able to detect troubles before the troubles actually begin
On the other hand, some of those who were home schooled might know a lot of stuffs, but unfortunately they lack many of the skills to successfully interact with others, particularly strangers, and often fall pray to scams because they are not aware of the darker side of humanity
No matter which school you send your kids in, you, as the parents, have to know that your kids learn from you more than they ever could learn from their teachers
Learning is not schooling, and no amount of schooling can equip your children if they do not have the opportunity to learn OUTSIDE of the school
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Disclaimer: I am a certified [MSc] teacher in chemistry and physics. Worked the job only a year [went to do PhD and then do R&D in semiconductors] but all my life I have being interested in education and never stopped thinking and learning about it. Sorry for the gigantic post; there is so much to say about this...besides according to Terry Pratchett teachers can only converse in the form of short lectures:))
The major problem of standardized school system is the lack of flexibility and inability to provide different approaches to different types of students. I am not saying anything new here -- the class moves through the curriculum with the speed of the average student, not the best, of course. This is the classical case [to use popular culture reference] of "who and how is going to teach Ender"? On the other hand, the "slow students" are often slower than they can be again because of lack of flexibility in approach.
The major problem of home schooling is politics --> that the majority of people seem to want it not in order to educate their kids better but the opposite, to save them from "evil" knowledge and from hearing different points of view. This home schooling fad perpetuates the whole developed world ATM and the idea comes usually. from the religious circle of the parents. Please, understand me right, I don't want to start a war on this issue but it is true. In mitigation I can say that many other ideologies [politics, business, culture in general] also try constantly to meddle in schools and teach [or not] the students about certain things.
Two issues then -- one, now to make the system more efficient in pure education terms, without considering social and cultural issues. Two [this is the biggie] --> how to deal with the inevitable clash between the culture and knowledge in the family and the culture and knowledge of the world [school].
It is a FACT that what happens at school has major influence on the development of the young mind. It is a FACT that bad teacher can do huge harm and good teacher can do huge good. It is a fact that most families internal culture is narrow-minded compared to what the school teaches. And you cannot possibly separate culture form education. Example --> if you study logic, one of the best text books starts with debunking the whole idea of advertisement and shows you clearly how you are manipulated by it. But that message is universally despised by our culture [for it has been perverted to such degree that any objection against money grabs and inhuman economic structures is labeled as "freedom-hating"] and trust me, some enraged group of parents will protest [especially if daddy is making his bucks in advertisement:)]. During my short tenure I saw many such clashes. Parents asked me "why are you teaching them this, you are just physics teacher, what can you possibly teach them about everyday life". "Everything", was my usual answer and I tried to explain that the scientific approach is a system of thought that is universal and can be applied to any problem. As my physics teacher in high school said "you might be selling groceries all your life but if you understand a bit of physics and scientific approach you will out compete the other grocery shop". Very few parents understood...
Thoughts on issue one:
- make the cooperation between parents school and society more efficient and [wishful thinking] as free of politics as possible.
- Create "clubs of interests" [we used to have those very good under the communist system] where fast kids can learn more. Make those good and affordable.
- here is an idea --> teach skills. Go with the kids to where their parents work. If some kids show interest in advance machining [dad has golden hands and builds interesting stuff] let those kids have internships in that company or similar. Find what the kid really likes and then provide endless torrent of knowledge and practical work in that field. When motivated by curiously and satisfaction we humans excel and do not need a stick to make us
Then...
Now, before you think I did that just to be mean, I am an autodidact. My situation lands even further outside the norm than those who have been home schooled, such as yourself. I'm not trying to indicate that home schooling is a fail, per se; only that it is much more difficult to do well than even its most vocal proponents generally admit to. My own writing is more of an attempt to ape patterns of speech I consider optimum than it is a coherent application of the rules of English. That is a direct result of teaching it to myself according to my own standards. I don't recommend the process, frankly.
There is a very strong tendency for home schooling to pass along failings of the teacher, generally the parents. For instance, if the parents are poor at English, or math, or history, it is that much more difficult for them to catch failures in those areas, and to remediate them when they occur. Then there is the issue of superstition and how it affects scientific understanding, moral and ethical conditioning. Then what to do about the ritualized tribal behaviors inculcated by immersion and overemphasis of team sports rears its massively ugly head. It goes on and on.
Certain subjects are so difficult to teach that the worm turns and you may have a better chance to teach them well than a public school does. For instance, I would liken mathematics to a balanced, inverted pyramid. You teach it from the bottom up, laying each brick upon those that went before it, keeping the structure balanced at all times so that the whole process doesn't result in a flawed, imbalanced outcome. Fail to import a proper understanding of algebra, and the much of the rest of the process is in trouble, the balance is lost and with it, hope of unimpeded progress. So it goes.
Home schooling is a path that will have an immense impact upon the person whom the child will eventually turn out to be. I would find it very difficult to recommend to anyone without knowing so much about the situation, and the parents, that it would be considered invasive.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Why would it be? A math major has already learned all the math taught in grade school. And a math educator, who will teach grade school, might need a refresher on how math is being taught today, but doesn't necessarily need to know math concepts more complicated than a few years past where they plan to teach. I'm sure if they truly love math they could take additional math courses as electives, but to get a job as a teacher their education should focus on how to teach.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
So what you're saying is for all that extra work, you got average results.
If by average you mean good results, I guess that would be a yes. I mean seriously, in what world of stupidity and cynicism did getting kids through post-graduate education became "average results"?
I'm not a fan of home-schooling in general because, at least in this country, it is generally perceived by the public as a means for Luddites to keep their kids off the sinful, Godless grid.
But here, this is obviously not the case. And for you to simply dismiss the results of their efforts as "average results" (when in this country "average results" means graduating from HS without knowing the difference between "your" and "you're"), that is just imbecile.
Whether you are just being cynically stupid or just deliberately obtuse, only you know.