Comment Re:Homeschooling =/= fundamentalist schooling (Score 2, Informative) 1324
Thank you for saying that, it really is a shame it needed to be said.
Our children are now eight and nine, they have been homeschooled since kindergarten. My wife and I are both atheists and our reason for homeschooling is definitely not religious, in fact we have gone out of our way to teach comparative religion so the kids will understand all the cultural influences of, and references to, the major religions.
Initially we had two main reasons for homeschooling:
- I am originally from the UK and we still spend as much as 3 months a year in the UK. Having to deal with pulling the kids in and out of school would have been disruptive for them and made it difficult to maintain continuity in their lessons.
- We do not believe in the lowest common denominator theory where classes move at the pace of the slower students. Where I grew up the school's classes were banded by ability within each subject so you could easily be band 1 for English but band 3 or 4 for Maths. My wife grew up without banding and personally experienced the issues with always being ahead of the class.
We priced private school options and decided that on balance we would rather downsize and reduce our income (I went from full time employee to just doing part time consulting work and my wife closed her part time hobby business and found a full-time job with health benefits) in order for one of us to stay home and take care of the education ourselves.
On the subject of socialization, we have observed our kids 'socializing', we deliberately chose a house in an area with a lot of families with school age children and they play together outside after school almost every evening and at weekends without any issues. In order to give them more interaction with other kids in a structured environment they played in a soccer league for several seasons (5-8), we ended up coaching a team but that is another story. My observations in that environment were that the public school kids did not have better socialization skills, if anything the homeschoolers on the teams stood out as leaders and mediators. In fact I would go as far as to say that the homeschoolers in general had good social skills, being cooperative and enthusiastic team players, going out of their way to both motivate and involve other kids and speaking up loudly and clearly, whereas the majority of the public school kids had what could only be called anti-social skills often being rebellious, moody, shy and exhibiting poor listening skills.
As I type this my 3rd/4th graders are hand coding web pages for their sites on our home web server. We use these websites for them to be creative and publish information they are interested in, mostly animal pictures and art for our daughter but Lego and video games for our son. In addition each of their home pages have a link to their school work where they publish their book reports, essays and scanned images of their art work. I just fielded a question from my eight year old on how to use CSS to give the first element in a list a different format to the rest of the list! They both keep bugging me to start teaching them how to make their pages more dynamic and include input fields to gather data.
On the flip side...there are very few good resources for secular homeschoolers. Most of the support groups and a lot of the available curriculums are very religious and of no use to us. The major national home school groups typically cater to the majority religiously focused home school families and even include prayer and other more distasteful activities at their meetings and conferences.