Comment We homeschool our children, as well (Score 2, Informative) 1345
I was not homeschooled, per se, but I taught myself from age 10 on to program, by myself, without any help from my parents, outside of school, and started by copying BASIC programs out of COMPUTE! magazine. By end of high school I had taught myself BASIC, 6502 Assembler, and Pascal. I am now a professional software developer on my 2nd business.
Required reading for anyone who considers critiquing homeschooling would be John Taylor Gatto's "Dumbing us down." Gatto is an award-winning New York school teacher who spoke publicly and wrote many essays about why our current school system is not good for children, or education at all. A great, quick, read and it spoke volumes about my own experience with public and private school as a child.
Finally, we homeschool our three children (8, 5, and 3 years old.) For those who think homeschooled kids will become lazy, jobless, drains on society obviously have some vein of laziness in themselves, or no work ethic at all.
It's easy to call names, or discredit us, and harder to consider your own education and how much better it could have been if you weren't served 50-minutes of American History, then 50 minutes of being half-naked in a room with red balls flying at you, then 50 minutes speaking Spanish. Nowhere in life does that happen, so why do we teach our kids like that?
The whole point of homeschooling is to:
- Instill a sense that a child's education within their own power to grow
- Provide real-world experiences which teach the child real, practical knowledge
- Avoid the inevitable issues of having children "slip through the cracks" in a room with 30 other kids and one teacher
From as early as possible we communicate with our kids that:
- If they are interested in something, they can pursue it
- Kids learn differently, and the rote "schedule" of school often forces things down kids throats before they're ready
- That working is part of life, and it often can be a lot of fun
- That ultimately, their education is their choice
Obviously, as a parent, my job is present structure and facilitate the learning. Making pancakes? Great, a good time to explain fractions (1/2 cup, tablespoon, teaspoon). Interested in video games? Great, let's animate something in Flash.
We read to our kids every day. We read things all of the time in front of them. You think with that kind of example, kids won't learn to read?
And some kids take longer. I've known kids who were 12 years old who weren't ready to read. When they made the decision to read, it happened within 6 months. Are they going to suffer as a result? I doubt it.
Just plug "Homeschooled Children prepared studies" in your local search engine to find plenty of studies which show that homeschooled kids tend to be well prepared for college, and as a group, tend to go to college more.
Yes, if you're a deadbeat alcoholic Dad working at Wendy's and let your kids run around "unschooled", then no, homeschooling is not the answer, and sending your kids off to school to be babysat at the local school for 6 hours a day works great. But most homeschooled parents take the commitment very seriously, and guide their children lovingly into a rich, knowledgeable future.
