Home Schooling - long, long, long

[Amy Z]

It's been really interesting reading about people's experiences of 
schooling and homeschooling.  

David wrote:

>That said, you are partly making the best of a poor schooling 
>situation (and Tabouli got the worst of it).  

Very true.  It all depends on what your options are.  I would send my 
children to school if it looked like the best option for them.  It 
sounds as if the system has done right by your kids.

>Also, I have doubts about our ability as parents to contribute much 
>on the teaching front, even with specialisation in a network.  We 
>have had plenty of posts here pointing out that contrary to popular 
>opinion, teaching is a very difficult and skilled job.  

Also true.  My dh and I are both very good teachers, but just the same 
we would no doubt discover many areas of study in which we're 
clueless.  One advantage of hs-ing is that we could help our child 
seek out someone who can teach him/her calculus or Spanish or Asian 
history (or horseback riding or metalwork for that matter), whereas 
with school you're generally stuck with the teacher who's assigned to 
that year and subject even if the teacher's a bad one.

There's another issue there, though, which is at bottom the reason I 
see myself homeschooling.  I am essentially an "unschooler"; I would 
take a very unstructured approach, not "school at home" (do your 
workbooks for an hour, Thursday's math day, Monday's English, etc.).  
The unschooling approach is often called "child-centered learning," 
but I think it's a bit of a misnomer; it is really knowledge-centered 
learning, following the logic of the subject rather than the arbitrary 
structures given to subjects in most schools.  E.g., the necessary 
(for school purposes) but arbitrary dividing lines between subjects:  
did you ever have a really interesting question in chemistry class and 
get told, "that's physics"?  A hs-er could just follow that road right 
into physics instead of waiting 2 years until he/she "got to" physics 
in the curriculum.

Some things might be best learned through workbooks or lectures, but 
hs-ing allows the flexibility to use workbooks and lectures when 
they're appropriate and scrap them when they're not.  You as the 
parent are not expected to be the fount of knowledge; you're more a 
resource person.  An ounce of experience is frequently worth a pound 
of schooling, and experiences are plentiful if you have the time and 
freedom to pursue them.  E.g. instead of my teaching my child civics 
out of a book, or out of my own head, we could go to the state house, 
go to aldermen's meetings, read biographies of the founders of the 
country (happy sigh remembering a child's biography of Patrick Henry I 
loved as a kid), etc.  We sit in the gallery and see the reporters at 
work, which leads to an interest in journalism, and the next thing the 
child wants to visit a newspaper office, create his/her own 
neighborhood paper, interview the journalists, etc. . . there is a 
natural but unpredictable structure to knowledge, and we tend to learn 
best when allowed to pursue the questions that currently interest us. 
 What did Twain say?  Never let your schooling interfere with your 
education . . .  

It reminds me of something I once read that said that the best 
education happened in kindergarten and graduate school, not any of the 
years in between.  In graduate school you regain the freedom you 
haven't had since age 6:  you follow a subject that interests you in 
whatever direction it leads.  The more schools allow kids to do that, 
the better, IMO; but it is very hard for schools to allow much of that 
freedom, because they are trying to teach 20 kids in a classroom (if 
you're lucky--often it's 40), just for starters.

Unschooling is "child-centered" in this sense, the sense of allowing 
the child's passions to dictate direction.  The hs-ed kids I know have 
all learned to read, do math, practice science, etc. without anyone 
ordaining a curriculum, but simply because they followed their own 
curiosity--but again, it might not work like that with all kids.

Well, I could go on like this all day and still only give the barest 
of explanations; I've been thinking about these issues for years.  See 
the writings of John Holt for a more vivid description than I could 
give . . .

>  Most families here simply can't afford home schooling.  They need 
two incomes to 
> survive and, while that isn't always incompatible with hs-ing (one 
> family I knew were musicians who could schedule concerts, music 
> lessons, and hs-ing around each other), for most it is.  

I'm lucky there too.  My dh's hours aren't very flexible, but mine 
are, and neither of us has a 9-to-5, punch-the-clock kind of job.  We 
could both work full-time and still homeschool a child, at least once 
he/she was old enough to be home alone a few hours at a time.

I do know people who both work 9-to-5 who make it work, but it must be 
very tough.

Amy Z