School’s Out Forever
BevK April 10th, 2006
http://www.time.com/time/…1181679,00.html
Time, South Pacific has an article posted about homeschooling in New Zealand and Australia. School’s Out Forever.
As usual a mixed bag of nice things to say and experts skeptical opinions. Here’s a bit of the negative.
So how do homeschooled kids turn out? Pretty well, it seems. They’re ineligible to sit for exams such as the N.S.W. Higher School Certificate or New Zealand’s 7th Form Bursary, which would indicate how they stack up academically against their traditionally schooled peers. However, numerous studies, mainly American, have given homeschooled children a glowing report card: better abstract thinking and language skills, above average in all the main subjects. While much of this research was commissioned by homeschooling organizations, few experts argue against the practice on academic grounds. “Homeschooling can often produce very smart kids,” says psychologist Bob Murray - largely because learning becomes a way to please their parents.
Universities have a discretionary power to accept applicants without entry scores, so homeschooling isn’t necessarily an impediment to tertiary study. Indeed, a high proportion of the homeschooled just keep on studying, often well into their 20s. Why? Perhaps their childhood experience fires a profound love of learning. Or does their sheltered upbringing cause them to delay the leap into a scary world? The most persistent objection to home education is that it denies its charges the socializing experience of school. “Living in the community, being with other children . . . these are vital parts of a normal life for a child,” says Sharryn Brownlee, immediate past president of the N.S.W. Federation of Parents and Citizens Associations. Schools aren’t perfect, she adds. But nor is life. “You have to give the child the opportunity to learn and grow.”
The article concludes:
It’s hard for outsiders to accept home education, which challenges so many fixed ideas. Teachers teach and parents raise. School is a societal glue. Brothers and sisters singing together is a little too twee. If society’s aim with children is to help them become decent, happy and employable, there’s little concrete evidence to suggest that homeschooling is a more flawed way of trying to achieve it than packing them off to school when they hit age five. And yet the unease persists. One day, you pass a primary school where a bunch of 10-year-olds of all colors and shapes are having a physical education class in the autumn sunshine. Within the space of a few minutes you watch them encourage and console one another, succeed and fail, concentrate like demons and muck about amid noise and mirth. And you have to wonder, whatever the arguments to the contrary: Is this a snapshot of something - school life - that children could really be better off without?
