BevK May 6th, 2008
Stefan Merrill Block, who was homeschooled, shares his response to some of the myths about homeschooling.
Home schooling’s successes remain obscured by suspicions, so it is worth repeating the argument that many, many home schoolers have made before me and that I have had to make too many times to count: The common myths about home schooling don’t stand up to empirical scrutiny.
He goes through several of the common myths listing studies that refute them. He then goes on to, as he puts it, “attest to what I would have lost had California’s dreadful home-schooling laws applied in Texas when I was a kid.”
I could rhapsodize about the many benefits of my own home-schooling experience, but they are all based upon a single, simple, revolutionary idea, an idea that other forms of education explore but only home schooling can fully express: that students’ individual needs and interests should determine their educations. My parents understood that curiosity is the sacred heart of learning, and they gave me the time and space to put my hand on it and learn its rhythms.
When homeschoolers move away from the “school” model of education wonderful things happen. My own daughter had a conversation with a friend in Sunday school about what they were currently reading. My daughter is working her way through Jane Austen’s novels, on her own, her choice. Her friends response was that she had had to read one of Austen’s novels for school and it was really hard and not something she’d ever want to do again. Sad, but typical. Of course my daughter has fully realized that her education is her education. She’s been known to bring home a stack of books from the library on a variety of subjects she doesn’t think she knows enough about. I think the key is curiosity as Stefan says. Curiosity will make you explore something you might not think of as fun because you want to know what the fuss is about something. Curiosity can lead you to all kinds of new and wonderful places.
Read the article…
BevK December 3rd, 2007
Long article on whether homeschooling is a good thing or not. The article is found at Jewish Exponent, so there is also information about Jewish homeschooling.
Some excerpts:
Ed Collom, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Southern Maine, who has extensively studied the phenomenon, said that he finds homeschooling to be a collective endeavor. Collom, who is not Jewish but is an analyst of this type of education, earned a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California-Riverside and has written scholarly works about homeschooling.
“Home-schoolers rarely teach in isolation,” he said. “[They] have been very effective in forming their own networks.”
On the other side of the fence, Janine Remillard, associate professor of education at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education, said that homeschooling could potentially limit a child’s exposure to new ideas, experiences and perspectives.
“Collaboration, communication and interaction are critical components of learning,” she said. “These components are not easy to build into a one-on-one situation.”
Read more…
BevK November 26th, 2007
Four homeschool families, four different reasons to homeschool.
When people learn that Kathleen Ford of Erie home-schools her 6-year-old son, the question that follows, she said, is usually “What church do you go to?”
Read more… ABCs of inhouse education
BevK August 30th, 2007
Many think that their elite suburban public high schools or Christian schools are the perfect answer to their children’s education. Rod Dreher shares how they turned to homeschooling until they found a school that met their needs for both academics and moral culture. They were motivated by a documentary.
There are two kinds of parents: those who have seen the 1999 PBS documentary The Lost Children of Rockdale County, and those who have yet to be freaked out by it.
Our firstborn was barely home from the hospital when my wife and I first saw the show, which investigated a syphilis outbreak in a prosperous suburban high school. It was a damning portrait of a peer culture run wild and well-meaning parents whose indulgent child-raising created a moral quagmire for their kids. When the final credits rolled, we had no doubt that we were going to homeschool.
Scared into homeschooling, they still weren’t homeschooling with a homeschooling lifestyle perspective. When they found a school that met their needs, they opted out of homeschooling. Not all and I believe not most homeschoolers are homeschooling purists who believe that homeschooling is foundational to the way they live their lives. As school choice broadens, especially with online schools expanding, I can see that homeschooling will come to mean many things, but also that a large number of parents who homeschool to provide better academics or to keep their children safe will choose another option when it becomes available and affordable.
I’m a dyed-in-the-wool homeschooler. I’ve got four years to go to graduate the last of my five children, and God willing, that’s exactly what I’ll do. My children wouldn’t be who they are today if we hadn’t had them home. You may take a mother’s claims of her children’s extraordinary capabilities with a grain of salt, but my children are brilliant people. I don’t mean that in an academic brainy kind of way, although they aren’t slouches in that department. They’re people that other people enjoy being with, working with, and trust to help them with their problems. I think that’s because they were home where their strengths were nurtured and their weaknesses weren’t ridiculed. We’re a tight knit family that remain tight knit even across hundreds of miles. Homeschooling as a lifestyle works.
BevK August 20th, 2007
Hodding Carter II has this dire comment to make about homeschooling:
My concern about our educational system is for those who aren’t part of it - those who are home-schooled:
An estimated 1.7 million to 2.5 million will be taught at home by a parent this year. Not letting kids try out their own wings after we’ve provided the right roots will disadvantage them later in life.
Laura Derrick’s, president, National Home Education Network, response hits the nail on the head:
“Children can’t fly if they aren’t free, and they aren’t free if the conformity of a classroom is the only acceptable path to education.”
If you believe that homeschoolers are never allowed to test their wings, you know very little about homeschoolers. My children have always amazed me with their confidence. Adults who interact with them for the first time often complement us on what great kids they are. My oldest took her first community college class at the age of 16. A class icebreaker required the class members to line up by age. She went to the end of the line automatically believing correctly that she was the youngest. She was questioned on this by several class members who were surprised when she announced she was just 16. She had no problem stretching her wings in adult classroom receiving an A in class that required a lot of interaction among class members. That’s just one story about my oldest. I have four other amazing (if I say so myself — and I do) children.
BevK August 20th, 2007
Lisa Jo Rudy shares how their family decided to homeschool their 11-year-old son with autism.
Some schools are already back in session. Others will be starting up in just a week or two. This year, for the first time, our family will be taking a whole new direction. We’ll be homeschooling our 11-year-old son with autism! This is a big new move for us, and one that I hope will lead to some interesting articles, interviews and opportunities.
BevK July 23rd, 2007
At Mom is Teaching Summer Minor has posted on whether or not homeschoolers can keep every bad influence away from their children by homeschooling.
But it made me wonder if homeschooling can really combat some of the negative things in the world we don’t want our children exposed to too soon. Even away from the peer pressure in schools, the social pressure for women to be thin and beautiful beyond reality is everywhere.
What are your thoughts on this? Do you think there are just some thigns that will creep in no matter how we guard our children? Is that necessarily a bad thing?
The answer is obviously we can’t keep everything away from them. But I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing or even a goal we should try to attain. I think homeschooling when done properly allows parents to see the influences in their children’s lives more readily because we’re literally there with them more of the time. It still requires open ears and eyes, you can blind yourself to your children’s struggles by deeming it impossible for them to ever engage in or think about something, but that would be foolish. Homeschooling also allows parents to establish better communications with their children. They can still be autocratic and overbearing and blow the opportunity, but most homeschoolers I know can sit down with their children and have serious discussions about serious things. The world is waiting for them when they finally leave your doorstep. Dealing with the things that they encounter at youth group or even while visiting another homeschool friend is part of raising kids.
Hat Tip: Homeschool Buzz
BevK June 26th, 2007
Barbara Miller gives a very good answer to that question. She’s a Christian, so her answer will be different from someone who is not a Christian. But it’s a solid answer based on years of experience homeschooling and teaching seventh grade.
Barbara Miller of Prosper: Why we choose to homeschool
BevK May 3rd, 2007
Choosing to educate your children at home is more than an exercise in educational freedom. It’s a lifestyle choice that involves many options and decisions.
I think the statement that home education is a lifestyle choice needs to be made more frequently. Homeschooling is not just an alternative to sending your kids to the public school. Those who plan to homeschool for a year or two and then put children back into school don’t ever discover what “true” homeschooling is…it’s a lifestyle. (If they stick to that goal of returning kids to public school.) Once you’re invested in that lifestyle, keeping on track with the public school is no longer a concern. You don’t have to study what third graders are studying when you have a third grade age child. You can create a curriculum that suits your family, your children, and your own educational philosophy. A homeschooling lifestyle means taking advantage of opportunities as they arise and scaling back academics when life requires. It means that you can take your time with developmental delays rather than having your child labeled as learning disabled and forced to take special classes and feel “stupid.” The homeschooling lifestyle is so much more. But it’s not something that you discover until you decide to make a true attempt. You can’t look back to public school or you risk becoming a pillar of salt.
Read the article at FWfamily News.
BevK April 28th, 2007
CBN has posted an article that takes a look at homeschoolers and socialization from a Christian perspective. It has some interesting things to say including the results of testing homeschoolers and public schoolers with the Vineyard Adaptive Behavior Scale. I don’t know what that tests, but I’ll be looking into it.
Socialization: Homeschooling vs. the Schools
92 percent of superintendents believe that home learners are emotionally unstable, deprived of proper social development and too judgmental of the world around them, according to a California study by researcher Dr. Brian Ray .
Questions about inadequate socialization are often brought up as a means to disqualify homeschooling as a viable alternative form of education, but are the arguments valid?
That really is the question. From the article:
So how do these different settings affect children? Dr. Thomas Smedley believes that homeschoolers have superior socialization skills, and his research supports this claim. He conducted a study in which he administered the Vineyard Adaptive Behavior Scales test to identify mature and well-adapted behaviors in children. Home learners ranked in the 84th percentile, compared to publicly schooled students, who were drastically lower in the 23rd.
The article goes on to look at what makes homeschooling different and why homeschoolers would do so well on such a test.
Perhaps the most important statistic quoted in this article, where Christian parents are concerned, is the percentage of Christian youth disowning their faith.
Consistent with these figures, Christian producer and occult expert Caryl Matrisciana reports that 75 percent of public-schooled American youth brought up in Christian households disown their Christian faith by the first year of college. NHERI finds that this is only true for less than four percent of homeschooled youth.
