So many of the posts I read about homeschooling are chock full of caveats designed not to offend the vast majority of the population (96-98%) who send their children to school.? Because we are such a tiny minority, and because homeschoolers respect each family's right to make its own lifestyle choices, we are loathe to come right out and risk offense by admitting that we think homeschooling is better.? And yet in a way that's odd, because we obviously think it's superior or we wouldn't be doing it.? We especially wouldn't be doing it considering the substantial financial sacrifices we make in being primarily one-income families.
Regarding financial sacrifices: real wages have been massively eroded since the early 1970s, while health care, child care, energy, and college tuition costs have risen greatly.? The huge drop in standard of living wasn't felt, though, because more women were joining the workforce and more families became two-income households.? But two incomes should not be a necessity, and the wage decline is an injustice.? This is not, however, somehow the fault of homeschoolers, so don't trot it out to criticize us with.? When you tell us "You're so lucky to be able to homeschool," we can hear the unspoken "...you elitist, anti-left snob" coming through loud and clear, trust me.? Anyone who ever chose a house partly based on the school district is also "lucky" to be able to afford said school district, and clearly anyone sending a child to a private school is similarly "lucky," etc.? But these are economic issues, not educational ones.
So, having got that out of the way, let me focus on education and socialization and say what I really think.
First of all, tutoring my kids one on one just beats classroom lectures all to hell.? I know what they understand or don't, I know when they're distracted (and can remove the distraction or try again at a different time), I know to try a different sort of explanation if my first attempt isn't working.? Anyway, much of their learning takes place at random times during the day when they ask questions and we have a conversation.? Their questions are ones they really want to know the answer to, so their interest and attention are at a maximum.? And, although I'll get to this more later, my kids aren't suffering any social harassment while their learning is taking place, which is a great boon to learning.
Secondly, the way they teach in schools is mostly based on classroom management and is not based on how we know people learn, based on the research.? What we know is: People learn better when the information is in context (e.g. you are actually using fractions in a recipe, not just on a math worksheet).? The classroom isn't in the context of anything, frankly.? Part of its purpose is to remove children from the rest of the world-- i.e. to destroy context.? Secondly, people learn better without extrinsic motivation (carrots and sticks).? Well, again, only the most radical schools even make a pretense of abandoning carrots and sticks, and NEA teacher forums are full of suggestions for better carrots and better sticks to manage those marauding masses.? Third, people learn better when they are able to relax and concentrate and (contrary to popular opinion) when they are not in competition (see Alfie Kohn's No Contest: The Case Against Competition).
Furthermore the textbooks & other materials suck.? One of my earlier posts was on How the Earth Was Made and how much better it is than a textbook.? Anybody who says "But surely there's more information in a textbook," well, firstly, no.? Take out the bullshit and you've removed at least half the text.? And then you have to consider not merely the information which is on the page or in the show, but which is retained. Let me expand on that for a minute.
Lately I've been taken with the idea of my kids studying whatever will enrich the rest of their lives, which means that learning bird songs and frog songs, ID'ing trees and wildflowers, learning more about the human body and human health, etc. make more sense than science as taught in high school, which is basically under a vocational model.? In school it's: Here, calculate how many joules it takes to shove this n-kilogram object up this plane inclined at x degrees (ignore friction).? Here, balance these chemical equations.? Here, tell me the genus and species of this plant, in Latin please.? Supposing the kid goes into an occupation in the field, they may need to use these skills, but for the vast majority these problems are extremely unlikely to come up again.
And if you start telling another adult how, for instance, 5 years after getting an A in chemistry you couldn't remember what an acid was, they very often join in.? Sometimes friends and acquaintances of mine have come right out and said: "Oh, I don't remember a thing I learned in high school!"
But if what you learn enriches your life, that's different.? You not only have an incentive for remembering the material but presumably this material, some of it at least, will continue to pop up now and then.? You'll hear a chorus frog, spot trillium, distinguish the red pine from the white, ponder the different types of radiation when reading another depressing Fukushima article.
The other problem with school is that most things you care to learn about do not fall neatly into a particular topic.? The kids and I cannot ever stay within history, or geography, or science, or even math... we veer haphazardly through all these topics in a single conversation.? Real life is like that.
Textbooks also present information as being dead.? History is a bunch of dead facts everyone agrees on, mistakes are impossible.? Science is a bunch of stuff we discovered decades if not centuries ago, and mistakes are impossible.? Memorize it and move along, there's nothing to see here.? If they had designed it to kill interest they could hardly have done a better job.
So, no, I do not want my kids in school.? The environment is not conducive to learning, lectures are inferior to tutoring, the topic divisions are artificial, the books and learning materials generally suck, the constant carrots and sticks are absolutely toxic to learning, the competition is toxic to learning, the "will this be on the test?" analysis gets in the way of any actual comprehension or retention.
I did once say to a friend that I couldn't remember a thing from a high school history class, only to have him say "Really?? I remember a lot of that stuff."? This friend was in my same high school graduating class, and read the same textbooks as me, with the same teachers.? So why did he get so much more out of it?? Well, this friend of mine is incredibly intelligent, but never gave a rat's ass about grades.? And he happens to be a prolific reader.? So, when taxed with reading 50 pages of some excruciatingly badly written history text, he just read it and tried to grasp whatever little bit of story or narrative or characterization could be wrung from the thing (if any).? If you can attempt to follow the story, then you have a shot at actually remembering the information, because humans learn in narratives.? But when I read those same pages, I simply scanned for bold-face words, memorized glossary terms in the margin, memorized the names of legislation and the dates of battles.? I was great at determining what would be on the test, and I was an excellent little test-taker!? But unfortunately this is exactly why I never remembered anything later.? You can either analyze what will be on the test or you can pay attention to the narrative.? One or the other, not both.
I did have an instructor who lectured on US history and gave exams as follows: she handed out blank paper and told students, for example, "Write down everything you can think of about the Civil War."? Now, you might think that avoided some of the issue of What Will Be on the Test.? But unfortunately you'd be wrong (though I admire her for trying anything new and getting away with it in a classroom).? The trouble was that I took notes just as if I was capturing the data that would be on an imaginary test.? One can still identify the discrete, objective chunks of data coming through in a lecture.? "Abraham Lincoln, elected such and such a year, ran against so-and-so, South Carolina, Mason-Dixon, Robert E. Lee...."? Lots of little dots, not necessarily any narrative, or any understanding.
What I really remember well is everything I learned outside of school, and it's quite a lot, actually.? I have a pretty extensive understanding of how nutritional and other supplements can be used as medicines.? I know quite a lot about economics.? I'm learning history.? My view of the biological world was revolutionized by Stephen J. Gould.? My view of public education was revolutionized by John Taylor Gatto.? I learned an alternative history, as well; regarding who really killed JFK, RFK, and MLK, and the reality behind the start of several wars.? I got obsessed with language acquisition when Anya was a toddler.? I was forced to learn more about gut flora than I ever wanted to know when Tristan had health issues as a newborn.? I learned about Austen's books and the Brontes and finally read Hamlet (for the third time) and thought it was kick-ass, which was a mystery to me since the first two times (high school senior and college freshman) it was just work to be done.? And I spent years poring over The Norton Anthology of Poetry, a study I considered too personal to ever let it overlap with schooling.
Why is it that in spite of being an A student I mostly remember only what I learned by my own volition?? Even in my area of expertise, biostatistics, most of the skills I actually use as a consultant were honed after I was working as a consultant, and did not come from grad school.? 70-80% of what I did in grad school I never used on the job.? Meanwhile, entire fields of statistics I had been previously unaware of (many of which were used in the social sciences) I simply picked up on the fly through my own reading, quickly gaining enough understanding to be able to counsel others.
George Bernard Shaw said:
My schooling not only failed to teach me what it professed to be teaching, but prevented me from being educated to an extent which infuriates me when I think of all I might have learned at home by myself.
Yes, exactly!
And as for socialization, well, here I have to get really offensive, I'm afraid.
There are obvious differences in the socialization of homeschoolers vs. schooled kids.? Homeschoolers aren't age segregated, so the older ones tend to be kinder to the younger ones than you would find in schools.? Dealing with children of varying ages is a skill which is constantly exercised.? Secondly, they don't act out in order to demand adult attention (which is in cruelly short supply in schools); if they need attention they go over to their parent and talk to them.? Third, if any kid was inclined to be nasty to another kid in a homeschooling get-together, they face a strong likelihood that some parent will observe or overhear them, and steps will be taken.? Fourth, most of the homeschooled kids I know have a very strong and innate sense of fairness and justice and do not mistreat others.? I'm not saying it's utopia, there are frustrations and this rule doesn't apply without exception.? But generally speaking homeschooled kids simply treat each other much, much better than schooled kids do.? Blinded studies in which psychologists watch videotapes of schooled and homeschooled kids in a mixed setting also indicate that social behaviors among homeschooled children are more appropriate and mature.
My kids don't actually even want to be around schooled kids.? They show up at the park in the summer or after school and we leave.? We avoid field trip groups like the plague (those kids frequently act like they've just been released from prison, which of course they have).
The truth is I don't want my kids to have anything to do with schools -- socially or pedagogically.? And guess what?? The research is on my side on this one.? On the standardized tests so beloved of public schools, homeschoolers are 25-30 percentile points ahead.? Later, as adults, they are more engaged in their communities & more active citizens.
It really galls me when somebody writes an article about some particular homeschooling family where some kid can't read at (say) age 11, and the author concludes homeschooling should be highly regulated or banned.? Do they think this never happens in the schools?? Really?? Let's stick to the data rather than the anecdotes.
Note that many of the studies cited involved religious homeschooling populations, and therefore the samples aren't representative.? Well, okay, but the left wing thinks the religious homeschoolers do the worst job.? In the college town where I live, most of the homeschoolers in our group are progressive.? Some are "driving is evil / vegan / Buddhist" lefties.? Presumably the folks on the left (at places like Salon and AlterNet and Daily Kos) would feel more comfortable that we lefties can teach our children math, reading, and science, right?? So the fact that the right-leaning religious homeschoolers still outperform publicly schooled kids by 25-30 percentile points is merely a minimum outperformance, to their way of thinking (which I do not necessarily endorse).
And this idea that public schooling is a social equalizer and promotes social mobility?? Oh yeah?? Then why are gender, race, and income gaps in student achievement so huge in public schools and yet tiny to non-existent among homeschoolers?
Granted, that's based on standardized tests, which many homeschoolers don't give a shit about.? Reading, writing, spelling, my kids do this stuff on their own and improve at it on their own.? Sure, in high school we can perfect argumentative essays and the like, but seriously, we don't need to spend "schooly" time on this.? What we spend time discussing is mostly the world around us, its geography and history and its political systems and cultures.? None of which is ever measured on a standardized test (and thank goodness!).
So yeah, I definitely think this is better.? I think having my children with me most of the time is more natural, the way humans evolved, and better for their development.? I think the social environment is better.? I think the learning comes easier, is better retained, is more meaningful to their lives, and helps develop their own personal interests so that they will hopefully have a good idea of what they'd like to do by age 20 or so.? I think school materials are insultingly childish, and that in fact, schools themselves are insultingly childish.? Newsletters sent home to parents are positively infantalizing to adults, I don't know how any parent can bear to read them.
But what about the kids suffering abuse, I can hear people saying.? Well, the vast majority of those kids go to school and it doesn't stop the abuse.? Furthermore, middle and high school introduces them to abuse.? Suicide is the third leading cause of death in 15- to 24-year-olds in the US even though suicide is (for various reasons) pretty drastically under-reported as accidents.? Close to 7% of high school students have attempted suicide.? This is to say nothing of alcohol & drug abuse, dating violence, and rape.
You think I've had my rant out?? Nah, I've barely scratched the surface.? I've not said a thing about what John Taylor Gatto or John Holt uncovered about schools, nor have I quoted Ivan Illich.
Do I think homeschooling is superior to schooling?? Yes.? What else would anyone expect a homeschooler to say?
Source: http://freelearner.typepad.com/free_learner/2012/11/homeschooling-is-better.html
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