Homeschool

A very popular and controversial topic that is hotly debated by a vast segment of propionates and opponents.

The first I heard of modern homeschooling was, I believe, in the 1980s where a family living in the outlands of the great Pacific Northwest had schooled their son at home and he was attempting to get into college and they were having great problems with the educational system and government. Both parents held advanced degrees from college and had taught the boy a basic up to college level curriculum.

They prevailed with the powers that be and opened the door and the eyes of the nation and world as a whole. It started a whole flood of homeschooling.

Homeschooling actually dates back to the 1700s in America and proponents will tell you that people like Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin were homeschooled.

The detractors will say homeschooled kids lack social skills and a proper education. Independent studies show just the opposite, that homeschoolers are more mature, more social and better educated.

The biggest detractors are the school systems and teacher unions who don’t like loosing their government money per student (that is the one and only reason roll is taken at schools, to document attendance for obtaining Federal and state funding for each child at the school per day).

Today, many colleges and a few state school systems have embraced homeschooling. Florida, for example, has a complete homeschool program that awards an accredited Florida high school diploma if you complete all the courses on time and at a certain level of proficiency. It is free to all Florida residents and available at a charge for non-residences. Other states are considering similar types of programs.

Each state and nation sets their own rules for someschooling. Some states have no requirements at all. Some states require you to register your school, take attendance and turn in logs to the system. Some states require you to use an accredited or approved homeschool system.

There are a wide variety of homeschool systems, such as the Penn Foster, Bob Jones and Charlotte Mason programs.

Some are on-line. Some are on CD/DVD. Some are text based. Many have teachers or counselors who work with students by e-mail, some require lessons be turned in by specific dates to be valid. Some empower the parent as the teacher, providing an answer book and lesson plan.

One of the advantages of homeschool is you can often pick and choose from the various plans, based on recommendations and what you like. You can pick one plans math offering and another plans English offering.

The fact of the matter is some children do better in a real school, provided that school is safe and actually teaches something. Other children do better in homeschooling programs. A few students do well in un-schooling programs. Some children are given all three methods.

Homeschooling works best with self-starters who are given supervision and an exchange with a parent or adult who has the time to help them.

Homeschooling works best when the family plows money and time into the program. You can’t just learn from books or DVDs, field trips to galleries, museums and tours help with the educational process as does supplementing with PBS, Discovery, History and Science TV offerings, which the student can access anytime day or night.

In real schools there are often tools to learn with and parents need to give the child access to these tools either through field trips or buying them. Radio Shack and Edmunds Scientific are excellent sources for project kits that deal with electronics, chemistry, physics, astronomy, biology, optics and light. For those who live near the Chicago area, regular trips to the Field Museum (of Science and Industry) would satisfy a lot of this without having to buy things as that museum has lots of hands on examples of science and physics.

There is also the planetarium and many colleges offer public planetarium programs at least once a week and most major cities have such an offering.

A $60 telescope, a $3 star chart and a $20 astronomy book will teach more about this science than any school could ever teach a child, short of college. This is part homeschool and part unschool.

It is also something parent and child can do together, provided the parent lets the child do all the work and just discusses things with them.

Electronics kits will teach more than any Middle or High School electronics shop could ever hope to teach.

Shop, however, is an area where some public schools can excel and where homeschool can pale a tad.

In my Los Angeles Middle and High School we had fully equipped wood, plastics, metal, fiber glass, auto and print shops. With real world equipment. $1,000 drill presses that almost no one at home would ever consider buying.

At home you’d be doing it with $30 Black and Decker tools from Home Depot.

At my schools they had a full Web press for the student newspaper. It wasn’t a very big web press, but it was still a professional web press as used by larger printing companies and it functioned in a similar manner to those found in small newspapers.

So, there are some aspects of some public schools that do leave homeschool in the dust.

There is also the issue of school social events, such as home coming dance, proms and football games.

Homeschoolers who have friends in high school can go to these events as a “date” if both parties are into that arrangement.

There are a wide variety of public offerings that the parent should involve the child in. such as weekend soccer, softball, little league, bowling leagues and there are even some public dances, such as square dancing.

There is no reason why homeschoolers can’t hang out at the mall, unless the mall is too far away!

There are also churches and church functions.

One of the largest groups of homeschoolers are the religious who want to teach their children the religious view of things, which some people object to and this can be an obstacle to the child, especially if college is in their future. But, if handled properly these kids can learn both methods of looking at things and answer the test questions in college with the answer expected, while still holding to their spiritual view of the world. Some parents, however, don’t follow these principals and, yes, a small bit of history and science gets brushed under the rug. But, this doesn’t mean that math, English, reading and writing are not being learned.

Homeschool can also be used by some parents as a form of cloistering for clannish or xenophobic logic. This would occur with or without homeschooling and parents would simply keep their kids at home and never teach them anything with the existence of homeschooling tools.

Some homeschoolers finish a complete high school course load, through calculus by the age of 14, 15, 16 or 17. Many start college while younger than 18.

The current winner of the national spelling bee was homeschooled.

The education you receive at homeschool is largely a part of the program selected by your parents which is designed by professional educators and meets the criteria of most state systems and colleges. Anything additional comes from the parent who provides additional tools, personal experience and information based on their work and educational background. Finally the individual student who is motivated and self-starting can expand upon the groundwork of all the other aspects by doing independent studies, research and using “un-schooling” to a positive advantage.

Most colleges accept homeschoolers, provided they pass the placement tests just like any other formally educated applicant. Harvard, for example, makes special room for them on an exclusive basis, but they pick only the best applicants.