Tracy Culleton has published a well written and useful Q&A on home education. Those interested in home education or expanding their engagment with their children may get some useful perspectives from it. Here below are reproduced a few paragraphs. Her site also has useful links to home education resources.
Q: Why are you home-educating?
A: There’s a number of answers to that, depending on how much detail you want. The short answer is that home-education is a tailor-made education, rather than the one-size-fits all which school has to be. Everybody has different learning styles (aural, visual or kinaesthetic, i.e. hearing, seeing or doing), different strengths and weaknesses (it’s now accepted that instead of someone being intelligent or not, there are actually seven [or eight, depending on the theory] intelligences and all of us score better in some and worse in others), but traditional schooling does not take these into account. (I don’t see how they can.)A longer answer, and perhaps a more provocative one, is that we believe, as Plutarch is reputed to have said, a [child’s] mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be lit. Schooling is very concerned with children learning facts. Nowadays there is so much information that nobody can know it all. Apart from the basics of reading, writing and arithmetic, there is no one body of information which everybody has to know. Far more important skills are those of being able to find information rather than know it, and creativity and problem-solving skills. School is very left-brain while we try to offer a much more balanced education.
Also as I explore in the article on Failure it’s my understanding that successful people view mistakes as learning curves rather than dreadful experiences. They view mistakes as an inevitable part of the process of learning how to do something right or better. They definitely view making mistakes as an essential part of developing something new. They aren’t nervous about making mistakes.
Our school system, on the other hand, is set up so that mistakes are things to be avoided (getting less than 10/10 in a test, for example. If you mispronounce something everybody laughs). If mistakes are an essential part of success (and they are, I try to be dogmatic about very little, but I’m sure on this point), then school taught us, and is teaching our children, to avoid one of the essential ingredients of success. (Robert Kiyosaki, inventor of the incredible Rich Dad, Poor Dad franchise, is of this opinion also).
A huge perk of home-educating is that home-educated children are much less likely to encounter bullying. In fact, about half of home-educators never send their child to school and come to it via a philosophical route. But the other half come to it by removing children from school who have been so desperately unhappy – usually due to bullying – that this is the only possible route for them. We didn’t decide to home-educate to prevent Tadhg being subjected to bullying – that would have been a very fear-based, negative way of looking at things. But it’s certainly a relief that it’s not an issue. (Sure, he might encounter bullying with other children, but at least he can remove himself from whatever situation he’s in.)
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