I will state up front that I have an obvious bias when it comes to how I feel children should be educated. This stems from the fact that I am pursuing a career as a teacher and I take my chosen profession very seriously.
I'm going to talk about home schooling and unschooling. Unschooling is a relatively new trend, with about 10% of home school students in the USA subscribing to the idea. You can check out this link for more. The link also contains a clip from ABC news which shows a reporter speaking with some unschool kids.
I'll start with the obvious - giving your child all the power to choose everything and anything just seems like a really dumb idea. I understand the ideal behind the idea of trying to encourage learning through doing and allowing kids to find their passion. However, that utopia is likely to go unrealized in most, if not all cases. In my opinion, you need to put some amount of pressure on children in the form of expectations and rules. If you have no expectations for your children in terms of what they're going to do, why would they do anything? When it comes to my students or my participants at camp, I always have very high expectations for behaviour and academically. I have found that when they realize what my expectations are, if we have a positive rapport, they will do their best to go about trying to exceed my expectations. They want to work to impress you and many end up getting something more out of it.
For example, the issue of behaviour. I have had too many kids with behavioural problems to be able to count. Not all of them end up coming around, but many do. One of the camps I supervise in the summer is in a very rough area. I actually worked there as a counsellor my first year. I know the area and I know the kids. My staff this year really struggled to maintain order. However, all it takes is me showing up and speaking with the individuals and they're back on track and trying really hard. In fact, one of the kids was very eager to let me know that he was having a much better time the next day when I saw him. He said he felt better and he had even tried one of the techniques I'd told him to help calm down. He said he was having more fun because he was participating and was getting along with his peers. He's eight and he was able to articulate all this. Then he thanked me for actually listening to him and trying to understand where he was coming from because he had disclosed to me that there was a lot of stress at home. Again, he's 8. We ended up talking about how he could try to take what he learned at camp and use it in school too so he wouldn't get in so many fights anymore. He ended up telling me he wished all his teachers had taken as much time to talk to him as I was doing and that he really hoped I got a teaching job soon.
That's obviously a success story. I haven't always had that kind of success, but still. It leaves a mark on you. Whether or not he follows through, I'll probably never know. But I hope he does. Sometimes it really does just take one adult to help turn a kid around.
Back to home schooling though. I have many other issues with the whole concept of removing a child from a formal school environment. I know there are many reasons why parents do such a thing, one of the main reasons being this fear of bullying and the wish to shelter their children.
Here's the thing - I went through hell and back from gr.6-8 in terms of being bullied by essentially my entire class. Many were more bystanders, but they didn't stick up for me because they didn't want to be targeted. I was an easy target at the time. I'd always been a tomboy so I didn't have any really close female friends when we got to gr.6 and puberty suddenly hit. I was the only major female athlete in our class. I also had short hair, had gotten glasses in gr.5 and verged on being classified as gifted in terms of academic. Talk about having every single bloody target on your back eh?
(Random Long Tangent: I was never formally tested, but I know there was talk of having me skip a grade. Looking back having learned about the classifications for exceptionalities while completing my education degree, I definitely think had I been tested they would have determined I was gifted in language arts in particular. Unfortunately, because my class as a whole struggled and the majority were behind the provincial standard or just scraping by in hitting that standard, there wasn't much room for enrichment in the classroom. As a result I was never challenged academically until I got to university, and at that point I was so used to everything coming so easily to me while doing the bare minimum I wasn't motivated to spend hours agonizing over thesis papers anymore. I did the minimum in order to get my B average and was happy with that. There are certain subjects I enjoyed a lot and would initially try much harder in, but unfortunately those were also usually classes with stuffy professors who should only be allowed to research and not teach because they have zero enthusiasm whatsoever. Whenever I had an enthusiastic professor or TA though, I busted my ass. I got an A in my fourth year Canadian History seminar. As a general rule, Canadian History bores the snot out of me - especially Cold War era Canadian History.)
In any event - I was the punching bag for three years of school. While I still struggle with insecurities (and frankly think that I should perhaps see a therapist at times), I've powered through it and I live my life and I enjoy my life. Sure I have my dark moments, but overall I'm doing exceptionally well. And, having gone through that, I am very good at picking out bullying issues in my camp and dealing with it so that the victim doesn't end up feeling the way I did. The administration at my school ultimately never seemed to follow through on anything and I could never understand why my bullies were never punished effectively. That doesn't mean now I try to destroy the bullies that pop up in my camp, but I do address it. Immediately. I actually apply different methods I've learned in workshops or just from trial and era instead of assuming it will sort itself out. What makes this even better though is one of the main offenders actually apologized to be at a party in February, said how much he admired that I hadn't let it get me down and had gone on to do amazing things. He also mentioned that I'm super hot now and he'd always thought I was cute anyway.
Anyways - back to homeschooling specifically. Again, I do understand the basic idea behind some of the reasoning. However, while there are issues in the education system, homeschooling ultimately, in my opinion, does your child a huge disservice. They are not exposed to the outside world, they aren't learning how to socialize and work in that structured environment. They think they are the centre of the universe and everything they say is right. They aren't challenged enough. I could go on. I see this in the kid I babysit. He's 10, but academically he's functioning at a gr.3 level from what I've seen. His social skills with his own age group are also lacking.
The important aspects of school include that you are exposed to ideas outside of your little family unit. You are exposed to different teaching styles as you go through the system. Hopefully you are in a system that is regulated in terms of who is allowed to teach so that they actually know what they're doing. (Although even then there are poor teachers at times.) However, it is important to have those experiences of learning how to operate under someone else's rules. This will ultimately help you in the future when you have a job that has rules, regulations, expectations, etc.
This is probably all over the place, but I really feel that homeschooling and this new unschooling movement does kids a huge disservice.
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