Occasionally, I think about homeschooling our daughter.
Usually, that thought is prompted by thinking of how rigid/hidebound our local school district is. That thought doesn't occur too often, so neither does the first one. But sometimes other things bring it to mind. I was reading a blog by a woman who is apparently brilliant, and who was home schooled. I know, thats a chicken and egg kind of thing, but it made me wonder: as I approach the time when I am thinking about retirement, could I/should I profitably spend some of the time home schooling my daughter?
One woman I know, who is herself quite bright (MIT, Harvard Med), told me in no uncertain terms that homeschooling is a terrible idea for many reasons, all of which could be summed by this: if you think you can manifest the abilities of a dozen teachers, all year long, you're fooling yourself.
Maybe so. Probably so. And I know that the most common reason for home-schooling -- ie, religion -- wouldn't be mine. I'd do it because I love to learn things, and I want to pass that on to my daughter. Not all things, true. And undoubtedly she's picked up some of that from me and her mother already. Also, its not a given that she won't get this from school -- though it does seem more likely than not.
Plus, when she has on occasion said she'd like to be homeschooled -- usually for the same reason as I use -- she quits when I mention that among other things that means that snow days are school days. Hum, she says, thoughtfully....
Still....its a shimmeringly attractive thought.
2 comments:
The religious folk who want to protect their kids from evil knowledge aren't the only ones doing home schooling, just the noisiest. The best case against letting the official schools have charge of the education of your children was made by John Holt some years ago. His book are surely available in quantity at places like www.abebooks.com . All the books are of interest; I think the last one and the most relevant was Instead of Education.
BTW if you believe his critics, he was a laid-back groovy hippy type who thoughtkids should do what they wanted and didn't need to learn any tough rigorous stuff. Bullshit. His position was that following things they were interested in would get them to learn the necessary rigorous stuff vastly better than they do in school.
That the dozen school teachers you're trying to replace are providing such fine expertise is simply bunk. Holt shows why. He's worth a serious look.
(Disclosure: I didn't do the home school thing myself. But it wasn't for any of the official reasons against home schooling.)
I'm not sure I believe that studying things that interest you will necessary give one the rigor to study the difficult underpinnings. I think its more likely that you will in that case than for things that you dislike, but I don't think I would want to rely on it happening -- let alone assume that I could even find something of interest in every discipline, all of the time. Put another way, I think that there are things that you need to learn which are not intuitively interesting, as a rule, and which are difficult, perhaps impossible to link to items that are of interest -- but if you do learn them, you will be grateful later. I think that the magic of a great teacher is being able to lead you into the grove of learning the frankly dull and uninteresting stuff and get you to enjoy it -- but I don't think most teachers can do it, and I'm not sure that I can. But I like the idea of trying, and I will certainly read the material you mention. Thank you.
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