Home Schooling
There are those who believe they can improve on teaching methods currently utilized in stimulating young minds to enquire and to acquire a grounding in knowledge that will prepare them for academic and scholarly pursuits on the one hand, and taking their place in society on the other. Parents with enough confidence in their own ideas and values and abilities and patience to stimulate the minds of their children.
People like the late anthropologist Margaret Mead, for example, whose mother and grandmother tutored her at home. And she, certainly none the worse for the experience. It seems reasonable when people are motivated to teach their young if they feel assured they are capable of transferring information to them and in the process imbuing them with a love of learning.
If children are sufficiently stimulated and become motivated to become learners the experience can certainly be a positive one for both parents and children. When parents dedicate themselves to this type of task for practical reasons due to isolation, or for reasons of religious belief, or the wish to shield their children from interaction with children whose inherited values may not reflect their own other problems may result.
But there may be instances that come to light where children are left to their own devices as far as learning, through self-education and advance themselves. Children have malleable, curious minds and are naturally eager to learn about the world surrounding them. And there, in the newspaper, was a story, a true success story, about a young woman, one of 7 siblings whose parents, she recounts, simply left her to herself.
Once she was capable of reading, she was given a library card and encouraged to read whatever she wanted to. This was her gateway to self-education. Her parents were busy, and neither was involved in helping her gain an education. She was fully self-motivated, left to herself and her own imagination, and read extensively and omnivorously.
When she achieved the age of 19, it was her decision to formalize her education. She began to attend an Adult High School with the intention of receiving a high-school graduation certificate. There, she mingled with others with the same intention representing school drop-outs, ranging in age from their late teens like herself, to those old enough to grandparent her.
The one class that presented as a problem was math class. She struggled with advanced math, having never herself gone beyond the equivalent of grade 3. With the help of a rew dedicated teachers she was able to surmount her math difficulties and in the end, mastered all of her courses at the top of her grades.
Her academic achievement, mostly self-taught, will enable her to go on to university. She may have been favoured by the fact that she, with her family, moved constantly, some 21 times in her recollection, as her father found employment in various places around Ontario. Her mother stayed at home to look after her brood of 7 children.
All those moves, however personally, socially destabilizing they might have been, might also however, have had the effect of introducing her and her siblings to travel and different values and social atmospheres in the various towns and cities they lived in, broadening their social perspectives in the process.
Did she think, in retrospect, that she was disadvantaged by her lack of formal education? No, her library card enabled her to read about other countries, about history, culture, to a depth not available to most students, she maintained. She engaged in urging herself to write 'reports' about what she had read, some of which were shared with her parents, some not.
She is, however, of the opinion that her kind of open education experience was a valuable one. Perhaps not for everyone, but most certainly for her. Her opinion is that she was advantaged by not experiencing the pressures placed on young students through the classic public education system which can 'burn kids out', and 'sour them' on the learning process.
An original and perceptive perspective.
People like the late anthropologist Margaret Mead, for example, whose mother and grandmother tutored her at home. And she, certainly none the worse for the experience. It seems reasonable when people are motivated to teach their young if they feel assured they are capable of transferring information to them and in the process imbuing them with a love of learning.
If children are sufficiently stimulated and become motivated to become learners the experience can certainly be a positive one for both parents and children. When parents dedicate themselves to this type of task for practical reasons due to isolation, or for reasons of religious belief, or the wish to shield their children from interaction with children whose inherited values may not reflect their own other problems may result.
But there may be instances that come to light where children are left to their own devices as far as learning, through self-education and advance themselves. Children have malleable, curious minds and are naturally eager to learn about the world surrounding them. And there, in the newspaper, was a story, a true success story, about a young woman, one of 7 siblings whose parents, she recounts, simply left her to herself.
Once she was capable of reading, she was given a library card and encouraged to read whatever she wanted to. This was her gateway to self-education. Her parents were busy, and neither was involved in helping her gain an education. She was fully self-motivated, left to herself and her own imagination, and read extensively and omnivorously.
When she achieved the age of 19, it was her decision to formalize her education. She began to attend an Adult High School with the intention of receiving a high-school graduation certificate. There, she mingled with others with the same intention representing school drop-outs, ranging in age from their late teens like herself, to those old enough to grandparent her.
The one class that presented as a problem was math class. She struggled with advanced math, having never herself gone beyond the equivalent of grade 3. With the help of a rew dedicated teachers she was able to surmount her math difficulties and in the end, mastered all of her courses at the top of her grades.
Her academic achievement, mostly self-taught, will enable her to go on to university. She may have been favoured by the fact that she, with her family, moved constantly, some 21 times in her recollection, as her father found employment in various places around Ontario. Her mother stayed at home to look after her brood of 7 children.
All those moves, however personally, socially destabilizing they might have been, might also however, have had the effect of introducing her and her siblings to travel and different values and social atmospheres in the various towns and cities they lived in, broadening their social perspectives in the process.
Did she think, in retrospect, that she was disadvantaged by her lack of formal education? No, her library card enabled her to read about other countries, about history, culture, to a depth not available to most students, she maintained. She engaged in urging herself to write 'reports' about what she had read, some of which were shared with her parents, some not.
She is, however, of the opinion that her kind of open education experience was a valuable one. Perhaps not for everyone, but most certainly for her. Her opinion is that she was advantaged by not experiencing the pressures placed on young students through the classic public education system which can 'burn kids out', and 'sour them' on the learning process.
An original and perceptive perspective.
posted by Pieface @ 6:34 PM
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