Quote:
Originally Posted by mike_bike_kite
So the teaching is done by groups of families, presumably all with kids of around the same age, and where each parent teaches what ever they specialise in? I guess I could teach my kids maths, history and geography but lord help them if I had to teach them English or languages!
I just picture some poor kid being given an education by their well meaning parent(s) and ending up handicapped because of it - I guess it all depends on the parents doing the teaching and whether they want to broaden the horizons of their kids or just hide them from the world.
Schooling in the UK also has it's problems and many families (mine included) take time to add to their kids knowledge as well as sending their kids to Saturday schools or getting private tuition. I'm simply curious about home schooling though I don't see it as an end solution in itself.
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To answer your first question to your first post. Homeschooling is quite big in certain parts of the US. Where I live, there is a large homeschooling community with many different homeschool groups. There are various reasons to homeschool one of the bigger reasons is for religious reasons. I'm certainly not saying that's the only reason, because each family is different. Another reason is politcal for those who have a strong sense of individual and parental freedom and think that the federal government really has no business educating our children.
Yes, a parent can screw up a their child's education, just like public school can screw a child up all too often. There a risks involved in any decision you make. However, the statistics show that messed up educated homeschool kids are a rarity, and that the norm is that they tend to excel much more than their public school counterparts. I think that can be attributed to the fact that most families who do homeschool are serious about their children excelling and take responsibility to see that it happens.
The most common way to homeschool is groups of people coming together to teach certain classes once or twice a week or once a month. However, most of the day to day schooling is done at home. Children are taught how to study better and research things on their own at an earlier age in a homeschool environment. I hear that a more popular thing going on with high-school age homeschoolers (mine are grade school) is to do online college classes, so they go to college with a lot of credits by the time they graduate high school.
In the US, homeschooling takes on many shapes and sizes not just because of each family being different, but each state has certain requirements when it comes to homeschooling. Some states are real strict to almost abolishing it like California and others have a lot more freedom such as Alabama.