Homeschooling – Damon’s Point of View

Yesterday, Alli blogged about the homeschooling fair we went to this past weekend. So, I’d like to throw out my opinions.

My Opinions
It was a little daunting going to the fair as homeschool novices, so we sat in on the “Homeschooling Foundations” workshop hoping to learn the ropes. Instead, we heard a not-short-enough lecture about how the public school system tries to fit every student within a single set of standards.

The guy was definitely preachy (in fact, he indicated that he was a pastor as well as a homeschool administrator) and he treated public schooling a lot like a straw-man in his arguments. He characterized public schooling as a tool to make children into conforming members of the Great American Workforce. I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt on some of this because I can see where he’s coming from. But like Alli, I got a little turned off by the “homeschooling is the perfect solution to teach all of God’s unique children” rhetoric. (And we’re Red-State Christian Conservatives – War Eagle!)

That being said, I have to ask myself, “Am I turned off by his presentation or by his underlying message?” I mean, maybe homeschooling actually does give a much more child-specific education than public school? (Actually, for the purpose of this blog, I lump public and private school together and call them “institutional education”.)

The main area where I believe that institutional education can’t measure up to homeschooling is personal student attention with respect to the pace of the curriculum. In a homeschool situation, if the student doesn’t “get” something, the curriculum is paused until the subject is learned. (This is probably why homeschool students usually enter college with high GPA’s. After all, if they under-perform on an exam, they’re simply made to re-study and re-test until they learn the material. Sounds like a good idea to me since it virtually guarantees that the child will learn each subject covered.)

Of course, with institutional education, the curriculum has to be paced to accommodate 20 or more students. While this aggregate pacing accommodates the majority of students, it causes problems for students outside the norm. An advanced student (we’ll call him Fuller) would be forced to “slow down” and wait on the rest of the class before proceeding to the next lesson. In addition, a less proficient student (insert some other child’s name here) is “skipped over” in order to keep the curriculum moving along.

This advantage is the key reason I’m interested in homeschooling. Alli and I are trying to give our son the best education we can provide, and the idea of an education that progresses at his pace sounds pretty attractive.

(Plus, I’d get to teach him lots of cool stuff that he wouldn’t get in public or private school: how to start a fire with sticks, why Spider-Man is the greatest superhero ever, how to make a self-balancing electric scooter, how many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Roll tootsie pop?, etc.)