Hi all
This is an article that I wrote for a school project back when I was fifteen. I found it the other day and thought you might enjoy reading about homeschooling from a young person's perspective. If I were to write it again, I would add so much more, but to change it would spoil it I think. So here it is...
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In the past, many people have rejected home schooling, worried that children would not receive the educational foundation needed to live in today’s world.
As a TAFE student who has been home schooled for over ten years, I can honestly testify to the immense benefits that home schooling provides. Today, not only will I be looking at the educational foundation, which was provided by the countless quality learning resources available on the internet and throughout Australia, but we will also be looking at other issues such as socialisation, emotional security and moral grounding, and see how home schooling dealt with them.
This is a student’s perspective.
Education and School Life
Although many people questioned the home schooling method, surprisingly, the quality of our education was not often the biggest problem for them. Maybe they presumed that education is education, regardless of the setting it is in, I don’t know.Nevertheless, as a student, the benefits that home schooling gave me were huge. Firstly, with home schooling, there was no set studying time frame. You simply had an amount of work that needed to be done that day and when you got your work done, you had the rest of the day off. The time it took to get your work done was up to you, as you were the one who bore the results. This also meant that there was no huge pile of homework to come home to, certainly a good reason to study hard.
Secondly, having everything that you needed for studying right at hand was really nifty for us in that it kept Mum from having to make lunches every morning and it saved us from having to lug heavy backpacks back and forth from school. Spending so much time together as a family was great for us kids in that it strengthened our family bond and it taught us how solve our differences and how to build consistent and meaningful relationships.
Socialisation Skills
This is one of the biggest things that people tended to have against home schooling. I guess they thought that we would not get the relationship building and socialisation skills that we needed if we stayed poked up at home and were only required to communicate with the small circle of friends that we were comfortable with, becoming shy and withdrawn. In some rare cases, this can be true. But in our family, we as kids had an amazing life, full of mixing with people of all ages and from all walks of life and we, therefore, learnt how to relate to anyone and everyone we met. With the flexibility that home schooling allowed us, our family was able to go places and do things that normal schooling would have made impossible. While on our trips and excursions, we kids not only continued our schooling all the way, but we each formed a wide general knowledge. This knowledge, coupled with the respect that we learnt to have for our peers and our seniors, made us into more interesting and enjoyable children to be with.
Emotional Security
A child can only live and learn properly if they are emotionally secure, feeling safe, cared for and loved. In a traditional school, a child’s healthy desire to do their best can be undermined by the constant desire to be popular the other children who might not always think that there efforts are all that cool. This constant instability of importance with classmates can leave the child emotionally upset, fighting for attention and never feeling sure that they are loved. With home schooling, however, we knew that if we worked hard and did our best, we would be praised and not laughed at. Also, as we experienced the steady and firm guidelines, reinforced with love, we were able to rejoice in knowing that if we were patient and were responsible in our actions, we would receive the attention and appreciation that we needed.
Moral Grounding
In today’s average school, there are hundreds of kids with different cultural backgrounds and beliefs. In a world where anything goes, it is left up to the child to decide their moral beliefs and, with so many contradicting influences, the confused child often ends up opting for none, leaving you with a child that has no right or wrong and, therefore, cares nothing about what he does. With home schooling, we were taught what was right from the very beginning and we continued being taught as we grew up. Also, we had the opportunity to look into each claim and viewpoint in depth, not just hear people’s personal opinions.In summary, home schooling provided us kids with a great education and the life skills that we needed and it did so in a way that was tailored to our individual strengths and weaknesses. Home schooling is a great alternative to the traditional schooling system. With the many home schooling aids and learning resources available, home schooling is not impossible. There are also structured curriculum guides available that correspond directly to the Australian Education Department’s requirements, making it an easy transition if, for some reason, you decide to put your children back into a normal school.
Home schooling in an amazing thing, give it a chance and you’ll be surprised at just how real these benefits are!
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