Sue Wight - Home Education Network

October 9, 2016

Socialisation: The Hidden Agenda

By John Barratt-Peacock It is the most boring of all the objections to home education and seemingly the most stupid since, on all the evidence, home educated children are the best socialised. So why do they do it and why do we buy into it? Within 30 minutes of my taking my daughter out of school the usual ignorant bully from the education department, […]

October 4, 2016

Ending is Better than Mending

Schooling and Commercialism By Susan Wight Early Australian society needed, and indeed the land itself demanded, that people be frugal, self-sacriﬁcing and hard-working. This was a time when there was nothing to spare. Possessions were few and were conﬁned to absolute necessities. In order to survive people had to be resourceful and independent – they had to make and do for themselves. Even early […]

September 7, 2016

The Preschool Push

By Susan Wight Preschool attendance has always been optional in Australia but the issue of compulsory preschool continues to raise its ugly head with depressing regularity. Parents paying expensive daycare fees may be in favour of government funded preschool programs. In order for a compulsory national preschool year to gain popular approval, though, the public would have to be indoctrinated into believing that preschool […]

August 10, 2016

Quality Time – A Guilt Trap

By Dr John Peacock Anna Wintour, when she was editor of the British ‘Vogue” magazine, claimed to be able to spend quality time with her children at some un-godly hour in the morning and still be at the ofﬁce before anyone else. Quality time seems to be the buzz excuse these days for mothers harassed into the work force by cynical governments and social […]

August 3, 2016

Age Segregation is Unnatural

By Sue Wight In today’s society, age segregation is an accepted way of life. Children are separated off from adults daily into crèches, kindergartens and schools which in turn further segregate them by birth year. Elderly people are frequently consigned to nursing homes and, to further exacerbate the isolation of each age group, families are inclined to purchase new homes in subdivisions full of […]

July 25, 2016

Learning Maths Naturally

By Sue Wight Our family follow a natural learning style of home education and feel quite comfortable that the children are learning all the time but, like many home educators, we have the occasional doubts about maths. Recently these doubts led me to persuade one of my sons, Matthew, to do some maths on paper. As a small child he loved maths, in fact […]

July 14, 2016

Are you qualified?

By Susan Wight Somehow this question puts us on the back foot and we ﬁnd ourselves mumbling, “Umm, well no I’m not a teacher…” Why? Why do we give in to the assumption that we need some kind of certiﬁcate to ‘teach’ our own children? I don’t believe we should, but somehow many parents suddenly feel unable to defend home education when this question […]

June 10, 2016

What gives home education the edge?

School people often nod along with so many of the things we home educators talk about – catering to individual interests, child-led learning, play-based learning, experiential learning. They actually agree that all these things are desirable and are beginning to adopt some of our language as buzz words. At some stage in the conversation they say, ‘But of course we’re doing a lot of […]

June 1, 2016

Mr Micawber’s Lesson

Financial Education at Home By Rob Wight If teaching your children about money has been on your “to do” list for some time, don’t delay any more – now is the time to act, no matter how old they are Given we spend so much time with our children, I believe home educators often have the best opportunity to lead the discussion about […]

May 19, 2016

The Journey of My Two Free Spirits

By Marie Cosgrove I’ve always valued being different but now my girls say they just want to be ‘normal’… My home ed journey began long before I had children. I was ﬁrst introduced to the idea by my sister–in-law, who was home educating my two nieces. At the time I was teaching in a primary school and struggling with a system I felt didn’t […]

May 10, 2016

Just Playing

By Susan Wight Play is children’s work and yet it is curiously undervalued in our society. Many adults fervently believe that there can be no ‘educational value’ in something that children choose to do. Their concern about home educating without a curriculum is that children might ‘just play’. Adults are sceptical that play, which looks to them like merely a pleasant pastime, can really […]

April 4, 2016

Soul Schooling

By Carolyn Franzke (Otherways Magazine, issue 140) I used to be a teacher. I taught maths and science, and sometimes other subjects too. I was on the curriculum committee, attended lots of conferences and ran staff meetings about the value of a quality curriculum. I studied for my Masters in Education and wrote a thesis about the value of digital portfolios in improving the […]