By Sue Wight Rachel Brady gave up on home education after two weeks and sent her children back to school. Her home education experience is not representational. Around 20,000 Australian kids are currently being home educated, thousands more already have been. For some families, home education provides a valuable short-term solution to an immediate problem, but many educate for a substantial time. The average
Can it be done? Yes! Parents often feel pressure from those around them to put their children into school for the high school years. ‘What about university?’ is one of the most frequently asked questions of home educators. ‘What about VCE?’ is another. Home educating your teenager isn’t as big and scary an undertaking as some may have you believe. While it is understandable
By Pavlina McMaster Whenever we tell people that we home educate our children, they almost invariably ask, “But what about socialisation?”. What they usually mean to ask is, “But how will they learn to be social?”. There is a difference, and home educated children are well-placed to be both, in a considered, thoughtful way. What is Socialisation? Socialisation is the process whereby children and
By Sue Wight Something odd is happening in the world of unschooling. Sarah has heard that if her children want chocolate biscuits for breakfast, they will eat a balanced diet over time without well-meaning interference from her. Meanwhile, she’s struggling to buy enough chocolate biscuits to keep up with them and is torn between her concerns about nutrition and a reluctance to impose restrictions
By Susan Wight Towards the end of the year, I often catch up with old friends. Getting together always emphasises just how different our lives now are. They talk of meetings, workloads, changing policies, best-practice and so on. Their end-of-year display of cards and gifts from appreciative clients or students always takes me by surprise. Jealous? No, I’m happy with my life and don’t
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
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
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
By Jess Pritchard “What advice do you have for those just starting out?” It is the inevitable question, asked again and again. I clearly remember asking it (in some form or another) myself, many times, of many different people. And now I am being asked it. So here is my advice. In dot point: 1) Don’t be afraid of mess. It goes without saying
By Lyn Saint On making the decision to home educate their children many women often bring up the question – but what about my life, should I devote the next 10-15 years solely to bringing up my children – what about me…? As we all know, society today does not appreciate, acknowledge and respect women who are fulltime mothers – quite the opposite in
This is never easy. As soon as you pull your children out of school, it seems as though your parents, your friends, your neighbours, even the local check-out operator suddenly have an opinion on how children should be educated and most of them won’t match with your concept of home education. Take a deep breath. There will be opposition; it is just a question
For many home-educating families and prospective home-educators the fear of dyslexia is a significant problem. “It’s all very well to wait for spontaneous reading, but what if my children are dyslexic?” they might ask. “Won’t they be better off in school where they will get proper help?” Dyslexia is a type of specific learning difficulty in which the person has difficulties with language and
