By Nicole Xerri As a kindergarten teacher, I have lost track of how many times families have asked when we will start ‘teaching’ children instead of just ‘letting them play’, while similarly in home education, families can ask about a kindergarten curriculum or the best way to start teaching their child to read and write. So many families are surprised when they find out
By Pamela Ueckerman One of the most frequent questions I get about our journey through home education now that my boys are a tween and a teen—aside, of course, from the inevitable and soul-wearying question about socialisation—is, “Will you home school through high school?” It’s a valid question and my answer is always, “If that’s what they want,” which is usually met with more
After ‘How do I register’, ‘Should I use (insert the name of any well advertised homeschool product here)’, is the question I see most in different Facebook groups these days. It’s most commonly asked by parents who are moving to home education from school because of a precipitating event, School Can’t or because their child is disengaged. When compared to home education, schools are
The greatest benefit of home education By Lyn Saint So what about socialisation…how will your kids learn to fit into the real world! The question is so simple and yet the answer so complex. Any one of us that has been asked that question knows how difficult it is to come up with an answer that will satisfy not only the askers but deep
By Matthew Panopoulos, M.Ed. (research) As a NSW music teacher of almost six years, I frequently work with hundreds of students in three main roles: primary classroom, secondary classroom, and private tuition. If you asked me which one I enjoy and believe in most, it would be the last one. Having flexibility and the freedom to tailor learning to the interests of each student
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,
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
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
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
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 Lyn Saint There has always been a lot of confusion with the public’s perception of what homeschooling is. As the name implies, people expect to do schooling in the home and therefore expect to be able to purchase homeschooling as a package for their children. Many are often quite confused and even alarmed when they find out that homeschooling is in fact all
Ockam’s Razor, 1996 Robyn Williams: Bertrand Russell never went to school; it didn’t appear to do him much harm either, as he still got to Trinity College Cambridge, revolutionised 20th century mathematics, won the Nobel Prize for Literature and did quite a bit for philosophy and politics as well. Avoiding school was commonplace for the British aristocracy. But does it have a place in
by Alan Thomas Infants start learning informally from (or before?) birth, mainly through interaction with the mother or other caregivers. Part of this is learning how to behave in culturally appropriate ways, e.g., how to deal with emotions, how to interact with others in the family and wider community, and the acquisition of cultural values and attitudes. This alone requires a vast amount of
by Dr John Peacock Jean Lave had a problem. She knew that the best scholarship said that schools were better than other places of learning because in schools skilled professionals taught general principles that were objective and unbiased because they were not dependent upon particular contexts or situations. That same scholarship said that other sorts of learning, such as go on in the home
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