Monday 12 July 2010

Home Education and Me

Children grow so fast. My eldest will soon be school age and I've been thinking about how much he's learned already, just by being home. He's like a sponge soaking up life and learning with so little apparent input. I'm truly amazed.

As I think about school I am feeling more and more that I'd rather continue to educate him at home. Home education (or homeschooling elsewhere in the world) seems so natural. The more involved I get, the more it seems like the best way, if not for all children, at least for a good proportion of them. Getting 1to1 attention, being able to learn from where you are at and not try to keep pace with everyone else in the class, having the option of taking your learning off at a tangent according to your skills and interests...wouldn't that be a lovely way to grow?

Speaking as a teacher, one of the key difficulties schools face is being able to work with every child. All too often the quiet ones, or the ones who just get by, are missed. You are busy making sure the most able are stretched and the least able are supported, those who are disruptive are occupied and those who are occupied are doing the right thing. How can you spend the time with every child ensuring that you have met them at their point of learning? Even the best teachers that I know admit that their classroom teaching has limitations.

That's not to say that good learning doesn't happen in the classroom setting. It does, and I've seen it in my own classroom. It's just that I'm getting a stronger and stronger feeling that there must be a better way. Perhaps small group teaching can provide the benefits of peer teaching as well as adult support. But schools can rarely sustain this for any great length of time - think of the cost of having enough staff to be able to teach the children in this way.

Home education gives that opportunity to meet each child at the point at which they are learning. This can only happen when you are really tuned in to each child and have the time to spend figuring out where they are at in the development of their understanding.

My passions are aroused...watch this space!

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