Homelearning and Homeschooling

Many can educate themselves at home, and also their near ones. Neat knowledge of how to go about it may trigger sustained efforts. There are many books on home education, also called homeschooling.

Seek to benefit yourself in many decent ways, and then it may be fit to benefit close ones in your care. In most societies the state and government has taken over the schooling, and many results of it are quite disastrous, so victimising that the victims hardly know they are badly treated, and why.

Victimising, public education should not be the norm, but it may be to so many millions of children who grow up to become fakers. So many do not realise their inborn growth potentials because of stunting, public education. And when innate interests are curbed rather than encouraged, when most of what happens is directed by others, serving conformism, fakers result, I am sorry to say.

Gatto

A teacher who has become concerned about these issues is the retired American school teacher, John Taylor Gatto (1935 -), author of Dumbing Us Down. He was named New York City Teacher of the Year in 1989, 1990, and 1991, and New York State Teacher of the Year in 1991. Then, in 1991, he wrote a letter where he announced that he retired, saying that he no longer wished to "hurt kids to make a living."

He then began a public speaking and writing career, and has received several awards, including the Alexis de Tocqueville Award for Excellence in Advancement of Educational Freedom in 1997. He promotes homeschooling, and specifically unschooling. Wade A. Carpenter, associate professor of education at Berry College, describes himself as in agreement with Gatto.

What does the school do with the children? Granting there are differences among schools and forms of schooling, let us look briefly into Gatto's stand in Dumbing Us Down. For one thing, public schooling makes many children confused. There is an artificial needs to memorise to stay in school. Tests, lessons, and trials fill almost all the "free" time of children.

The school teaches them to accept their class affiliation; makes them rather indifferent and emotionally dependent; teaches them an artificial pop-up kind of self-confidence and self-digging that requires a lot of confirmation (provisional self-esteem); and makes them know they "cannot hide", for they are being supervised.

And some grown-ups think that is not too bad.

Harold E. Gorst on Dangers of Public Education

110 years ago the British author Harold Edward Gorst wrote a scathing or telling book, The Curse of Education. Many of the issues he dealt with back then, may still be found. Some sides to enforced, public education are exposed by Gorst. I recommend much of his central matter, despite his "big-mouthed" performance of a sort. He is quotable, so I have gathered many quotes from his book on a separate page. [More Harold Gorst]

Many would like to help their children with their education, and some also provide them with a good learning environment at home along with the ongoing stunting in slow motion at school. In these times, when the Internet has changed much and offers access to vast amounts of information, the conditions for home schooling and home learning with their challenges and opportunities have improved correspondingly. This may be the case with its related distance education too, which has blessed many a child on outback farms in Australia and many other countries. Distance education is less centralised, may be much helped by the Internet if used properly, and may be suitable for grown-ups who do not live close to university towns, and for younger persons who live far apart, as settlers in Australia and on other continents.

Homeschooling, Home Education

Homeschooling in the modern sense is an alternative to public or private schools outside the home; an alternative in developed countries to attending private schools or educational institutions operated by civil governments. The education of children at home is typically by parents but sometimes by tutors, and not in any public or private school. Before the compulsory school was established by laws, much childhood education took place within the family or community.

Homeschooling - also called homeschool, home education or home based learning) - is not at all different from self-education, and can be pleasant, so pleasant that one asks for more voluntarily. Ronald Gross goes well into sides of such sides to learning in his book Peak Learning.

Simply put, displeased with the sordid, compulsory education that tends to "make stiff" and maybe regret one's learning experience so deeply that resentment comes to the fore like lava, you may take the matter in your own hand and at least update yourself, and hopefully help your dear children as you learn how man learns more and better.

This is to say there are alternatives to Waldorf Education, Montessori Schools, and the public education that serves the State far and wide, making children less than first-class themselves, for the sake of conforming to the more or less short-sighted needs or foolish ardour that a larger society can be ridden by.

Many Norwegian parents seek to help their children on and up by doing their homework with them – maybe seeking "to have it both ways somehow" thereby. Others go further, and Tony Buzan is one such person. He advocates learning groups at home, to ensure more, faster and better skimmed learning for those involved. Buzan has authored many books. A sample is below.

He is much in line with Ronald Gross, author of Peak Learning and Socrates' Way: Seven Master Keys to Using Your Mind to the Utmost.. If you cater to a jolly good learning processes for yourself, finding fuel for it in savoury, very helpful books and programmes, you may easily want your near ones to benefit from great learning too, as you go on and help them with their various pieces of equipment, advocating lifelong learning also, and telling the near ones to "Live and learn," "Life is a school" and other apt proverbs.

There is good reason to take a proverb with a pinch of salt, that is, to add something like "more or less, to some degree, perhaps" to it. That can help against "dumbening" too. There are many other reservations (qualifications) to adjust ensnaring statements by, as a help against duping, or a means to inspect them fairly at first glance too.

American Proverbs

Newspapers are the schoolmaster of the common people. [Ap 107]

Education doesn't come by bumping your head against the school house. [Ap 176]

Experience is a dear school, but fools learn in no other. [Ap 189]

We learn not for school but for life. [Ap 366]

As the old cock crows, the young cock learns. [Ap 366]

We learn something even by our failures. [Ap 366]

Learn from the mistakes of others [for example by reading good textbooks]. [Ap 366]

You have to learn to walk before you can run. [Ap 366]

Wise men learn by other men's mistakes; fools insist on learning by their own. [Ap 366]

A learned man can be appreciated only by another learned man. [It takes one to know one.] [Ap 367]

A closed book does not produce a learned man. [Ap 367]

Advance in learning as you advance in life. [Ap 367]

Learning makes a man fit company for himself. [Ap 367]

A handful of common sense is worth a bushel of learning. [Ap 367]

Repetition is [a] mother of learning. [Ap 367]

If you have wit and learning, add to it wisdom and modesty. [Ap 367]

A mere scholar, a mere ass. [Ap 527]

He who robs a scholar robs the public. [Ap 527]

Scholars are their country's treasure and the richest ornaments of the feast. [Ap 527]

You can send a man to school, but you can't make him learn. [Ap 527]

We may enlarge on that: "You can send a man to the moon, but can you make him happy there?" - and - "You can send a man to school, but can you make him happy there?"

The first quip dips into the aims of very much education: technological mastery, much in the hope of tackling the long run bad results of misfits who have made the planet less hospitable by exploitations and much else and much worse.

The second dips into the long process of schooling that is subservient to the looming aims of those who curse mankind's future - although it still happens that students enter courses with genuine interest, and get it drained or halfway drained by the system they get engulfed in.

Moral and Results Count

It depends on how much you can handle and how far you are willing to go for yourself and dear ones. Parents cite numerous reasons as motivations to homeschool, including better academic test results, individualized instruction, to help the public system with fewer kids, more hands on environments, to try alternative methods, poor public school environment, religious reasons, improved character/morality development, the expense of private education, and objections to what is taught locally in public school.

Homeschooling may also be a factor in the choice of parenting style. Homeschooling can be an option for families living in isolated rural locations, living temporarily abroad, and to allow for more travelling. Also, many young athletes and actors are taught at home. Homeschooling can be about mentorship and apprenticeship, where a tutor or teacher is with the child for many years and then knows the child very well. Some parents also want the freedom of choice to providing a better education than the rather typical public education in some countries.