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Teachers Be Crazy
Akima:
--- Quote from: richlitt on 08 Jun 2011, 02:47 ---once because the movie 10 Things I Hate About You wasn't christian on the bus
--- End quote ---
Eh? Do movies have a religion? :?
I think home education (what homeschooling is called in Australia, as distinct from distance learning where children are enrolled in a school but study at home because they live in one of our isolated areas), might be a good alternative to poor schools, but is a poor alternative to good ones, and especially bad for ESL parents and students. It bothers me that the few people I've met who home-ed seem more concerned with what their kids should not learn than with what they should learn. Depending on parents' motives for home educating, I don't think it is an either/or decision. My parents kept my nose to the grindstone with home-ed as well as sending me to school (they thought my homework allocation was ridiculously light), and sending me to private lessons. School holidays? What are they? :laugh:
In NSW (education is controlled by state governments in Australia), probably the biggest problem with home-ed is that you cannot obtain the HSC (Higher School Certificate) at the end of high-school, or therefore an ATAR (Australian Tertiary Admission Rank), unless you are enrolled in a school, so you'll be way down the back of the queue for admission to uni and many technical education courses. There are alternatives to the HSC/ATAR like the IB/UAC, but they're not accessible to home-ed students either. There are some private schools that offer "distance learning" curricula to home-ed parents even if they live just down the road, which is probably a good option provided parents can afford it, approve of the course material, and are OK with the (generally) strong religious affiliation of such schools.
richlitt:
Don't ask me; I'm a dedicated agnostic. I think my 8th-grade-self had issues with all of the dicks in the movie. Like the one drawn on the business school kid's face.
Yeah, my parents sent me to a private school once they saw that I was outgrowing them, and when they were less concerned with what I wasn't learning (evolution), and more concerned with what I should be learning (social skills.)
…a decade later, I'm an evolutionary biologist with no social skills. Go figure.
Barmymoo:
I'm just keen that my kids learn, well, anything at all. I went to two pretty good schools, one terrible one and a reasonable sixth form, and I don't actually know very much about most things, or anything at all about a lot of things because I decided aged 14 that I didn't care about those things (case in point: geography). Schools do what they can but in my opinion there's no way that a teacher with more than thirty people in the room and limited resources can be as successful as individual attention from one person, and visits to museums, libraries, workplaces (pretty sure I'd have cared far more about woodwork, for example, if I'd been taken to see some guy making furniture instead of being given a piece of plywood and told to make "something useful" out of it) etc. So much time in the school day is wasted on the kind of logistical wrangling that's unavoidable with five hundred people in the building and completely non-existant with only five.
But if my theoretical kids tell me they want to go to school, they can go. Like you say, there's holidays and weekends and evenings for fun trips to interesting places.
On the exams point - in the UK home education is completely legal and all you have to do is be able to explain to an inspector (should one contact you) what you're doing. The government have no right to demand curricula, learning plans, inspections, interviews with the children etc unless they suspect you're not actually teaching them anything - for example, if they know that both parents work full time and there's no tutor, then they can demand proof of education. Exams can be entered through local schools and it's pretty easy to set up. Not all schools allow it but most do, and I know loads of people who were educated that way, including my two half brothers who now both have degrees. I think in other countries it is much harder because the government is much more concerned about being in control of what the kids are learning. Here, the government are doing everything they can to offload that responsibility onto anyone who's prepared to take it, so I think we're golden.
pwhodges:
(Just a random thought, leading nowhere:)
When I was diagnosed with TB at the age of twelve, the school doctor had me thrown out of my (boarding) school as a risk to the other pupils (probably not so); I was educated at home for two terms, until the due time for my next school (and also the end of my treatment to cure the disease, though I was checked for some years longer). As my parents never made an unforced decision to do this, it's honestly never occurred to me in the fifty+ years since to think of that period as "home education" rather than just "being thrown out of school" - but I guess it was, really.
Barmymoo:
What, a whole fifteen years old? (Yes, I realise that is a girls' school - my point is TB is still very much here.)
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