Replies to '11/24 Great School Debate'

Quote From: laderrick

I realize that you've put a great deal of time and effort into learning about how to teach, and I commend your for that, but you're making some assumptions about homeschooling parents that are crippling your ability to think clearly about how children learn, and who is best able to help them along the way. (My browser will not let me do paragraphs, so I am going to try using spaces to indicate a new paragraph.) We are an unschooling family. By the time that my first child was old enough to attend kindergarten (though he never went to kindergarten - we didn't see any point in that), I, as his "untrained" parent had OVER 25,000 HOURS of experience helping him learn. In that time, he had learned how to babble, roll over, crawl, talk, walk, run, relate to other people, recognize all the things in his environment, empathize, solve problems, read, write, count, add, subtract, multiply, keep track of his own things, cook bread and some other basic foods, help with household chores, make friends, swim, use a computer, speak a small amount of several different languages, read a simple map, use the library's computer catalog, and a zillion other things I couldn't possibly list here. He is 15 years old now, enrolled in college, and excelling there, despite never having been schooled before. So, you do the math. At this point, I have over 15 YEARS of direct, hands-on experience helping my children learn. I am not am amateur, neither am I uneducated or unskilled in the field of education. I started researching homeschooling 20 years ago. I have read hundreds of books about education, psychology, communication, neuroscience, learning styles, disabilities, behavioral and pedagogical approaches, etc. I have attended dozens of conferences, and hundreds of workshops. I am also not the least bit unusual among home educators. How do I know? I also TEACH workshops. I see many thousands of homeschooling parents each year, continuing their educations, evaluating curricular materials, adapting to the learning styles of their children, and being very successful at helping them learn and grow. I have seen parents with bad spelling, poor grammar, and virtually no math skills, drop-outs and rise-outs, products of dismal public school systems - many hundreds of them - help their children become well-prepared for college level work. I admit, there was a time when I would not have believed it could happen, but it does, and I can tell you after all these years that it is the norm, not the exception. People can and do learn outside of school, fortunately. And perhaps you are not aware of the latest research? http://news.bostonherald.com/editorial/view.bg?articleid=168927 "There seems to be little difference in teacher effectiveness among certified teachers, the uncertified and those who enter the profession under the new alternative (often midcareer) certification schemes, according to a major study of nearly 52,000 teachers in New York City. These results are a heavy blow to decades of conventional wisdom promulgated by the education establishment. "