Homeschooling

What is Homeschooling?

Homeschooling is the practice of educating children in the home or within the local community.  Homeschooling is not something new, it was the standard practice of families for thousands of years to educate the children in the home or the local village/community.  This was because partly because schools and teachers were rare and expensive, but also because it was a very logical approach to take to education.

Who Homeschools?

A lot of people believe that only religious or weird people homeschool, in actual fact many people who homeschool are just regular people and include many atheists as well.  Many of the myths about homeschooling are actually spread by the publicly funded school system that views homeschooling as a threat or competition.  Consider how many teachers would be out of a job if parents realised they could do a better job than they could?  It is just good sense to protect your own interests.  Keep in mind that all parents homeschool at least some of the time.  Whether you are directly helping your children with their homework or teaching them how to pay a game, fix a computer, cook dinner or reading them a book.  These are all forms of homeschooling too, so it is not so strange at all really.  Consider also just how many celebrities were homeschooled or actively homeschool their children, here is an ever increasing list of famous people who were homeschooled or do homeschool their children:

Literature/Arts/Entertainment

Agatha Christie
Robert Frost
Hilary Duff
William Blake
Margaret Atwood
Charles Dickens
Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain)
C.S. Lewis
Hans Christian Anderson
Beatrix Potter
George Bernard Shaw
Walt Whitman
Louis Armstrong
Felicia Day
Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie (Homeschooling their children)
Will Smith and Jada Pinkett (Homeschooling their children)
Jennifer Love Hewitt
Mayim Bialik (Homeschooling her children)
Lisa Welchel (Homeschooling her children)
John Travolta and Kelly Preston (Homeschooling their children)
Tom Cruise (Homeschooling his children)

Science/Technology/Academia

Albert Einstein
Michael Faraday
Blaise Pascal
Alexander Graham Bell
Bertrand Russell
Orville and Wilbur Wright
Thomas Edison (Because he was too “addled” for public schooling, may have had ADHD)
Jimmy Wales (creator of Wikipedia, homeschools his children)

Sport/Athleticism

Bethany Hamilton
Venus and Serena Williams
Tim Tebow
Michelle Kwan
Darrell Waltrip

Politics/Military/Law/Economics

John Stuart Mill
Thomas Jefferson
George Washington
Benjamin Franklin
Douglas MacArthur
George Patton
Winston Churchill
Sandra Day O’Connor
Elizabeth Edwards
Franklin Delano Roosevelt

What Advantages Does Homeschooling Have?

The biggest advantage a parent, whether mother or father, has over a school teacher is that a parent has an extremely personal stake in their children having the best education.  No one cares more about the quality of education your child gets than yourself.  The best teacher in the world just could not compete with a parent when it comes to the kind of passion and interest parents can bring to the education of their children.  Next, because the teacher’s time is split between twenty to thirty children, he seldom gets the time to get to understand every child’s individual strengths and needs, the temptation is to treat children as though they are all the same.  Parents, however, tend to know their children very well and often share interests and hobbies with the children so they can join in the educational experience more easily.  These are just some of the advantages, check out more links on the homeschooling menu to find out more.

What Does Homeschooling Look like?

Homeschooling does not mean recreating the oppressive and boring school environment in your house.  Rather homeschooling is about reconnecting with play and understanding how important playing with ideas, crafts and activities is the best way to learn.  You could learn vocabulary from memorising long lists of words, but I guarantee you will learn faster from playing Scrabble and other word games.  You could learn economics from reading a book, or playing monopoly while discussing how the concepts in the game relate to the real world.  What the education system often ignores is that children playing is essentially children learning how to learn.   Homeschool does not need to be a drag like school, rather it should put the fun back into education.