Home Schooling

Message / Question What are your thoughts about home schools? Are kids that come out not as social, not as popular, not as exposed to the real world, too protected, are they limited by their parents ability. Is it a form of child abuse, as Dawkins would say?

Response

There are good public schools, there are bad public schools, good private schools and bad private schools. Likewise, some who choose to homes-school their kids do it well and some don’t.

In principle, home schooling is a good and valid form of education – provided there is a suitable curriculum and adequate supervision by the provider. My wife and I have 4 children and, in response to certain circumstances, we chose to home school one of them and it worked well. There are different home school structures and the one that we chose more like “distance education”, where our son was enrolled as a student in a particular school and studied the same material as the students who physically attended the school. The system worked well right through to the end of year 12. At the same time, we ensured that he was involved in appropriate sporting and cultural activities in the community and was thus as “exposed to the real world” as most other kids. I know many other people who home-schooled with great success, so I have confidence that it can provide as good (if not better) school experience than physical school attendance. As for home-schooling being “child abuse”, I would absolutely reject the notion. The closest thing in the present day education system that I have seen to child abuse in the so called “safe-schools” programme – but that’s a whole other story!