“teach your own”: school response

school response

“[Schools] seem to fear that if they let one family teach their own children at home, every family will want to, and they will be out of business. Given their present troubles and bad publicity, this worry is natural enough. But it is not realistic…There are simply not that many people who like or trust their children that much, or would want to have them around for that much of the time, or would take that much time and effort to answer their questions and otherwise help them find out what they want to know.
   It is not primarily compulsory attendance laws that keep most children in school so much as the fact that almost no one wants them anywhere else.” p. 256-7

“…[research] done by teachers in their own classrooms, based on experience rather than experiments, is the only kind that will significantly improve teaching.” p. 262

“…it seem very likely that the one place where we can hope and expect to see some really fundamental and long-term research on learning, on the kinds and amounts of teaching that most help learning, and on the usefulness of different methods and materials, is in the homes of people teaching their own children.” p. 263

“What they [homeschoolers] will teach [schools] is that there is no one best way, and that it is a waste of time and energy to look for it; that children (like adults) learn in a great many ways; that each child learns best in the ways that most interest, excite, and satisfy her or him; and that the business of school should be to offer to learners the widest possible range of choices, both in what to learn and ways to learn it.” p. 264

“What makes people smart, curious, alert, observant, competent, confident, resourceful, persistent — in the broadest and best sense, intelligent — is not having access to more and more learning places, resources, and specialists, but being able in their lives to do a wide variety fo interesting things that matter, things that challenge their ingenuity, skill, and judgment, and that make an obvious difference in their lives and the lives of people around them.” p. 279

“What is most important and valuable about the home as a base for children’s growth into the world is not that it is a better school than the schools but that it isn’t a school at all. It is not an artificial place, set up to make ‘learning’ happen and in which nothing except ‘learning’ ever happens. It is a natural, organic, central, fundamental human institution, one might easily and rightly say the foundation of all other institutions.” p. 279

“…it has been well documented that private and home schools nonetheless produce high achievement among their young regardless of the lack of national tests and the wide variety of curricula, methods, and philosphies being used. This is a vital point, and one that gets losts in all the talk about high standards, testing, and accountability.” p. 282

“Homeschoolers are creating a new ethos for education: ‘To learn everything one needs or wants to know when one needs or wants it.’” p. 283

“The assumption that people become good citizens, or well-rounded individual, simply by passing a bettery of tests in a school system if a false assumption.” p. 284

“It’s a dream to forge a national identity based on the shared experience of being forced to compete for grades to learn the same thing, at the same time, in the same way. This vision of schooling…is not a good idea gone bad, but a crazy idea from the start. We learn at different rates, in different ways, and for different reasons.” p. 285

“Creating more opportunities for adults and children to share work and to talk about their lives together, creating more spaces and activities where children can explore and play in their own ways without adults directing or controlling all their interactions (but nearby to help when questions arise or disputes break out); these are but some of the ways that our lives can be shared outside of school.” p. 286