Homeschooling or Homefooling Q1: Teacher Qualification February 16, 2008

(Editor’s note: This is one of a series of questions about homeschooling that will all be posted with answers. Eventually.) 

Question 1. The Education/Ability of the Parent/Teacher. In my state, home schooling parents don’t need a teaching degree or even a bachelor’s degree. I believe some states do require this. A person with a bachelor’s degree is not necessarily smarter than a person without one, but there should be some kind of teacher’s training especially for children with special needs. School teachers have to have degrees so that they know how and what to teach, and no matter how great the parent is, parenthood doesn’t automatically make great teachers.

Parental education – or lack thereof – has absolutely no effect on one’s ability to teach one’s own children. The anecdotal evidence for parents successfully teaching their children at home is overwhelming. After all, when Stanford University admits more homeschooled than high schooled teens (relative to number of applicants), you’ve got to figure that those parents are doing something right. Desire to learn and love of learning have a far more profound effect than a teaching credential; and those who choose to educate their children at home have this in abundance. The other thing parents have in overflowing abundance is a desire to give their children the best and a knowledge of their own children’s abilities and interests. (Yes, we all know parents who do not desire to give their children the best, but let’s face it: if you want to bring your children home and spend all day, every day, with them, you are a parent who enjoys your children and wants to give them good things.)

Besides, every teacher and school administrator knows that the biggest predictor of a child’s academic success is the level of parental involvement. And what is homeschooling but total parental involvement! The truth is, if you’re clever enough to be online finding and reading things you want to find and read, you’re clever enough to be your child’s teacher. (And here you are, reading this!)

Completely apart from parental qualification, we place far too much credence in teaching credentials. Granted that the majority of teachers are people who care deeply about children and their education; but there are also more than you might suspect who are there simply because they couldn’t decide on a major, and teaching is easy with summers off; or who couldn’t qualify for a more difficult major (sad to say, in any given university the college of education is generally one of the easiest to get into, and has the fewest requirements [see *comment]); or who thought they wanted to teach and discovered too late, after receiving their degree, that they don’t really enjoy working day after day with someone else’s children, but lack time or money to prepare for a different vocation. So, simply having teaching credentials is a far cry from a guarantee of being a good educator.

As the holder of a bachelor’s degree in elementary education myself, I can assure you, dear readers, I was in classes with all of the above students, none of whom I would want teaching any of my children anything. I can also unequivocally inform you that teacher training does not consist of “what to teach” as the questioner assumes. Since the teacher trainee is in college, the teacher trainee is assumed (baselessly, I must regretfully inform you) to have the basic content knowledge needed to pass on to the students. Without naming names, I would like to state here that it was the extreme dearth of knowledge displayed among my fellow teacher trainees (the inability of many to write a grammatical sentence comes to mind) that first sent me scurrying to the library to discover John Holt, a fellow educator who is often named the father of the homeschooling movement.

No, the truth is that teacher trainees are taught classroom discipline, and crowd management, and record-keeping, and tricks for capturing the attention of thirty bored pupils, and a little (a very little) about child development and learning styles, but zero content. Now, learning about child development and learning styles has some merit, but most of it is common sense, and it is amazingly easy to find anything more you wish to know on your own in any number of accessible books on the subject.

In fact, it was my class on child development that sent me scurrying back to the library to find Raymond and Dorothy Moore, also fellow educators who are frequently termed the grandparents of homeschooling. I was feeling a serious disconnect when I would leave my child development class, where I learned that children develop at different rates (what a shock!) and are cognitively ready to learn skills such as math or reading at different ages, and proceed directly to my elementary language arts class, where I was taught how to start all of my first-grade children on the same material regardless of their ability or development levels.

What happens to a child who is unready to read at age six, but forced to try? The sad result is that by age nine or ten, when his brain has matured to a point of readiness, his educational experience thus far will have convinced him that that he cannot read and wouldn’t enjoy it even if he could; his teachers and parents are convinced also; and he very likely has a mental block about reading and may never read beyond a second-grade level. And yet this is unfortunately what trained teachers are required to do by the nature of their institutional employment: pressure all children to perform at the same level at the same age, and label them as defective if they cannot.

Now, explain to me why any caring parent would want to have such training?

Homeschooling or Homefooling? February 16, 2008

Many moons ago, when Themestream was a bright and shining star on the internet horizon, I came across an article there entitled “Homeschooling or Homefooling?” which posed some queries and opinions that are fairly typical of people wondering about this whole homeschooling thing. I answered the questions there and, since Themestreme is sadly no more, reproducing the Q&A here seems like a worthwhile endeavor. It was a long article, and the replies make it much longer, so I will break it up by putting one Q&A in each blog post.

Before we start, I’d like to say I don’t mean to attack anyone who questions homeschooling, but I do hope to answer some of these reservations and perhaps dispel a few myths about homeschooling for a few people. Oh, and I also have to say before writing this that both of my parents and my older sister are teachers (not to mention I have an elementary education degree myself), so I know first-hand that the majority of teachers are dedicated, caring people who truly want to help children learn. It is the institution of schooling that is at fault, rather than (for the most part) the teachers.