What will the fashion for homeschooling lead to. home education
Two or three centuries ago, homeschooling was considered commonplace. But even now, often in different countries of the world, parents think about this method of raising and developing children. Russian legislation also provides for a clause allowing the education of a child at home, both for medical reasons and at the request of the parents. However, you can return to school at any time. What are the advantages and disadvantages of home schooling?
Freedom of learning
There is no other education system that is as flexible and convenient as the home teaching method. You can fully control it, arrange breaks and credit periods at your discretion, choose suitable methods and programs, and change them at any time if necessary. Children can study at a convenient time for them and in the comfort of their own home.
According to experts, in fact, basic knowledge can be covered in six years of study. Much depends on the ability, maturity and interest of the child. Homeschooling is well suited for gifted children who may find it difficult or boring in mainstream schools.
Physical freedom of the child
Most children experienced a real sense of freedom after leaving the school system. Without school hours, strict schedules, social events, homeschooling saves the child more time and energy.
Emotional freedom
Competition, peer pressure, boredom and bullying are just a few of the typical problems faced by students. Homeschooled children can dress, act and think as they please without the need to “fit in” with the general environment and are not afraid of ridicule and bullying. A child, studying at home, can live in the real world, where life will not be dictated by teenage tendencies and temptations to dangerous experiments.
Attention of parents
This is considered one of the most typical benefits of home schooling. In this case, parents see the child more often and pay more attention to him. Adults will have the opportunity to interact more closely with children in order to better understand them and establish contact.
Improving family relationships
This positive aspect is emphasized and appreciated by the majority of families who have chosen to homeschool their children instead of the traditional one. This decision helps to strengthen ties between all family members. Teenagers can greatly benefit from this type of interaction. The crisis of transitional age is much easier to solve with home schooling.
Revealing Good Characteristics
Thanks to the provision of comfortable home conditions, parents will be able to personally observe the growth and development of their children. These moments are priceless. Parents become witnesses to the achievements and successes of their child, when, as in school, they often learn about this from teachers.
No negative impact
At school, a child often has to cope with various types of pressure from teachers and peers. Especially dangerous is the negative influence of classmates, which is minimized during home schooling.
broad outlook
Learning at home is not limited to the walls of a room or building. At any convenient time, a child with parents can go to the street, to the forest, to a museum, theater or other educational and recreational activities that are rarely organized at school.
Emphasis on children's personality and abilities
With home schooling, there are more opportunities to pay attention to the development of the personality and certain abilities of the child. Parents and tutors can choose a training program based on the individual characteristics of the children, and not just on the general education program.
Flexibility
If children have a chronic disease, then homeschooling is the most beneficial solution for them. Periods of exacerbation of the disease, visits to doctors, treatment procedures take a lot of time, because of which the child often misses school. But at home, the lesson schedule can be easily adjusted and adjusted to fit it.
Failure to comply with the national curriculum
The first disadvantage of home school programs is that, no matter how well designed they are, they are unlikely to fit into a recognized curriculum with accreditation and examinations. Moreover, if parents are not properly qualified to teach, it will be difficult for them to provide their children with a proper education.
Restrictions
Home schooling can limit the work and leisure time of a child's parents. It is good if one of the adults has the opportunity to constantly be next to the child, but such cases are rare. The rest of the parents will have to plan their schedule in such a way as to allocate sufficient time for home lessons with the child, or spend money on the services of a tutor.
Problems of socialization
Homeschooled children are deprived of the usual school experiences and activities. They are less likely to be in crowded and loud noise environments. Because of this, such children can sometimes experience discomfort and inconvenience in the crowd and when establishing friendly contacts with other people.
Load on parents
With homeschooling, parents have a huge responsibility and a lot of worries: it is necessary to plan a schedule, prepare a lesson, purchase textbooks, etc. If parents teach lessons, they need to carefully prepare for them in order to be able to answer additional questions from children.
Financial restrictions
When one of the parents is engaged only in homeschooling the child, the other is forced to earn at least two in order to feed the family and provide everything necessary for the education and upbringing of the child.
No less costly situation will be when hiring a tutor. In addition, it is necessary to allocate expenses for teaching materials, books, computer software, stationery, etc. Conducting some chemistry and physics classes at home can be difficult.
Life outside the standard
Like any activity that challenges the way of life, homeschooling can encourage children to live outside social norms. If it is supposed to educate a child only at home and away from the rest of society, then it is better to prefer traditional home education.
Loss of schoolwork
Some of the school activities (team sports, graduation, school balls, theatrical performances, etc.) children at home schooling may miss. Building friendships with other people through shared activities and interests is a social advantage of the regular school. Children's creativity can be formed and developed through dance, theater, music and art.
Many schools are now well equipped with large gyms, swimming pools, auditoriums and stages. Children in a regular school, unlike those who study at home, always have access to school facilities and modern equipment, including an art studio and a science laboratory.
Limited exposure with adults
In addition to their parents, homeschooled children do not have the opportunity to communicate with other teachers and adults. And this is an important condition for the formation of social and communication skills. As a result, "home" children may have difficulty communicating with teachers at the university or work colleagues.
Each type of training has its own advantages and disadvantages. Before making a choice, you need to carefully weigh everything and try to make the right decision that suits both parents and children. Here are some helpful tips for parents:
- you need to formally attach to any educational institution and agree with him on home form learning,
- explain to the child the rules and conditions of homeschooling,
- organize a special place for classes,
- together with the child to purchase the necessary stationery and textbooks,
- create a schedule and lesson plans for the day, week, month and year, keep a progress log or reports on topics learned,
- objectively evaluate the work of the child, but without unnecessary criticism and transition to personalities, praise him more for his efforts,
- make time for rest
- try to keep the child interested in learning.
Some 100-200 years ago, home schooling was almost the only educational system that existed in tsarist Russia, Europe and the USA, although only children of noble, wealthy and prosperous families who could afford to hire trained tutors.
Gradually, home schooling was transformed into a relic of the past, it became prestigious to study in public schools and boarding schools, but, as you know, everything new is well forgotten old. Currently, homeschooling systems are regaining their former popularity, today this is no longer an innovation, there are an increasing number of children and parents who refuse the generally accepted principles of studying in public schools.
What changed? Why did many parents stop trusting the traditional education scheme, according to which our grandparents and parents themselves were brought up, and why do most children and adolescents continue to study? Can individual homeschooling prepare a child as well as teachers in a comprehensive school?
Let's try to figure out whether it is worth depriving your child of a kind of "school of life" in general education institutions and taking responsibility for the full education of your child at home.
For those who did not know, homeschooling is possible not only because of health problems that prevent the child from attending general education institutions, but also at the parents' own request. If everything is clear with the first case, then the second one raises many questions for the majority: how, in this case, is the transition to family education carried out?
In fact, there is nothing complicated about this, for a long time there has been a law that allows you to choose the most convenient form of education for the child, however, schools are reluctant to do this, because with each such student who decides to study at home, she loses a certain percentage funding allocated by the state for each child.
For these purposes, parents must write a statement to the school stating the reason why the child will remain in family education. So, the reasons why you should teach your child individually or how to decide for yourself that your baby is not created for the general education system and daily trips to school.
- Your child is significantly ahead of his peers in development. It often happens that the child, having studied everything that was offered to him in the lesson, begins to get bored, all the other classmates are still absorbed in the process of attention, and this only one is spinning and spinning around, not knowing what to do with himself, distracting others. Teachers, noticing this trend, begin to give them tasks "ahead", offering to jump a year or two to another class. But few people take into account that in such ways even the most hardworking kid may lose the desire to learn, and not everyone can get along with too old classmates, because your child’s psychological and physical development is still at the level of his biological age.
- If your child is professionally engaged in some extracurricular hobbies, such as sports, dancing, music. Combining quality education and professional sports (dance, music) is sometimes beyond the power of even the most talented child.
- If your work is connected with constant moving from city to city, because of which the child has to constantly change schools. Such constant changes injure the psyche of the baby, which can affect his academic performance and psycho-emotional state.
- Sometimes parents refuse to educate their child in general education institutions for ideological and religious reasons.
The pros and cons of homeschooling
In order to make your choice in favor of one form or another, you must carefully weigh all the pros and cons that are present in the individual education of children.
Most parents, when they choose homeschooling for their child, are sincerely convinced that they are able to educate their child on their own, acting as a teacher in any of the disciplines. True, not everyone takes into account that for this you will have to spend a huge amount of time studying literature, choosing textbooks and developing an education program for your child.
If in the primary grades almost any parent is able to educate their child, then the sciences of the senior classes are often beyond the power of the parents themselves. Of course, you can hire paid teachers and tutors for these purposes, but it should be noted that private lessons are not cheap pleasure, which will have to spend a large part of the family budget. Free education in schools - maybe not the best, but, in any case, an acceptable option for everyone.
There are also positive aspects, for example, freedom of choice. You can always decide for yourself which discipline should be studied now, and which should be postponed, depending on the age and interests of your child.
Another pleasant moment is that it is absolutely not necessary to force the baby to sit down at the table at exactly 8 o'clock in the morning and get up at exactly 13 because of it, you can always adjust to the person's biological clock, which will contribute to the active work of the brain.
On the other hand, what about the concept of discipline and organization, which should still be planted in the little heads of our children? At work, in the office or in pairs at the institute, no one will wait for your biological clock, and you will have to work strictly according to the schedule. To prepare for such “working days” of adult life, nevertheless, one should gradually.
The next point is a matter of adaptation and the ability to communicate in society, make friends, find your “allies”, and also repel “attacks of obvious competition”. Of course, a wonderful life experience can be obtained at the same sports sections or any other circles, where there are also peers and their own circle of friends, but still, most psychologists believe that everyone should go through this kind of “school of life”.
Children must temper themselves, look for a way out of different situations, absorb not only positive, but also negative experience, which you definitely cannot teach in theory.
When your child, protected at home from all the difficulties and problems, nevertheless “comes out” and encounters most of them (“difficult boss”, “student life”, “gray working days”, etc.) , he can simply become depressed, not knowing how to live with all this.
On the other hand, it has long been noted that children who study according to an individual system learn information much faster. Topics and tasks that are studied at school for weeks can be completed by a child in a day or two at home, because the child is more concentrated in such conditions, he is not distracted by classmates, he does not have to listen to what can be read and explained several times.
It has long been noticed that the knowledge of such children is a third higher than their peers, besides, they are not loaded with homework and schedules, so free time can be devoted to other sciences that are not particularly considered in school conditions - painting, art, gardening, needlework, etc. .
Take the child to school or entrust curriculum visiting teachers? Or maybe become a teacher for your own child?
Let's look at the pros and cons of homeschooling. (from English homeschooling - “schooling at home”), to understand how this tactic suits your family.
Why parents choose homeschooling
In our country, the format of home schooling is becoming more and more popular. "Why?" - you ask. There can be many reasons for this:
The state of health of the child;
Dissatisfaction with the quality of school education;
Distrust of educational structures;
Problems with the socialization of the child;
Outstripping classmates in mental abilities;
Interests in another field of activity (sports, acting, etc.);
Constant moving.
Types of homeschooling
home education- individual education provided by the school (available to children with disabilities and those who, for medical reasons, cannot attend an educational institution).
Family Learning- study of the general educational program at home, where parents act as teachers.
Remote education- the process of learning, which is fully or partially performed at a distance using computer technology.
Advantages and disadvantages of homeschooling
Positive sides
Full development of the program
At home schooling, it is easier to understand which topics are more difficult for a child in order to fill in knowledge gaps in the future.
Time saving
You can learn the curriculum on your own in a shorter time. So there is more free time for trips to theaters, cinemas and museums.
Individual program
The visible advantage of home education is the ability to independently choose additional subjects. For example, ancient languages, art history and more.
No conflict situations
Negative socialization (excessive nit-picking by teachers, bullying among peers) is a common occurrence for children who are educated in a regular school. At home schooling, the child is isolated from such problems.
Development of an individual way of thinking
A child studying at home is not subjected to other people's stereotypical influences.
Negative sides
Lack of communication with peers
When homeschooled, children build relationships only with those children with whom they want to continue to communicate. Socialization also implies the ability to communicate even with unpleasant people and the willingness to resolve conflict situations if necessary.
Permanent control of parents
Some parents choose home education to have maximum control over their child's life. It is difficult to say what such overprotection will lead to in the future.
Lack of discipline
For some children, the presence of a large amount of free time becomes a cause of lack of concentration and irresponsibility. Parents who have made a choice in favor of family education need to be careful about planning and teach their child how to schedule correctly.
