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On Home Schooling

By: Joseph N. Abraham, M.D.

More and more parents are turning to home schooling as an alternative to traditional education. Doubtless, this makes sense. Our homes are where we learn most of what life requires of us; and no teacher can do as much for a student as a parent does by talking, reading, and otherwise instructing a child. Home schooling extends this, and does so quite effectively: in fewer hours per day, home-schooled children frequently cover more material than students in traditional schools.

However, not all parents are prepared to take over the education of their children. They may not have the education themselves to do this; they may not have enough time; and most unfortunate, many of them simply aren't interested.

When one or more of these is the case, then we are well-served to build schools. Institutional education may not be as effective or efficient as home-schooling, but it still correlates powerfully with all desirable societal outcomes: income, lawfulness, civic participation, personal fulfillment. The bumper sticker is valid: "If you think education is expensive, try ignorance."

So yes, home schooling might be attractive, if it were universally available. But even when parents met the three requirements above, it is an unusual parent who can teach all disciplines all the way through the high school level. Very few people excel at all disciplines: sciences, math, humanities, arts, etc.

And for the handful of people who can do it all, everyone has limits: who has the mastery to educate a child through all the necessary college courses?

Should home schooling be the ultimate target of our educational systems? Should we begin designing a community wherein one parent stays at home, not so much as to cook, clean, and do housework, as to home-school future generations? Whereas the current trend is for educational systems to intervene earlier and earlier in our children's education, perhaps as we become better educated, we should instead encourage parents to take over more of their children's early education. Perhaps in some future day, we will have a situation in which the majority of our parents have the knowledge, time, and interest to educate their children all the way to adulthood.

Home-schooling offers a lot of advantages to traditional education. But until we have parents with all of the necessary skills and resources, we will still need schools and school systems.

Article Source: http://www.articlemanual.com

Joseph N. Abraham MD is president of The Acadiana Educational Endowment and booksXYZ.com, the Nonprofit Bookstore Supporting Education. booksXYZ.com lists over 2,000,000 paperbacks, hardbacks, and audio books. Dr. Abraham is also the author of Happiness: A Physician/Biologist Looks at Life, an innovative self help book looking at Zen, biology, and fulfilment.



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