Some Thoughts About Home Schooling

(This hub was originally intended as a comment on another hub, Benefits of Home Schooling Your Children, by Marye Audet. But the comment got too long to remain a comment, as you can see, and I decided to publish it as a separate hub. To really understand what I am talking about here, you will have to first read Marye’s above-mentioned hub.)

I was recently reading Alvin Tofflers' trilogy - Future Shock, Third Wave and Power Shift - in which he has talked at length about education and schooling, among others. These books give a great insight into the problems of schools and why they are so factory-like with their emphasis on discipline, factory foreman-like teachers, and the domination of time in all their activities.

Toffler argues that in the beginning of the industrial era it was necessary for industry to instill these values in children coming predominantly from an agricultural background. Agricultural societies that preceded industrialisation had a more relaxed view of timeliness, discipline, and submission to authority. Hence an school system was devised that closely mimicked the factory - think of the school bell as the factory siren, the teacher as the foreman, the examination system as the performance-related pay packages, and you will see the close parallels that exist between schools and factories.

The industrial age has now passed and has been replaced by what Toffler calls the Third Wave, in which people live in more disarregated, relaxed ways. This will call for new ways of doing everything, including schooling. The values so priced by industries - timeliness, discipline, submission to authority, etc. - are no longer that important in the new post-industrial, knowledge-based societies of today. Many people now work from home for their employers, or have become full-time freelancers. Offices too have become more relaxed, offering flexible working hours.

Schooling too will change to fit into these new circumstances. The large factory-like schools of now may become things of the past, or may not remain the dominant form of schooling. We could have home schooling on a much larger scale.

To me it seems that it may be very difficult for individual parents to take care of the schooling needs of their children. This will be particularly so for single parents, and we must not forget that this trend is increasing too. However, the idea of home schooling is attractive and may be the need of the hour.

To make home-schooling more stable, two or three like-minded parents could get together and establish a common home-schooling environment for their children. It will be even better, and more workable if these parents also live in the same neighbourhood.

One of the disadvantages of parent-run schooling is that in these days of exploding knowledge and narrow specialization, the parents won’t be well-versed in all branches of knowledge, and the children taught by them will also reflect this. If several parents get together to school their children, they can between themselves cover several areas of knowledge and skills.

This can also overcome some of the problems associated with parents (or one of them) frequently moving due to change of jobs or getting transferred by their employers. In one-family schooling, this can be a very tasking challenge. Home-schooling parents pre-occupied with relocating, may end up neglecting their children’s education. In multi-family schooling, the other parents can step in and relieve the newly relocated family.

This leads to the idea of a country-wide network of parent-run schools. In this system, there will be multi-family home schools throughout the country and as families move from one part of the country to the other, they can just slot into one of these multi-family home schools.

Home schooling will encounter many such problems but I am sure that as more and more parents experiment with it, they will overcome these problems and establish sound and tested practices that guarantee success.

We can also think of the type of schooling that existed before the industrial style schools came into vogue in the nineteenth century. In India we had ashram schools that were in effect home-schools run by teachers. Each teacher ran a school in his home and took in children from his neighbourhood.

Mahatma Gandhi, and Rabindranath Tagore, who won the Nobel Prize for literature, both had set up educational institutions reflecting their views. Mahatma Gandhi believed that education should be livelihood-oriented and emphasised the acquiring of useful skills like carpentry, pottery, weaving, etc. Tagore’s educational venture, called Shanti Niketan, has now flowered into a full-fledged university which lays great stress on the arts such as music, painting, drama and traditional arts.

There will be similar examples in other countries too, and we can learn from them to provide the best education to our children.