I feel like every few weeks I see one of these posts in which someone with multiple education degrees asks how a homeschooling parent could possibly be qualified to teach all subjects to all ages when said degree holder is despite years of training only qualified to teach specific ages and subjects.
This kind of thing points to some real problems with credentialism within our modern education system. However, I want to leave that to one side and address two points which I think are worth highlighting.
First, learning to manage and teach a classroom with twenty children is very different from teaching your own children. I'm not convinced that we necessarily need a four year degree and then an advanced degree as well just to teach someone how to plan and manage classroom teaching. I suspect that we could successfully train and credential people a lot faster while giving them time while in college to devote themselves to a subject matter rather than teaching itself. However, productively managing a classroom full of kids is a definite skill, and learning it is going to take time.
By contrast, teaching children at home is often a lot more like parenting than it is like managing a large number of other people's kids in a formal schoolroom environment.
Yes, there are times when it is important to seek out some specialized materials or techniques. After quite successfully teaching the first four kids to read using the 100 Easy Lessons book, MrsDarwin had to seek out a specialized curriculum for teaching kids with dyslexia to read for our fifth child. And then for the sixth and seventh, she was able to go right back to the old system. Special needs required special techniques.
But a lot of the time, teaching younger kids at home is a lot like doing any other activity with them. You sit down to read or do an activity, you provide some guidance, you make sure they do their activities. While there will be occasional kids who will need something special, teaching most kids to read and do basic math is not hard for the average parent to do with a few easily chosen books. And teaching young kids about history and science is quite honestly often just a matter of sitting down and reading aloud, or even turning them loose to watch some decent TV programs on an interesting topic.
The second topic I'd like to address, however, relates to somewhat older kids, and it has to do with teaching expertise.
While I think it's pretty obviously misguided to think that someone needs one advanced certification to teach math to third graders, but a different one to teach them science, and so on -- I can see why someone would think that someone teaching middle school or high school science, history, literature, etc. should have pretty in depth knowledge of all those topics. How is a parent going to be an inspiring expert in all those fields?
For one thing, it's worth being honest: most high schools and middle schools also do not offer an inspiring expert in each of these fields. Certifications set minimum, but they don't create inspiriting personalities or deep expertise. You can bet that your certified high school biology teacher can explain what the Krebs Cycle is, but that doesn't necessarily mean he will have an infectious enthusiasm which makes numerous students go into biochem. A lot of well trained teachers (like a lot of trained professionals in other fields) are going to be just okay, even as others are going to be brilliant.
But even so, wouldn't the middling high school biology teacher who knows about the Krebs Cycle be better for teaching kids about biology than a parent who may not remember the Krebs Cycle at all?
So here's where I find myself wondering a bit. Because, as in this example, a lot of adults do not remember learning about the Krebs Cycle. Indeed, you could even work in a lot of other areas of biology without thinking about the Krebs Cycle often.
Let's picture two different ways that studying biology while being homeschooled in high school might go.
In one case, the parent picks out a solid high school biology and makes the student read the book. The parent may not remember a lot of the topics covered well, but if they run into trouble the parent does some Wikipedia work or otherwise helps look up questions.
In the other case, the student reads a half dozen popular science books on topics that seem interesting about animals and watches a lot of documentaries and YouTube science videos. The student's knowledge is very spotty, perhaps, compared to reading a comprehensive biology textbook. However, the stuff he reads he finds really interesting and retains. Perhaps this leads to a longstanding adult interest in a few biology related topics, and he continues to read about those through the rest of his life. Or if he feels really inspired to go deeper into the topic, he takes biology when he goes to college and perhaps even ends up majoring in it.
Which of these is a better science education, the one which mimics a traditional classroom with a solid survey text, perhaps rather uninspiring but thorough, or the one which is spotty but driven by interest?
I think that in a number of cases, homeschoolers may end up covering some topics more in the latter fashion. They may never do the broad survey study which modern middle and high schools emphasize.
However, it may also be worth asking: how much good are these broad survey courses achieving in many average schools across the country? Are there perhaps many cases in which an interest-driven approach to learning, while in places spotty and shallower (though also with certain areas of depth) actually leaves many homeschoolers retaining more education 20 years later than some of their traditionally schooled peers? Does the breadth of a traditional course count for much if most of it is never retained by most students?
I don't think there's any question but what a deep and broad course taught by a passionate expert, which really inspires people to love the topic, is the ideal. But ideals don't always happen, and often people are picking between various non-ideal options.
I do wonder whether if homeschoolers are often ending up pursuing topics with more interest, even if also less thoroughness and expertise, they end up better served for the long run.
9 comments:
I always find such arguments against homeschooling odd because they seem to refuse to look at how teaching in schools actually works -- regardless of how the teaching is organized, a great deal of it will always be students working through things on their own (which is how students actually learn, everything else being merely supplementary to this), practicing things by doing homework (which in practice parents already oversee and assist), and drawing on subject-matter experts in the community, all of which are available in homeschooling. And while there is something to be said for expertise in classroom, a lot of the expertise you really need is just to deal specifically with the challenges of teaching in classrooms -- with the fact that you are teaching a given subject to a significant number of students at once, at varying levels of proficiency, who can receive only limited one-on-one tutoring, who may or may not have actually done the reading and the homework, and who, being all in one room all at once, are able to distract each other easily. Change the set-up for teaching, and you will need different skills and expertise in the teachers -- as we all learned during the disastrous first few months of COVID lockdowns, as teachers used to teaching in classrooms struggled to figure out how to teach remotely. As you note, the real test in all these matters is the long-term result.
There is looking at how teaching in the classroom "works"... and then there is looking at what is the end result of these various systems.
I was not homeschooled, but I learned most of the math I know at home.
A lot of it came from my dad buying me an appropriate textbook and telling me it was a good book. Then I learned everything inside.... and looked at the list of books at the back and read those, too.
Btw, I did learn how to teach math, but that came from practical experience (and I focused on teens and adults, not little kids).
....and then I learned how to teach others how to teach the same way.... but that's a bit different. Adult/mature education is different from little kid education.
Meep, Yeah, I'm not sure if there's anyone out there with a deep attachment to a topic who at some point wasn't handed a book to go read on their own, and reading that became the breakthrough.
I'm curious, what was the math book your dad gave you? Was the book itself a standout, or was it more the first step down a road.
My reaction when reading this was: does she think it is impossible for anyone to teach *themselves* anything? No one, once they leave school (where they keep credentialed teachers) ever learns a language, or an instrument; or how to code, or use a new software package; or picks up a math textbook, or sets out on a program of reading great books. Or prepares for an entrance exam or a professional qualifying exam. Or (I know this is crazy) pays for private lessons to help fill in gaps.
Not everyone enjoys self-teaching and not everyone would choose to do it. Maybe there are people out there who don’t even grasp the concept. It’s just odd to see that kind of incuriosity in someone who is explicitly presenting as a person who did postgraduate work. At least in my experience you sink pretty fast if you refuse to do some learning on your own in that context.
He gave me several books, or pointed the way in the library to specific authors (such as Martin Gardner -- he had a column in Scientific American, which my dad had, called Mathematical Games -- this gave me a vision of what REAL math was. Not the boring crap in school.)
I wrote about his influence here: https://marypatcampbell.substack.com/p/happy-fathers-day-some-classic-posts
The main book, though, was Godel, Escher, Bach -- which he gave me when I was 12. It took me over a decade to really get through that book. The first time, I learned propositional logic, and then just read the dialogues. I tried again at 15, and learned more about computer science and Bach. And I tried again in college and grad school -- in college, I understood nonlinear dynamics better, so that worked better for me. In grad school, I was learning neuroscience ultimately, so I finally had all the pieces.
I was public schooled 2-6, mostly because my parents answered too many questions when I was young, so I was placed at 5 into 2nd grade, and in 3rd grade math. Everything I learned in those 5 years was from reading books in my parents library and asking questions. I was constantly in trouble at school, mostly because I was so young compared to my peers and could not remember to turn in any of my work.
They pulled me out, handed me a stack of books and their college textbooks. Any subject I refused to do for them, (writing and lab science) they enrolled me in a class at the local university. I cannot recall ANYTHING they specifically taught me other than answering questions I brought them and teaching me to ask better and deeper questions. They also taught me to research.
When I got to University, I realized there were enormous gaps in my education, but I also took over 200 credits in four years because I wanted to learn things.
I’m currently homeschooling my 7 children and have probably torched it enough I couldn’t put them in traditional school. They test all over the place. College level in some subjects, 2nd grade in others. We do have a learning culture in our house, and they deep dive into whatever subjects they find interesting in the moment and I drag them through a minimum amount of math per day. (Except my kid who adores math). I’ve mostly decided I don’t care what anyone outside our family thinks of my kids’ education.
Anyways, I meant to say that I’m certainly not qualified to teach my kids every subject, but I do have a credit card and a library card and the inability to say no to anything the kids want that might be slightly educational. There are bits of chainmail littering our table, one child is churning out amazing drawings, another is building his own field guide of detailed bird drawings. Another child is weaving landscape tapestries and fills his journals with math problems. One of the children is listening to the works of great Christian thinkers on LibriVox without it having been assigned. Another child is making his own paper and ink.
We have an enormous library of cast offs from other homeschoolers and library cards. They have a lot of free time.
I think they are far better off than their peers, but I guess we’ll see how they do as adults before we can make a determination on that.
-Sarah
But she did all her learning in a credentialed context, so perhaps it doesn't occur to her to tease that out.
I tried one semester of grad school to teach my college freshman with what I believe now is called a flipped classroom model, but I had just been introduced to in a math Ed seminar and it hadnt been given a nifty trendy name (ie read material before class, come semi-prepared and work problems til you iron out the kinks) and they mostly rebelled. It wasn't their job to read the MATH text before class, the book was just for homework problem holding. I was failing in my teacher-ly duties by just shuffling them off on the book, and then they couldn't understand class because I expected them to be familiar with terms before we worked a problem together, and....wah wah wah. From legal adults who had been told and reminded to read these 3 pages before the 2x/wk class.
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