Home Education

This context of learning allows children to be taught at home instead of being taught in schools, parents don’t need to have the correct qualifications or in fact any to teach their children. There are numerous reasons why a child are home schooled, some of these include; bullying, religious beliefs, dissatisfaction with the school system or even distance to a local school.

I believe that home education does provide a variety of learning strategies for children. This includes creativity because the children are allowed to do what they want to express what they may have learnt or even when learning through the use of play. Also, children who are home educated can be taken to different places by their parents, for example the children learn by going on trips to farms etc. they can learn how a cow goes through the milking process and this teaches the children where our milk comes from.

I believe that home education has some weaknesses when it comes to educating children:

• Children don’t get to experience social experiences and may find it more difficult to socialize with other children in certain situations.

• There is no set timetable for what the children must learn and when
• Children choose when they want to learn and this can be a weakness in some sense because the child may never want to learn they would rather play.

• Parents do not have to mark the children’s work, so how will they know if the child is making progress or not?

 

I  also believe that home education does have benefits, some of these are:

 

• Has plenty of time to play, this benefits the children because they have freedom to experiment and learn new things.
• Has one on one teaching, their parent focuses solely on them and therefore they have a better learning strategy.

• Self-directed learning

Here is a video on home education and it explains some of the benefits:

 

Children are not required to be taught the national curriculum.  This can be a weakness and strength to home education because not everything on the national curriculum is beneficial to children’s learning and this can be a waste of time and resources when children can be learning subjects or skills which are important to them and will use. Children in home education who are not being taught the national curriculum benefit sometimes because they can focus on more important skills such as reading and numeracy which they will need in later life. Overall, I believe that this context of learning does benefit children’s learning in some ways but I think that it has more non-beneficial factors to learning due to the fact that there are no proper regulations which the parents must confide to in order to educate their children.  However, home education does educate children about what is going on around them, more than children in schools may know, this is because children who are home educated have more of a variety to what they can learn and they can choose what they want to learn.

References:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/parents/home_education/
http://homeschool.lifetips.com/faq/36085/0/what-are-the-strengths-and-weaknesses-of-the-classical-approach/index.html
Alan Thomas, H. P. (2007). How Children Learn at Home. Continuum International Publishing Group