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article: Homeschooling: Which Model Is Right For You?


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I must be becoming more like Hunter, because these kinds of articles used to just annoy me, but now I find them oddly soothing.  :laugh:  

 

Whatever any "Coalition" says, the modern American homeschool movement -- which I take to mean "homeschooling as a deliberate choice, in the face of compulsory education laws" - goes back several decades before the 1970s.   This is significant, not just for historical accuracy, but because homeschooling in the earlier stage of the movement didn't fit into the models that are presented in articles such as these.    In general, it was much more flexible and participative than today's "schoolish" methods, and more parent-led than today's "unschoolish" ones.  This lines up with what's been observed in local systems of informal education around the world (see e.g. Barbara Rogoff, Paulo Freire, Ivan Illich).   Before schools became the place where American children did most of their learning, the ways they describe were largely preserved here, too.

 

The author of the article says that unschooling is a reactionary movement.  This fits with my understanding of "reactionary" as referring to people or movements who use revolutionary methods to oppose a revolution.   The earlier revolution would have been the implementation (between around 1830 and 1930) of a complete system of modern schooling, which replaced both old-style elementary instruction and the classical secondary/college system.  He calls this system "traditional," but even ten minutes of reading online will show that it's a tradition of modern origin.   It was based on German research, especially then-current theories of psychology, applied to political and economic ends. 

 

At the end -- as is also common with this type of article -- he acknowledges that most homeschoolers would be categorized as "eclectic."   From what I've seen, even many parents who identify with a a specific "model" end up adapting it over time, usually making it closer to what home education looked like when it was normative.  For example, most of what goes by the name "Charlotte Mason" is a heavy reworking of her methods, making them more like the old ways (which CM herself knew about, but for whatever reason, chose not to recommend).   This seems like trying to turn a vintage motorcycle into a bicycle, by adding pedals and stripping out some parts.   It might work, eventually, but why not spend our time learning how to fix and operate the bicycle we already have, with help from people who are enthusiastic about that mode of transportation?  

 

(I wonder how many versions of this "list of homeschooling styles" are out there, and how it's changed over time.  Fortunately, I'm too busy with "pre-first-day-clean-up" to even think about trying to research that.   ;) )

Edited by ElizaG
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Wow. I've always considered myself eclectic, but I don't fit 80% of his definition.

 

Those type articles used to fascinate me and I loved to read through all the links.

 

I'm getting old and set in my ways (or maybe I'm running out of kids to try new things on), because I only skimmed it.

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Well, I have some problems with the article and I haven't even finished reading the whole thing. It mentions the Principle Approach more than once, each time in quotations, but doesn't list any resources for it. Goodness. If someone has the wherewithal to write an article that is supposed to give people information to help them decide where they fit, and it mentions a specific "method," you'd think there would be resources listed. Apparently, the author has never heard of the Foundation for American Christian Education, the primary promoter of the Principle Approach.

 

And the author is so far off on unschooling I couldn't finish reading. ::face palm::

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The section on Montessori is pretty strange as well.  It seems to be mostly about the differences between Montessori classroom education and regular classroom education -- ignoring the fact that neither of these bear much resemblance to homeschooling. 

 

In the list of "drawbacks," there are only two that relate to the challenges of adapting a classroom method to the home environment.

 

#1 is that the parent has to be a certified instructor -- which is false.

#2 is that there are "limited options for resources and networking" -- which is not really true IMO; there's quite a good selection online, comparable to many other educational methods.

 

Anyone with real experience with home Montessori would know that there are more pressing challenges, such as the much smaller class size, the usually much wider range of ages, the difficulty of modeling a serene and orderly demeanor to the children at all times :001_rolleyes: , and the eternal problem of pieces getting lost.   All of this would be important to mention.

 

Oh, wait... he thinks the small number of students is an advantage, because Montessori schools "prize small class sizes."  This is completely backwards.  A class of 40 children with one teacher is the ideal.    So he's not even able to describe the school version with any accuracy, let alone the homeschool version. 

 

And I'm rather taken with this bit (emphasis added):

 

"This method is modeled on a humanistic view of children.[5] If that’s not your view, or that approach doesn’t suit your student, then this model might not work for you."

 

"Yes, my husband and I were attracted to the program for its humanistic values, but it turned out that humanism just didn't work for little Timmy."   

 

:lol:

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The section on "school at home" is also baffling.   It seems like a combination of cut & paste and guesswork. 

 

I'm wondering if this article was written as some sort of AI experiment.  If so, that would explain their unique take on humanism, which is  pretty clearly oriented toward humans -- not to droids, bots, or cyborgs.  :laugh:

Edited by ElizaG
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That last comment wasn't meant to be mean, BTW; "automated journalism" has been becoming more and more common in the last several years.  See e.g. this article from Wired, and this two-part response.  Given that education is one of the most resource-intensive of human activities, you have to figure there are groups mining homeschool boards and blogs, trying to figure out how to monetize and manipulate us still further.   And with less effort. 

 

Or maybe the article is written by a real person who's looked at various sources, but lacks understanding of the subject, and just stuck phrases together in ways that don't always make sense.  I'm sure we've all experienced that, and unfortunately, it also seems to be becoming more common.  IMO, it's almost certainly due to the way writing has been taught in schools in recent decades.   Algorithms in; algorithmically generated text sample out. 

 

This is actually sort of at the core of traditional classical education:  we seek to raise and teach our children in such a way that they can write better than a computer program.  ;)

 

Maybe I'll say that, the next time someone asks about our "homeschool style."  It's sort of neo-Renaissance humanism.   We keep computers, but only as our tools.    And we're aware that they can all too easily be used to dumb us down to their level. 

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It's just fine.  There's nothing more challenging than trying to write an article that gives a bird's eye view of a topic to an audience with no knowledge or experience and keeping the audience members who are knowledgeable on the topic happy. Add to that the fact that many homeschoolers struggle deeply with generalities, and the author is going to get a lot of grief.  If the reader has a limited amount of firsthand knowledge in one part of the whole, such as limited exposure to a variety of people using the same general method, they may not realize their distorted view. 

 

Take, for example,  the unschooling group of about 40 families we used to hang out with because my daughters had friendships in that group even though we're Trivium/CM/Unit Study hybrids.  One parent there was the daughter of John Holt's best friend and she and her half dozen siblings were John Holt's guinea pigs K-12.  More than once I heard her discussing  some unschooling philosophy at the unschooling group and heard people tell her, "Well, that's not really unschooling," and " That's not how John Holt recommended unschooling,"  and  the like.  It happens here when it comes to Classical Education too.  Ideas evolve, there are different camps within different philosophies and no one owns all the definitions anyway.  An author can't get into all that, s/he has to stick with generalities and main points that just aren't going to apply to every situation so the audience gets an impression. People who care enough to research more in depth will become aware that homeschooling methods are like major religions-there are all sorts of denominations and interpretations among the adherents.

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Well, I know I struggle on a regular basis, though not so much with "generalities."  :001_smile:   But suppose you're right, and those of us who found these descriptions bizarre are simply narrow-minded and lacking in experience of the wider world of homeschooling. 

 

Where can I find these families who've done, say, Montessori at home, and whose experiences match up with a good chunk of the article?  

 

Books?  Blogs?  Forum threads?  E-mail lists?   I've read many over the years -- including pretty much all the M. resources mentioned in the article -- but haven't seen anything to support the list of pros and cons that he's posted.   Nothing even remotely near it, in fact.   So either this author is completely off base, or there's a whole other world of Montessori-influenced homeschooling that I don't know about, and that doesn't turn up in any other published works or search results. 

 

I'd like to keep an open mind, while still using my critical thinking skills and not just believing everything I read on some random web site.  How can I broaden my horizons on this subject?

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I know 2 different people who were Montessori teachers who ended up homeschooling their own kids.  They will tell you there are distinctly different types of Montessori education because I specifically asked about it when I saw different types of Montessori homeschooling going on and wanted to know if I was just not understanding what I was seeing and hearing from them. So yes, it is possible that you're seeing one camp and not the other.

The unschooling group I belonged to had 40+ families in it and met monthly to talk shop while the kids spent time together.  How many families are in your Montessori group and how often do they meet? It also had the 3 camps of unschooling I've seen for 16 year now-the group where it's always a child's-interest driven studies in all subjects at all times; the kind where no artificial learning is being used, only real life hands on applied learning but it was parent directed; and the free range parents (not the recently used term that applies to letting kids be unsupervised away from home-notice the evolution of terms over time) whose kids decide everything for themselves at all times including whether or not they want to study any subject in any way at any time. There were degrees and mixed of all of those at the unschooling group and all of them said they were doing what John Holt recommended.  That's individualism for you.

I live in the largest homeschooling community in the country, with just under 10,000 homeschooled kids in our county.  We have several groups that aren't philosophy specific that have 100-200 families in them. There are scores of smaller open groups and closed, stealth groups in addition to them.  When you talk shop with so many different homeschoolers, especially here where people move here from other places so often that being over 25 and born and raised here that it's weird and comment worthy, you get a much broader sense of educational philosophies that have been influenced by different factors all over the US.

Reading the same books and websites will not result in people interpreting and applying a philosophy the same way.  That's why I gave the example with the woman who was unschooled under the direct, continuous influence of John Holt.  Other unschoolers reacted to her explanations of what John Holt recommended as being bizarre, having no idea she's the person most able to articulate from actual experience what he recommended because she lived it first hand directly from him. So there you go.  Different people will do the same general thing in a myriad of different individual ways.

 That's why I used religion as an example too.  Every Christian you ever met will tell you they do things the way they do because the Bible teaches it, but we still have a huge array of denominations within Christianity who disagree about how to do things discussed in the Bible (baptism, communion, circumcision, what election and predestination are, etc.)  There are Christians who will tell you other Christians aren't really Christian because the Bible says they aren't while other Christians would say the same thing about them for the same reason.  They'll insist what other denominations do is bizarre. So, to repeat myself, we've all seen this phenomenon before and we'll all see it again because that's how people are.

As to the article, one person's pro is another person's con.  Additionally, not everyone in every situation will experience the same drawbacks because no methods is applied exactly the same way among all the people who propose it. Just because some homeschoolers didn't experience the con doesn't mean no homeschoolers ever experienced the con.  Then you have to layer in that not every kid will respond to every method the same way so some adaptation will necessary, but no method is all or nothing.   The author made a real effort to point these kind of things out with a few examples here and there and isn't under obligation to create an exhaustive list of every possible combination of pros and cons that could come up.  If it didn't fit each reader specifically, that doesn't mean it isn't good general information.

The target audience is people who don't have a sense of different methods.  Most Americans have only experienced one type of education (ps with whatever educational trends were en vogue and standardized by the government during their K-12 years) and have little or no concept of the huge range of different methods, approaches, content, scopes and sequence or pedagogy that homeschooling  allows.  The author has to serve a sampler platter and everything from the menu can't be on it.  Neither can every person's reaction to that particular restaurant's interpretation of each sample. Cut the author some slack for taking on a particularly tough challenge in an article short enough that many non-homeschoolers would be willing to read.

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I know 2 different people who were Montessori teachers who ended up homeschooling their own kids.  They will tell you there are distinctly different types of Montessori education because I specifically asked about it when I saw different types of Montessori homeschooling going on and wanted to know if I was just not understanding what I was seeing and hearing from them. So yes, it is possible that you're seeing one camp and not the other.

In the homeschool Montessori world that I've observed over the last ten years, there are several different approaches, though I wouldn't describe them as "camps."

 

- There are parents who draw their understanding of Montessori principles from the original AMI standards; those who follow more liberal standards, such as those of AMS or NAMC; and those who do quasi-Montessori (aka "Montesomething").

 

- Within each of these groups, there are parents who always try to use the official classroom materials; those who always substitute materials that they consider more appropriate for home use; and those who do a combination of both.   

 

The thing is, from what I've seen, the challenges I've mentioned above -- such as the need for exceptional patience on the part of the mother, the difficulty in setting up and supervising hands-on environments that meet the needs of different ages, and the mess factor -- are common to all of them.    

 

The AMS, which I think is currently the largest Montessori organization in this country, actually grew out of a few families' attempts at Montessori homeschooling in the early 1960s.  They faced the same sorts of issues as I've described, including toddler siblings swiping the small parts.  In the end, they gave up, pooled their resources, and started a school.  

 

So you'd think these points would be high on the list under "drawbacks."

 

(If there is an AI involved here, I guess I've just helped train it, free of charge.  :laugh: )

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