Reasons to Homeschool: Redefining Traditional and Classic Education
By Mimi Rothschild Proponents of home schooling and those who choose to home school their children are often thought of as being radical and anti-social. They are seen as bucking traditional school in favor of their own ideas about what school is and how it should be. While home school can be radical, it can also be a return to a more classical and traditional education than what is offered in the so-called traditional public schools. Indeed, by returning to the curriculums and methodologies used for many years, home schooling parents can play to their children's strengths. They can take advantage of the natural bio rhythm of their children and take their cues from the education of great thinkers, scientists, and mathematicians in history.
Home schooling was actually very common until very recently in history, especially for younger children. Basic math, reading, and writing skills were learned at home before formal schooling ever began. In this way, knowledge was passed directly from tutor to child in the comfortable and familiar settings of the home. Today, home schooling is the modern incarnation of this model of learning.
Home schooling, unlike traditional schooling, allows parents to take advantage of their child's biorhythms to help them get the most out of their school time. Instead of waking at 6:30 am, a child can sleep until 8 or 9 am and still get in a full day of school. For example, research shows that, as a rule, teenagers require more sleep and should be allowed to sleep a little later in the day. A home schooled teenager doesn't fall asleep in class because they woke up too early. Perhaps concentration is better in the morning and imaginative thinking is better in the afternoon. As a home schooling parent, you can take advantage of your child's natural ebbs and flows to maximize their learning.
Instead of learning history, science, or sociology in a fragmented fashion, through home schooling your child can learn history as it really happened: from ancient man to the present day. It is not fragmented or cut short, but presented as what it is: a continuous process. Home schooling mimics the way that civilization exists; building upon old ideas and hopefully learning from its past mistakes.
In many ways, it is home schooling that is more traditional and classic. Actually, public schooling is more radical: based upon new fangled, controversial, and often times wrong ideas about what is the best to teach and how children learn. Home schooling offers parents the opportunity to return to methods of learning that have existed for centuries. It also allows parents to take immediate advantage of the latest knowledge of how people function and learn. Home schooling your children is the best way to take advantage of the best of the old and new.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mimi Rothschild is a homeschooling parent, children's rights activist, author, and Founder and C.E.O. of online education company Learning by Grace, Inc. Rothschild and her husband of twenty-eight years reside in suburban Philadelphia with their eight children.
Feeling that “our current system of education has broken its promise,” Rothschild co-founded Learning By Grace, Inc. to provide families with Internet-based multimedia education to PreK-12 children all over the world.
In addition to her twenty years of experience as a homeschool mother, Rothschild has written a number of books dealing with education published by McGraw Hill and others. Her Home Education Websites Blog consists of helpful online content and activities for Christian homeschooling families.
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