All these comments are telling, and useful for edification. I’m particularly grateful for the book from #35 Mark, and will investigate this.

In June, God willing, our first child will arrive. There are two things that terrify me about this prospect, and have for years:

1) Education–particularly public education
2) Legal and social attitude (ie. Statist attitudes) toward parents and men in particular regarding children

Point 2 is of course a whole other topic, and I won’t digress there.

I, my older sister and younger brother were all home-schooled to a lesser or greater degree. During this process we learned to read “phonetically”, learned grammar with a thoroughness comparable to military rifle-stripping exercises, and learned math by massive repetition until we “got” it. I have not been familiar with alternative methods of teaching these basic things, but obviously there are.

My sister did extremely well. I did well. My brother never responded to home-school with the level of discipline needed to excel. Ultimately his education was finished through private schools. My sister finished her’s with grades 11-12 in a private school, to get an accredited diploma. I finished mine with 12th grade in a public HS, for the same primary reason.

I had previously concluded that the differences in responsiveness to home school was due to personality differences, however our family’s experience and our relative performance also track with the amount of time our mother had to provide personal, focused attention to our education. About halfway through my grades, she began working from home with increasing hours. By the time my brother was in middle elementary grades, he was officially enrolled in distance-education programs that graded his tests and the like, with our mother monitoring his studies rather than teaching directly.

The implication here is the same as that for parents who choose to use the public education system: child performance tracks with parent involvement and reinforcement of lessons (or supplementation in many cases). Secondarily, parents should be in the best position to evaluate–with data from surrounding observers–what situation or measures are needed to maximize their child’s capabilities at a given age (not grade).

Whether or not our child is home-schooled, I intend to teach him the following basic skills from age zero: reading, grammar (writing), math, and critical-thinking. This last one is perhaps the saddest lack in today’s education system, and by the time we’re done I hope to be a little better at it, myself.

–JC