classroom at home

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More and more Americans are homeschooling their children in the belief that they will become better prepared for life by learning at home rather than at public school. Here’s a look at four families who have turned their homes into classrooms.

Classroom at Home, by Peter Hossli

(photos by charly kurz)

4 Comments leave a comment below

  1. I am one of those homeschooling Americans. I can’t say enough good things about it! My kids are 7, 10, and 16. They are happy and creative and polite (usually) and aside from the possibility that they are plotting some sort of mutiny, I feel confident that we are on the right track.

  2. I think it’s good to keep in mind that homeschooling is not a novel system for education, but rather a lack of system that can, at best, do something even more important- ensure originality. I think it’s vital for society to have students that have come from idiosyncratic systems of learning and processing, because these people will naturally produce a more dynamic body of ideas and working approaches as adults. I think homeschooling is most laudable for enabling a child to innovate and reinterpret, I don’t think the academic strength of home schooled students comes from the academic approach, but rather from the students curiosity and self-motivation. Humans are natural academics if it’s not foisted upon them. I think a lot of our negative attitude (even in adults!) towards academia comes from negative associations created in school, the idea that learning is something you must do is absurd.

    I don’t think there’s much of a social-skill issue, at least not inherent in homeschooling itself. A lot of parents homeschool to keep their children away from other kids, which, besides be questionable in itself, is bound to result in some social issues. If, on the other hand, the project is undertaken for education, and not isolations sake, I don’t think it makes any difference. Casanova was home schooled.

  3. We live in California 2 blocks from the elementary school my Mom, her brother and my cousins and second cousins all went to. It’s a parking lot with two buildings on it. To see those small children in uniforms playing on the asphalt makes my heart break. My children are taught in our home and at the museums and parks around our home. It feels like a luxury to me to able to teach my children at home.

  4. This could turn out either amazing or disastrous, depending on how a parent can provide structure, how up-to-date she/he can keep his/her knowledge, and how the parent can communicate with the child so that the child is curious to learn. The child has to be lead to a certain amount of eagerness to learn as the learning hours are inevitably shorter and less intense. After all this you could have a unique individual with great practical knowledge. It’s also good because kids raised like this could lead to the end of the current 9-to-5 slavery system of working we have and instead develop a new system of getting jobs done without being required to spend our lives in tiny offices(like everybody freelancing).

    However, the thought of those home-schooling weirdo families I saw on WifeSwap give me shudders…