AIBU to offer an AMA as a home-schooled adult?

[Giraffapuses]

Following the publication of this article I've noticed a lot of interest in home schooling so I thought an AMA with a home-schooled adult in the wild might be interesting.

https://www.thetimes.com/uk/education/article/home-schooling-uk-inspector-gx982bgd6

Had to Google. I believe I am talking about elective home schooling but I haven't heard that term before.

Honestly, OP, I know you mean well, but these kinds of threads can be seriously damaging to the HS community. I do understand that you’re trying to raise awareness of the benefits, but I’ve seen it on MN before, posts like this often end up causing more harm than good, because small comments get picked apart, misconstrued, or taken out of context, and it quickly spirals into something really negative

The financial cost of home education is no joke. Both in the sense you identify (missed-earning potential for whoever does the teaching) and the financial cost of education.

This is a barrier for many people and I don't think I have a good answer. Of course, as an advocate of home education, I would like the financial saving made by the state (when the child is not in school) to be passed to the parent. But, I suspect that would not be a vote winner.

It is most definitely a risk. It is trite, but if it gives one person the confidence to free their struggling child from the school environment, I think it is worth it.

Also, I don't think it will have the reach to be a meaningful threat to HE. It's a mumsnet thread by a nobody.

thanks interesting to hear your take on all this. There is a middle ground. My kids go to school basically for half a day. I work and am with them in afternoons. Like I say I often feel a lot of pressure to provide - it is so expensive to do anything nowadays. I think taking kids to the other side of the world is one of the best ways to educate them but that needs an income

I understand you don’t have a wide reach. What I mean is that something you say can easily be taken negatively. Someone reading it then carries that perception into real life and judges a parent of a HS child they meet, which can have very real consequences for that family. So no, it might not cause damage on a societal level, but it absolutely can harm individual HS families

My child had tutors at home as ASD issues meant she couldn’t attend school. Honestly, as a university lecturer in previous years, I couldn’t have provided a well rounded education for my child, so am grateful for the school covering these costs and ensuring she had a good platform for FE, she’s now at art college looking at university

May I please ask what you consider to be well rounded and what they studied with the tutors?

Congrats on getting to art college and best of luck with the uni plans.

@Giraffapuses
Since you tried both school and home ed, are there any changes you would make to the school system (even if it was a complete redesign) that might have helped you thrive?

By well rounded I mean typical school subjects to GCSE level so she could move in the direction of her choice academically speaking. I could have helped with many subjects but not to the level she needed for GCSEs

You can't have much confidence in your choices, if you're not comfortable with an open conversation about home schooling.
Why should the subject be protected from the daylight of a discussion board?

StormyLandCloud.

So a combination of mfl, English language and literature, a humanatees subject, art, plus science?

That's pretty impressive that all those costs were covered for you..

I went to private school and did two languages, 5 stem subjects, plus English language and literature (nothing creative and no history, geography etc.) which with hindsight probably wasn't very well rounded although I got where I wanted to be at the time I suppose.

I home educate my son and my daughter was him educated for seven years before college. She wants to go into a very niche career path and the skills she has leant through home education have hopefully opened this up to her.

I’m not against schools if they work (they both went until Year 3) but I would now always choose to home educate.

I love hearing stories from home educated adults.

Nobody’s trying to ‘be a teacher’. What home educating parents are doing is entirely different. Your posts show your ignorance about home education

EHE is what you are talking about. In the U.K., home schooling means something different. It means education provided by a school, at home.

Hi, maybe someone else has asked this already, but I haven't seen it: what were your parents' reasons for homeschooling you?

So from what you’ve said, you did an OU course and then a degree- have you found not having GCSE English and Maths hampered you at all when applying for jobs as an adult?

Apologies if I’ve got it wrong, but it doesn’t look like you had any formal maths or English qualifications. increasingly with AI filters on job applications, yours would be filtered out as having not got the basic requirements, or has you not found employers in your field are putting those as minimum requirements?

How do families afford to home school? Does it depend on one parent being a high earner?

Another question - when you entered the world of work, did you find the structure and social aspects hard to adapt to, or did university work to teach you those soft skills before hand?

Guess it’s the same way some families manage to have a SAHP.

I home edded my sons who are now at uni. Can I ask - do you feel there is stigma attached to having been home educated? Did you feel this at any stage of your life? Have you always felt ok about being open about it? Do you feel judged when you tell people? Are they surprised?

Steiner is an interesting choice given its decidedly National Socialist racial teachings and very prescriptive approach.

The OFSTED reports into the three Steiner Free Schools make interesting reading to say the least.

Hahaha. So so many changes to the school system. If I was the education secretary, I would introduce self-directed learning, I would reform the coriculumn (prioritising an entirely different set of schools). I would not segregate children by ages or ability.

My parents reasons for home schooling were a mixture of dissatisfaction with the teaching methods used in school, their personal and political view of the coroculumn and a dissatisfaction with the culture of schools (everything from wearing a uniform to bullying to institutionlisation).

Do you feel you missed out on the social side of things?

Did you have many friends as a kid?