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

I was not home eduction but now run my own business. The reason I ask is because I’ve been offered a corporate and I don’t know whether I could go from being free to work my hours to be being told what to do

Why is your spelling so poor? (Genuine question).

I'm a qualified teacher and I home educate. They're very different skills.

What I really don’t understand is how people afford to homeschool. OP you have said that your mother was unable to work which somewhat explains your situation.

But I don’t understand how it’s possible for so many households which presumably were based around both parents working to suddenly halve their income overnight.

I don’t see that happening!

Fascinating thread OP - thanks for offering this.

Are your parents polymaths, or at least between them do they make up one polymath - do they have tessalating areas of expertise (if you see what I mean?).

I couldn't have chosen to home ed DD even if I wanted to, due to my financial situation and need to work. (Not sure I would have if I could have, but certainly I can see the temptation).

BUT, my areas of expertise are English and the humanities. Drama. Could have had a stab at classics/languages.

Her dad has similar academic skills to my own, and is also a talented artist

Neither of us could have taught maths or sciences to any even half acceptable level, I don't think.

Was your education skewed towards your parents areas of expertise, do you think? Any subjects you never really stood a chance in?

If you home ed from the start/only do a few years of school then it just becomes the natural expectation of how life is that on work days you get on and do work, and that you do it because education is intrinsically important and you are the one ultimately benefiting. It is exactly like doing your work at university in that regard (or getting up and going to work as an adult, tbh).
Obviously that doesn't mean that home ed kids might not prefer to be having free time than doing their maths, but usually not to the point of refusal - and there is also a lot less peer pressure to not be a swot/geek/someone who actually enjoys education, so sitting down to study doesn't come with an automatic 'ugh, doing this makes me uncool' flag.

It is school where you find children losing their internal motivation after years of external compulsion supported by external reward structures (which then is a vicious spiral as it leads to schools having to get more and more authoritarian as the years go on to keep control over the increasingly larger and less motivated pupils).

I actually don't have a good answer on the right level of supervision. This is definitely a polcy issue. I think the issue for home schoolers isn't government supervision per se but the concern that government would prescribe an education that was not aligned to the reasonable views of the parents.

Sorry but this would be widely abused. Imagine a Venn diagram of people who abuse the benefits system and people home educating. There will already be considerable overlap.

If you then offer this group of people an additional source of money for deregistering their children you are hugely incentivising those people to deregister and you expand that part of the Venn so all of those flaky people who can’t be arsed have more free money paid to them to keep their kids out of school. With the current lack of scrutiny of home education this would be a recipe for the creation of a whole class of people with substandard to no education.

I fear that your approach to this is very idealistic. Your parents obviously took their role as educators very seriously and put a lot into it so you see home educating parents as having the best intentions. Unfortunately many people don’t have the same standards as your parents.

Without proper scrutiny you’re inviting a whole class of grifters to see this as a money making scheme, at the expense of the children who are left to rot on their devices all day.

Ah, I'm not sure they are comparable so I don't think my experience of home school will be very helpful. I hear you though, I hate being told what to do.

My education was skewed to my parents areas of interest but I think that was more about the culture of our family rather than their expertise.

Where my parents did not have the knowledge, I found my own tutors who did (sometimes with their help, often not).

The only area I can see i missed out on was sports. But obviously I could have got this from a club outside of school.

Ah sorry didn't answer the whole question. I didn't stand a chance in natural science and maths. But that may have been an aptitude problem rather than a schooling problem!

Probably so. I was likely lucky (do to in fact unfortunate circumstances).

Regretably in most cases I assume home ed is pursued by the wealthy.

I'm typing on a phone which i hate and can't really be bothered to go back and correct typos.

I am paid (in part) to write so it's not generally bad enough to prevent me from working.

I think it is primarily either the wealthy who have exacting standards about education or people from deprived backgrounds who don’t care about it.

I don’t think it should be limited only to the wealthy but I worry about it being delivered by people who are themselves poorly educated and who don’t value education.

There is a theory that it is mainstream education at an early age that destroys intrinsic motivation. Forcing children to boxes and to sit and learn the same as everyone else using rewards and punishment kills their motivation, drive and creativity. It looks like it's working because in most cases it creates compliance, but they're complying to avoid punishment, not because they have motivation to learn and improve.

I am a qualified teacher.
The most important skill teachers have is managing a room full of 25, 30 or more children without it descending into chaos.
The actual "teaching" part is not difficult, and most articulate adults can do it, if relating one-to-one with a child and there is a relationship of mutual respect.
Home educated children generally have no concept of being 'naughty' just because the adult is a 'teacher' and it is fun to be naughty in class.

Interesting op. I have a friend who was homeschooled and hated it, she begged to go to school and got a full scholarship aged 13 to attend boarding school and attended Cambridge, so quality wasn’t the issue, she was just very lonely and was hothoused. Her dc attend the local state school. She talks very negatively about home schooling

I'm sorry she had that experience. No doubt there are home schooled children who do not have a good experience.

@Giraffapuses did you/your parents consider going down the conventional route of GCSEs then A levels?
Why?/why not?

Why are you choosing Steiner schools for your DC? They have a scary reputation, and in my experience of seeing pupils moving from them to mainstream not very academic

They and I did consider this. Because we had not followed the standard coriculumn prior to this point, I had no experience passing exams. So, we thought it would not, at that point, be worthwhile/pleasant to go back and learn how to pass exams when other options to demonstrate competence were avaliable that better fit the knowledge and expertise i already had.

Yes, I would agree. Learning how the exams work seems to be a much bigger part of sittting GCSEs now than when I say them 30+years ago!
Learning how to jump the exam hoops does take away some of the joy of learning just for the fun of it.

Sorry to be picky but that's the second time I've not seen curriculum 😬 It's the teacher in me 😉