Home schooling or formal education?

Home schooling or formal education?

Children who are being home schooled in NSW have increased from 1703 in July 2008 to 2802 in July 2012, which is up to 65% in four years. The reason behind this can be considered as what Sharyn Grebert, the secretary of Home Education Australia said: ''There is a culture of bullying within our schools. That has had a tremendous impact on a number of home schoolers.''

The existence of bullying in schools can be referred to “violence” of the “five faces of oppression” that suggested by Young (1990). Violence usually occurs in some disadvantaged groups such as female, black people or homosexuality. Violence makes children hurt both physically and psychologically. Especially for psychological hurt, it would be a great impact on children as they are young and vulnerable. So in order to avoid the hurt, some parents determine to educate their children at home. Home schooling is considered as a safe and convenient way to educate the children. Most parents would be the tutors who teach their children almost all subjects, or maybe more than these, such as religion etc. (Berger, 1997)

But what does home schooling lack compared to formal education? What does the increasing tendency of home schooled students mean to the government? In my opinion, although home schooling has its advantages, something important has been neglected. Firstly, since these children are taught at home, they have fewer opportunities to contact with other people. So they are less likely to involve the community with people from various ages, and they might be socially awkward when they grow up, because social contact is also an essential part of one’s life. In contrast, formal education provides more opportunities to meet various people such as different teachers, classmates and staffs. They know how to deal with the relationships between different people. Students from formal education are more independent than those who are home schooled, as they have to handle things in school alone, that is, without their parents’ help. Secondly, some knowledge needs to be taught with the help of equipment, for example, science course, students need to do or observe lots of experiments to get a better understanding of the content. Normally schools have their labs with sufficient equipment and chemicals for students to use; however, it’s hard to get the complicated experiments done at home. The increasing tendency of home schooled students is also a threat to the government. If the number of these students keeps increasing, then schools are not going to run or at least decrease the qualities as they don’t have enough funding to support school facilities and staffs’ salaries.

Schools should minimise the phenomenon of bullying as much as possible. Bullying is the main cause of home schooling. Nevertheless, home schooling both influences the students themselves and the operations of schools. I hope that the home schooling which is due to the bullying would decrease or even vanish through the enhancing of the management of schools.

Reference:

http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/home-schooling-up-65-in-four-years-20130907-2tcj8.html

Berger, Eugenia Hepworth. (1997). Home Schooling. Early childhood education journal 24(3), 205-208.

Young, Iris Marion. (1990). Justice and the politics of difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press.