The Homeschooling Handbook_ From Preschool to High School - Mary Griffith [29]
Don’t be shy about your homeschooling. You don’t have to announce it to everyone you meet, but visible homeschoolers help make homeschooling familiar and acceptable to the general public. With enough of us around, the public may eventually understand that homeschooling can be fun and exciting, as well as effective, and we’ll find we have active support even from families who would never themselves choose to homeschool.
CHAPTER THREE
Structure, or Can We Wear Our Pajamas to School?
SO YOU’VE DECIDED homeschooling may be what you want for your family. You’re convinced that your children can grow to be competent and well-adjusted adults through homeschooling, and you’re satisfied that it’s legal. Now comes the big question: What do you do all day?
The popular image of homeschooling, of course, shows children sitting at the kitchen table, working diligently on their workbooks, with Mom carefully supervising while she bustles around cooking dinner. Although undoubtedly a few families do fit that image, a great many homeschoolers would not recognize themselves or homeschooling in that picture and would be dismayed at such a limited idea of homeschooling. There are a wide range of approaches to learning at home, and it may take you some time to find the style that best suits you and your family.
Theories of Learning
What you do all day will depend largely on your beliefs about children and about learning. If you believe, to use some common (even overused) metaphors, that children are blank slates to be written on, or empty buckets to be filled with facts and figures and ideas, you will take a much different approach to homeschooling than you would if you view children as growing plants to be nurtured.
One fundamental determinant is what you believe of the child’s nature: Are children naturally innocent and good, or inherently savage and corrupt? Another factor to consider is how children learn best: Must they be formally drilled on material to learn it, or can they acquire skills and knowledge less formally?
Dozens of educational theorists, from philosophers such as Socrates and Rousseau to researchers such as Howard Gardner, have addressed these issues, and many of their ideas influence homeschoolers as well as traditional educators. A little familiarity with some of the ideas most popular among homeschoolers will help you make sense of the wealth of available materials when you begin to make choices for your family.
Jean Piaget and Cognitive Development
The work of Swiss educator Jean Piaget has been tremendously influential among educators during the past several decades. As a result of his direct observation of children learning and working, he proposed that children go through several distinct stages of cognitive growth. First comes the sensorimotor stage (birth to two years), during which the child learns primarily through sensation and movement. At the preoperational stage (ages two to seven), children begin to master symbols such as language and start to be able to form hypotheses based on past experiences. At the concrete operational stage (ages seven to eleven), children learn to generalize from one situation to similar ones, although such reasoning is usually limited to their own concrete experiences. Finally, at the formal operational stage (eleven years and older), children can deal with abstractions, form hypotheses, and engage freely in mental speculation. Although the rate at which children progress through the stages varies considerably, the sequence of stages is consistent for all children. Therefore, to be appropriate and effective, learning activities should be tailored to the cognitive level of the child.
More recent researchers have begun to question the specifics of Piaget’s research, and some view his analysis of cognitive development as limited, focusing too much on the growth of logical skills to the neglect of other aspects of mental development.