Does modern schooling meet the standard?

Interesting thought - at least to me - I have just come back from the secondary school that one of my children is still attending for VIth Form. I arrived at 09.00 and reported to reception to collect a piece of work that was left over from last year's Art GCSE. I was asked to wait whist the students dispersed. This afforded me the opportunity to watch the frenetic activity that takes place presumably every morning as the kids and the teachers rush to and fro with apparant purpose.

I know that I went through it, albeit in a smaller school, and indeed most of us have been through it in one form or another. But is it what we should really be doing? Is this really the best way to educate and bring up our kids - to abdicate repsonsibility at age five and chuck them all into an uber creche until they are ready to leave home ( possibly) at the age of 18?

I don't know for sure and I am not saying that it is wrong, after all the schooling system does produce people fit for the social context in the vast majority of cases. It does provide the social context in which we find ourselves with adequate fodder to carry on the tasks that we allocate to ourselves ( or perhaps are allocated to us - directly or indirectly).

Of course it does provide us with qualifications that we are told are either improving or getting worse depending upon the side of the fence that we sit on and it provides us with dentists and dustment, shop assistants and surgeons and so on.

But does it provide us with the right context in which to raise our children, pass on our genes and fulfil a role on the planet and in the ecosystems that we are working within? I am not so sure. I think that the paradigm is running us and not the other way around.

Like I said, just a thought and I guess that I have some teaching to do.

Ok so this isn't going to be easy

Don't let anyone tell you that home schooling your kids is going to be easy because it is not. It is demanding, challenging, exhausting, frustrating and all those other words that are not going to get onto this page today. On the other hand, it is also very fulfilling, rewarding, exciting, instructive and so on. Add to that the opportunity to build a relationship with your chidren that is missing from most homes because the children are off to school every day. Then add on a bit more about one's own education. regardless of where you have got to on the academic path, there is always a bit of extra learning that you can glean. Not to mention those of use for whom school days are so far into the past that they seem like someone elses lifetime. Catch up and updated knowledge is both interesting and a little scary.

I think that this blog is going to be difficult to maintain also for the simple reason that time is at a premium. However, it will be done and i hope that it will be instruictive for those of you who get around to reading it. However, now I have a Spanish test to set.

What are we all about?

A few months ago we decided to teach some of our children at home. The trigger was that one of our boys was due to go over to secondary school and we felt that he wasn't ready for it. Paranoid parents, you might ask? Well perhaps but in our defence I would say that we have put five of our children through the school system so far and have one more still going through it. The last three...well for the last three of them we thought something different was in order.

It really wasn't a decision to be taken lightly and as we have moved further into it, I really cannot emphasise that point enough.

There were some mitigating circumstances however. One of our boys was due to start secondary school in September 2011 and we felt that he really wasn't ready. I should add that both he and his younger brother had already been subject to considerable levels of support in their first school and both were ( and still are ) under review by speach therapists. I'll talk more about their own particular circumstances in another blog as there is a fair bit to it.

Opening Post

Hi guys, this is the first post of our Home Schooling blog. That is Somerset, England by the way for those of you who have zoned in from over the Pond.