Philosophy

Not ‘does it work?’ but ‘Why does it work so well?’
Home-Based Education – Excerpted from an article by Roland Meighan
University of Nottingham School of Education

Why does it work so well? – Natural learning and ‘dovetailing’
Families educating at home often engage in highly sophisticated activity, without necessarily being able to articulate what they are doing. Most parents find that young children are ‘natural’ learners. They are like explorers or research scientists busily gathering information and making meaning out of the world. Most of this learning is not the result of teaching, but rather a constant and universal learning activity, ‘as natural as breathing’.
Parents achieve the remarkable feats of helping their children to walk and talk by responding to this process. This is perhaps the most successful example of educational practice world-wide. In the first five years of life, astonishing learning takes place as a non-verbal infant learns its native language, to walk and to achieve competence within its home and local environment. All this achieved, with varying degrees of success, by so-called amateurs – the parent or parents and other caregivers, such as grandparents.
The highly sophisticated activity of parents is described as ‘dovetailing’ in to the child’s behaviour. Parents appear to have no predetermined plan of language teaching, they simply respond to the cues provided and give support to the next stage of learning as the child decides to encounter it.
 
Varied learning styles
Human beings, adults and children alike, differ from each other quite dramatically in learning styles. To date, 32 such differences have been catalogued. An example would be the difference between those who learn better with some background noise and those who learn better in quiet conditions. Individuals also differ in the kind of light conditions, temperature conditions, bodily positions, food intake and type of companions needed for efficient learning. Bio-chronology is another factor, for some are early-day learners and some late-day or even evening/night learners.
Therefore, the situation in which one teaches faces 30 children in one room and is required to deliver the same material within a given period of time, say 45 minutes, to all of them means that drastic harm to the quality of learning of many of the class and the resultant loss of a great deal of potential learning is inevitable. In contrast, in the home-based education I have witnessed the families rather take it for granted that learning styles differ and vary the learning situations accordingly.
 
Efficient use of time
When I have interviewed children who have come out of school into home-based education I have asked them to compare the two experiences. Usually the first response is the comment on efficiency of learning. They say that they have frequently learnt more by coffee time at home than in a whole day at school, so that the rest of the day is ‘additional learning’. This helps explain why children who are ‘behind’ at school soon catch up at home, and also why they can end up two – ten years ahead of their schooled counterparts.
 
A non-hostile learning environment
It is not just efficiency that the children note. They have told me about the relaxed atmosphere at home, which encourages them to be increasingly confident in taking over the management of their own learning. When they started school at five years of age, we know they were asking about 30 knowledge or enquiry questions an hour (Wells, 1986), but that this soon drops and eventually gets to around zero.
In the non-hostile home-based education, they tell me, their interest in learning and curiosity and questioning begins to build up again.
 
Direct access to an information-rich society
When schools were set up we lived in an information-poor society. Therefore, getting children together in one place to give them access made some kind of sense. Now that we live in an information-rich society, it makes little or no sense, as Richard North observes:
We no longer have to force-feed education to children: they live in a world in which they are surrounded by educative resources. There are around 500 hours each of the schools’ television and radio every year in this country. There are several million books in public libraries. There are museums in every town. There is a constant flow of cheap or free information from a dozen media. There are home computers which are easily connected to phones and thus other computers. . . There are . . . the old, the disabled, the very young all in need of children in their lives, all in need of the kind of help caring and careful youngsters can give, and all of them rich sources of information about the world, and freely available to any child who isn’t locked away in school. (North, 1987)
 
Adults as learning coaches
When adults quiz the parents about home-based education they often ask how one or two parents can replace the team of experts of a school staff. Apart from pointing out that we live in an information rich society anyway, parents describe themselves as ‘fixers’ or ‘learning site managers’, who help arrange the learning programme and may often operate as fellow learners, researching alongside their children, rather than as instructors.
 
This is excerpted from a longer article from Education Review [47 (3), 275-287, available in the Auckland College of Education Library.
ROLAND MEIGHAN is Special Professor of Education, School of Education, University of Nottingham, Nottingham NG7 2 RD United Kingdom
 
Further reading – what books do you recommend?
Look for these books in your library, bookshop or internet bookseller under ‘homeschooling’.
 
‘Educating Children at Home’ – by Alan Thomas
‘The Homeschool Reader’ – ed. by Home Education Magazine editors
‘The Homeschooling Handbook’ and
‘The Unschooling Handbook’ – both by Mary Griffith.
‘Teenage Liberation Handbook’ – by Grace Llewellyn
‘Guerilla Learning’ – by Grace Llewellyn & Amy Silver
‘Family Matters – Why Home-schooling Makes Sense’ – by David Guterson
‘Homeschooling’ for Excellence – by David and Micki Colfax
‘Teach Your Own, How Children Learn, How Children Fail’ – all by John Holt
‘Better Late Than Early’, ‘Home-Grown Kids, Home-Style Teacher ‘
- all by Raymond and Dorothy Moore
‘For the Children’s Sake’ – by Susan Schaeffer Macauley
‘Dumbing Us Down’ – by John Taylor Gatto
‘Why Johnny Can’t Read’ and ‘Why Johnny Still Can’t Read’ -both by Rudolph Flesch
‘Home Schooling Children with Special Needs’ by Sharon C. Hensley
‘Beyond Survival’ – by Diana Waring
 ’A Charlotte Mason Companion’ by Karen Andreola
‘You Can Teach Your Child Successfully’ by Ruth Beechick
‘Educating the Whole-Hearted Child’ by Clay and Sally Clarkson
 ’Homeschooling: A Patchwork of days: Share a day with 30 homeschooling families’ by Nancy Lande
‘Real Life Homeschooling: The Stories of 21 Families Who Teach Their Children at Home’ by Rhonda Barfield
‘And the Skylark Sings with Me: Adventures in Homeschooling and Community-Based Education’ by David H. Albert
 
NZ Books
‘Our Secondary Schools Don’t Work Any More’ by David Hood
‘Teach Your Children Well’ by Choon Tan with Veronika Meduna
‘Putting the Joy back into Egypt’ by Jean Hendy-Harris