From the day your child was you have been home educating - assisting them in their quest for knowledge of the world around them, answering their questions, teaching them to walk and talk. You have already done the hard stuff, and without a curriculum. In fact, if you truthfully look back at this stage, you yourself have not had much of a hand in all the wonderful things your child has accomplished. Our children are born with the ability to teach themselves everything they need to know about surviving in the world they live in, and they do it well. School interrupts this natural flow of learning and eventually kills it. If you leave children alone and just provide enough resources, encouragement and a caring environment, that is all you will ever need. Trust them and they will get the job done.
Home school is an option open to families in Australia and often the decision to home educate your child is made well after your child has started school. Schools are a fairly recent invention of man as they have only been around for about 150 years or so. Before that, parents always taught their children at home, and it was a natural part of life. Going to school is not the natural way for a child to learn and many children struggle with the concept of school. As a result, parents often see a change for the worse in their children. They become unhappy, angry little people unable to communicate with parents and siblings as they once did.
An Australian lecturer in education, who has been researching home education for ten years, has found that children who have had structured lessons at home as well as children who had absolutely no structure at home have both turned out to be socially and academically ahead of schooled peers. The only drawback that he found in the ten years of study was the lost wages of one parent.
Children do not need to be placed in artificial situations so that they can 'become socialised'. Socialization forced upon children in schools and playgrounds is not true socialization. Real socialization happens all the time, every minute of the day with parents, siblings, shopkeepers, in the park and best of all, children with themselves and their dreams. It happens all the time and we do not need to set it up. The type of socialization that does happen in the schoolyard is not the type most of us want for our children; the bullying and the peer pressure and the bad language, and children that grow up in charge of their own socialization grow strong and confident and able to communicate with a wide range of people.
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