A traditional school is associated with a bell signaling lessons' beginning and end, tedious homework, conflicts with classmates in a teenage period and never-ending exams. All people who are adult now remember this academic atmosphere. Some of them believe that drawbacks of on-campus education harden students’ will, teach them to adapt to life in different social groups, enjoy real world and achieve success in competition.
But there are also parents preferring to educate their children at home. Such alternative allows them to create comfortable conditions for young people, approach learning process from an unusual perspective. This format is called homeschooling. Its popularity increases very quickly. Statistics show that annual growth rate is between 7-15%. About 2 million students study at home today.
The concept of homeschooling is not new. It was used several centuries ago. But now we can see its re-emergence at new development stages. Particular love for domestic study is observed in Australia, Japan, US, UK, India and many other countries.
There are several reasons why parents choose this format: desire to control the learning process, undertake responsibility for kids’ health and safety, spend more time in a family circle, include non-standard disciplines in a personal curriculum. Some moms and dads want young people to study history and commandments of their religion. Also, a child may have a serious illness which prevents one from visiting school.
Whatever parental motifs are, learners receive some tangible benefits. We have prepared the list of homeschooling advantages compared with traditional educational system. Check it out below.
Avoiding emotional pressure
Peers at a regular school are not always kind and polite. Bullies may influence child’s psyche negatively, which leads to lowering self-esteem. In addition, professors not always find soft phrases to inform students about their mistakes, use such words as “stupid”, “worthless”, “no-talent”, “lazy”, “lagging”.
Academic world turns into a jungle where only the strongest species survive. It is necessary to receive the highest marks, show the best sports results, gain authority in a class to make friends, deserve sympathy and love. A person starts to believe that people may appreciate one’s accomplishments but nobody will appreciate one’s soul and unique inner world.
Parents love us whatever we do, regardless of mistakes we make. They are always ready to land a helping hand and say kind words. That is why children educated at home learn to trust people, be themselves, develop natural talents without being afraid to deviate from adolescent trends, disappoint society, face ridicule and disapproval. It is a great pleasure to wear favorite clothes, behave in a way one likes, form personal opinion without outside influence. After growing up, homeschooled people are more confident than those who had to adjust their character to fit into a system.
Customized curriculum
While compiling an educational plan, parents can take into account student’s preferences, career aspirations, character traits and learning pace. Less hours may be allocated for disciplines which a child knows well, while greater attention may be paid to filling knowledge gaps and considering tricky topics. Moms and dads may choose any duration and number of lessons, organize one long or several short learning sessions. A tailor-made schedule allows to elaborate course materials more profoundly, without haste, irritation and overloading.
Better academic performance
Experience of many families shows that homeschooled students absorb knowledge much easier and faster than their peers studying at regular schools, often need just several hours to cope with topics which take a week in a standard curriculum. This is due to careful choosing learning techniques and information channels, that way kids require less English homework help.
Young people prefer different ways to learn (auditory, visual, kinesthetic), which is not always taken into account by professors working with large classes and applying the same approaches for everyone. When studying the most suitable course materials, students show enthusiasm, become more motivated to work harder, enjoy educational process. For example, a person who hates reading can watch a video lecture or listen to an audiobook.
Warm student-teacher relationships
Students at regular schools often feel that educators do not care about their emotional state and just want children to obey strict orders. Also, professors may simply have no time to answer everyone’s questions and develop individualized curricula. Sometimes, kids are shy and afraid to seem not clever enough in the eyes of surrounding people. As a result, some nuances remain unclear, mistakes are made, and a person receives low marks.
This never happens when studying with loving parents who strive to ensure psychological comfort for their children. It is easy to find out all information of interest, receive support and advice when you are the only learner in a class.
Safe environment
Kids and teenagers are very curious and impressionable. Drugs and alcohol can bring them to a self-destruction path. This often happens when there are some cool guys in a class who smoke and drink beer. Other students repeat their actions to gain some authority and understand that bad habits are harmful when it is way too difficult to give them up. In addition, there are many extremities in society, such as sexual harassment, racism, gender, religious and ethnic discrimination, physical and psychological violence.
Understanding that school may be an unsafe environment, increasing number of parents prefer to protect their children from adverse influence, strive to educate better humans with correct value orientations and behavior patterns.
Transmitting family values
Most parents would have no objections to the kind of knowledge children are infused at schools, but as for values, that is a whole different matter. In a world where governments are busy infusing their own ideology into children, many families resist handing their children over to government educational plans. Transmitting their own values to their children is a tough job when schools are busy transmitting different values to them and experience shows that it is often the school values (shared by peers) which win the battle. Here homeschooling comes to make this right and let your children be educated with the values you have, not with the values politicians want them to have.
So if you want to be in control of what kind of education your children get, homeschooling is an option to think about.
