Wang-Tai Lee: Think Before Choosing Home Schooling

Think Over Before Taking Home Schooling

In the ancient time, education stemmed from home; people learned things from their parents and siblings while farming, hunting and cooking. Being dissatisfied with that, people went to churches, wizards’ places, or some wise men’s houses to learn more. Schools, therefore, were developed gradually. They have played a great role in civilization history for thousands of years. Until recently, again, people were dissatisfied with the school systems, and some children are being taken out of school. Home schooling is becoming an issue in the education arena. Still, I never think home schooling is a good idea for three reasons.

First, a huge sense of alienation is widening everywhere because of urbanization and computerization, and the idea of home schooling will worsen them. People made conveniences of the inventions of modern technology in their lives wind up isolating themselves from the society. In addition, most of the families have one or two children now, so the kids are very lonely and isolated at home. However, human beings are social animals; both individual’s success and civilization developments depend on effective team works. A nice teamwork depends upon nice people skills. Thus, it is a good idea for parents to start looking for peers for their children, and even a little bit peer pressure in classroom is becoming useful for children’s growing up under such circumstance. Actually, schools provide good places to train children and practice team works. Home schooling doesn’t have such functions.

Secondly, political and economic stability depend on some major ideas, and home schooling cannot help to build them up. Those ideas such as majority rules and respecting minority, rule of law, team works, among others are necessary and extremely important. Without them, no government, company, international organization can operate efficiently; besides, the people in developing countries will keep suffering from dictatorship and despoliation. Those ideas are easier to know than to do; therefore, children need to be trained not just taught. In another words, in order to build up those basic ideas, our children need to be trained in schools for years through many different kinds of classes. People can learn some ideas in groups not just by one-on-one teaching method. Schools are the most supportive system in this world and can hardly be replaced.

Thirdly, the need of home schooling will be eliminated gradually because of the changing methods in schools. There are two main reasons for home schooling; one is the common use of modern IT (information technology) at home; the other is the unity teaching components in school. Now, distance education can provide flexible places and flexible time for teaching and learning activities. Moreover, school systems have become more varied. More and more schools allow different classroom philosophy so that parents can choose the most suitable one for their children accordingly.

As a matter of fact, our world is becoming a global village; globalization plus urbanization put a lot of strangers and foreigners together in the same community. School systems are one of the inevitable venue for parents and students to meet together. What’s more, there will be a device letting us to carry whole library’s knowledge in our palms; we can get it almost instantly by just using one finger only. Therefore, everyone is knowledgeable in the foreseen future, but I still believe the diverse schools are even more in need instead of none at that time.