Watson's Blog describes what some of us got up to last night. The only thing she doesn't go into was the bit about my lifts and their beers under their chairs. Good grief, the return journey was a voluble one! And they wouldn't get out of my car when I tried to drop them off, so involved were they in discussing the issue of some of the seven deadly sins!
Thanks for what turned out to be an extremely entertaining evening, Watson
An interesting public home ed 'event' appears to have been the recent programme of Wife Swap (so my home edded son has been telling me) in which a traditional schooled family has a swap with a home educating family.
ReplyDeleteApparently, the home ed family was awful and the wife coming over to visit *made* (they were allowed to force the other family to behave in a new way) the children go to school. Apparently the children loved it, and in fact preferred it. She also made the father go to work.
Whereas, the home edding wife who went to stay in the conventional family made the father stay at home because she felt he was a workaholic. My son informed me that the home educating family was quite patently awful and that the experience of education for the children was unpleasant because 'the father was an extremely selfish man who had no interest in common preference seeking'.
I don't know if there is any conclusion that one can draw here (and perhaps I should not have mentioned this!) but I think that the quality of any form of ecucation is limited most specically by the person in power's capacity for entertaining good ideas with a sound set of moral theories to back them up.
Yep, you are quite right about your last point and also right to raise the issue of HE failures because there definitely are some!
ReplyDeleteIt isn't any good, incidentally, getting out of the argument by saying that schools have a huge rate of failing the children educationally and emotionally...we must directly face our own failures and attempt to deal with them.
This is why I think it such a good idea to advocate for the theories of taking children seriously. These theories offer a moral and epistemological framework that would prevent the type of problems to which you refer and they make sense, which means that they withstand critical scrutiny to a very high degree. This means that there is hope that people really can be persuaded of the value of these ideas, (once they have overcome those entrenched memes, of course.)
Lol...Look, I have photos too!
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