Saturday, November 19, 2005

Implications for US Home Schoolers of PA Murders

This article on the issue of the press treatment of the Pennsylvania homeschooling teen murderer seems to get the situation about right, as far as it goes.

The question that of course will remain in the minds of many, but that would be almost impossible for anyone to address responsibly, is whether this particular enactment of homeschooling was significant in providing the impetus to murder, but even if a direct link is hypothesised, (say along the lines of the murders being an example of a teen rebelling against excessive coercion), the homeschooling community need not suffer as a whole, since the uniquely personalised nature of home education means that it would be ridiculous to extrapolate from this case to any other home schooling family.

General conclusions about the effects of home schooling, whether these be good or bad, are very difficult to draw, although it does seems reasonable to refute claims that home schooling necessarily compromises learning by pointing to individual cases, and quite permissable to make a very reasonable case for the superiority of certain theories of learning that do abound in the HE community.

HT for the first article: Daryl

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