Foreign Perspectives

One of the interesting effects of the perceived downhill slide of the schooling system in America is that there has been a massive upsurgence in interest in home schooling which hasn’t, yet, been reflected in the UK.

That’s meant that there has been a growth in the support network available to anyone contemplating home schooling and the range of sites offering handholding and practical assistance is surprisingly large as a glance at the learning at home site will quickly show. Pick any one of the resources that are listed and you’ll find a surprising depth to them. Home schooling isn’t the unplanned activity that perhaps you might expect and complete curricula are available with weekly schedules of activities for you to follow.

I suspect that if more people knew that such programmes were available then it would be a much more widely taken up activity generally. I for one wouldn’t really have contemplated it on the basis that I would have felt sure that I’d just have dithered about and ended the year with nothing done yet with a weekly programme such as some of these sites provide, you have the necessary markers to ensure that you keep more or less on track.

What seems less common in America is the continuation of that home schooling into home university. That’s where we have the advantage in the form of the Open University which had perhaps the ultimate triumph of home schooling in its prospectus for 2007: a young girl who’d just completed her degree at 17, a time when most people would have another year to go before even starting a degree. Now that really says something about home schooling!

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