Homeschooling?

Question

Should parents be allowed to teach their children via homeschooling if they don't have teaching credentials?

Answer 1

I will start answering with a couple of questions...Does ANYONE need to have credentials to: have a baby, to teach it to- babble, crawl, talk, walk, eat with a fork, color. paint, build a block tower....etc? Why at the state mandated age (5,6,7) are parents suddenly not capable of knowing how to teach their children? Who knows them best? Don't we live in the age of almost too much information? Most of the homeschool parents I know are trying to get the best education for their children and want them to be able to think for themselves not to "think" what the state wants them to.
We all have gifts and talents. We can teach what we know and learn what we don't. Also we can have an expert in a specific subject where our skills or talents are lacking help. Also in a two parent family there are 2 sets of skills and knowledge that can be utilised. Once children reach a certain point they also have the capability for self learning. They can look subjects up at the library, on the internet, specialised classes etc.

Answer 2

Some very interesting answers, but I'm assuming since you came on the teaching forum to ask this instead of the homeschooling forum, you didn't get what you expected.
I am a homeschool parent, and I don't need a teaching certificate to teach my two children. Most teachers I know (and I do know many from my years as a publicschool volunteer and PTA Board member) will agree that a lot of what they learned in college is how to teach to a group. Most of the true knowledge they receive is on the job.
I do not need to know how to work with a group to teach two children.
But I do know how to work with a group, as I have worked in Children's Ministry, teaching many many children at a time for about 6 years now. I learned how to do that through mentoring and on the job training.
I've also worked as a publicschool afterschool program director and homework tutor for two years. All learned on the job.
When you ask if we need to be credentials to teach our children, you are forgetting two important things.
First, we are free in this country to teach our children in the fashion we choose.
Second, homeschool curricula is not written in the same manner as basic ps texts. For example, my daughter's biology 1 course came with:
teacher manual
student text
teacher lab manual
student lab manual
teacher answer keys for quizzes, tests and labs
student quiz, test and lab booklets
the teacher manual has background info, enrichment exercises, resources for further info, teaching tips, directives on what the child is to get out of each lesson and many other things. And that is just the teacher's manual for the text. then you have all the information for the labs, it is quite extensive.
Isn' this the same thing a teacher with credentials brings to the table?
It is obvious from some of your answers about homeschooling that you carry a lot of bitterness and resentment toward your parents, but that does not mean that ALL homeschool parents should send their kids back to publicschools because you think it's bad.

Answer 3

We do live in a free country and educational choice is a freedom that no family should ever give up. I agree with what Pam S. has stated and, in most cases, schools don't teach children how to think, they teach them what to think.

Most private school teachers don't have teaching credentials. Is there/should there be, a special set of rules for private schools?

Answer 4

My mom taught me homeschooling up until 2nd grade. She taught me and my brother and my sister. My brother only took 3 years to graduate college, my sister recieved a presidential scholarship from our local community college and got her masters degree, and I skipped a grade in elementry school--my mom didn't have a teaching credential but she had a great love for us and our education. All the resources necessary to give a child an excellent education in the home are available to anyone.

Answer 5

Having gone through the program for getting a credential, I can assure you that the whole thing is greatly overrated. Teachers really learn on the job a lot more than from classroom theory. Also, as another poster has pointed out, many teachers in private schools of all kinds have no credentials - and yet, a lot of people have the idea that private schools provide a better education. However, that has very little to do with homeschooling anyway - because learning in a natural setting outside of the classroom is a very different experience. Techniques developed for a classroom setting are not at all appropriate when helping a child to learn something - it's much more simple and natural in a one on one setting.

When learning outside of the classroom, you don't have to sit for day after day, waiting and watching as the teacher attempts to present state mandated material to a roomful of students who have not only varied abilities and learning styles but a variety of social and home life situations and stresses... In a homeschool setting, the same material can be absorbed in a small fraction of the time. The material itself can be chosen to meet the needs of the individual student, and wonderful resources, all the way through high school level, can be chosen from a wide range of things not available to the classroom teacher. A homeschooling family isn't limited to things that have managed to make it through a board of directors who may or may not know much about the subject or about how learning works - or about that individual student.

I've seen quite a few homeschoolers grow up and go on to impressive situations - some flourishing in college ( some on merit scholarship) and some doing well in other pursuits they've been drawn to. Social opportunities are always available - homeschoolers get together for park days, field trips, and all sorts of activities, and most of them also participate in various kinds of community classes and organizations as well as casual play with neighbors or other friends. Most of them laugh at the mention of "the 'S' question": "What about socialization?" - because their children are out and about meeting and socializing with people of all ages, rather than spending their time grouped with only their own ages in a setting where they're supposed to keep quiet and are constantly being chided with comments like "You're not here to socialize."

Did you know that a lot of schools are even starting to eliminate recess? Even for kindergartners? And they're simultaneously increasing homework time to the point that there's little to no free time left for many children to just be children. I think that's going to be a serious social problem in the years to come. We, as a society, are devaluing play and exercise, while at the same time complaining that children are not getting enough exercise. Exercise notwithstanding, play itself is a vital human experience - vital to developing the mechanisms for learning, vital to the all important development of imagination, and vital to the basic dynamics of personal growth and development.

As is illustrated continually in news articles, the government isn't necessarily doing a great job in the realm of "education" in spite of the dedication of lots of teachers who would probably do things a lot differently if they weren't trapped in the machine that has created the "No Child Left Behind" catastrophe. The last thing anyone needs to be worrying about is a minority of people who are willing to take the responsibility of creating a different kind of opportunity for their own children. "But shouldn't they stay in the system and help change if for the better instead of walking away from it?," some ask. The answer to that is that many of them have tried valiantly to do that before finally giving up and taking care of their own families' needs. It's not fair or realistic to expect that small handful of parents to stick in there in order to try against overhwhelming odds to save the system for everyone else. People who ask that question should at least question themselves as to how much they themselves are doing to help change the system.

So yes, definitely - parents should be allowed to teacher their children via homeschooling if they don't have teaching credentials.

Answer 6

This is a very good question. I guess you should be able to teach elementary and middle school aged children if you have a high school diploma, but to teach high school aged kids you should need more education than they have. Otherwise you may be teaching them incorrectly.

Answer 7

There are many aspects to this question.

One important point is that true freedom must include the freedom to educate our own children in our own way (short of criminal abuse, of course). In totalitarian countries, the state always completely takes over the education of all children, in order to control what they learn. Whether or not we like what they teach, the right of parents to choose to educate their own children is one of the most essential characteristics of a free society and all freedom-loving people ought to be vigilant in protecting and defending this fundamental liberty. Restricting this freedom to only those with certain credentials is an unreasonable restriction of personal liberty.

Second, there is no reason to think that teaching credentials or any other kind of state regulation or licensing will improve homeschooling outcomes. The essential characteristic of homeschooling is that it is idiosyncratic - each family homeschools in its very own particular way. The ability to individualize is the essence of homeschooling methods and what makes homeschooling work so well for so many families. Credential programs teach future teachers how to work with large groups of children. What is covered in the "how to teach" courses is seldom relevant to the reality of homeschooling one's own children. And much of a teaching credential program is about classroom management, something that is completely irrelevant to homeschooling.

Parents who are not fully committed to providing the best possible education for their own children will seldom choose to homeschool, usually preferring to send their kids to school in order to have some time away from them each day. Those who do choose to homeschool tend to work very hard at it and spend considerable time developing their own ability to homeschool - they read books about homeschooling, they subscribe to homeschooling magazines, they attend workshops and conferences, and they participate in online discussions. In fact, they frequently engage in more "continuing education" than any professional teachers. There is no need to regulate homeschooling parents, they are already highly motivated.

There are many very homeschooling parents who do have teaching credentials. There is no evidence that their children receive any better education than those children whose parents do not have teaching credentials. In fact, among homeschoolers, it is often noted that those of us with teaching credentials have to sometimes "unlearn" what we think we know about education, because it is not applicable to children who aren't in classrooms.

Homeschooling parents are not the only "teachers" homeschooled children will ever have. Homeschooling parents tend to act as resource specialists and learning facilitators as much as being their children's actual teachers. A parent may not be able to teach organic chemistry or Latin, but homeschooling parents are VERY good at finding opportunities for their kids to learn from others. Many homeschoolers utilize tutors, workshops, co-operative activities, online learning programs, experiential learning, museum programs, and on and on.

I am a homeschooling parent. My homeschooled children are now 21, 19, and 15. They are successful, intelligent, and happy. One is about to graduate from college, the other two are currently in college (yes, the 15 yo takes college courses as part of a dual-enrollment program). I am also a college teacher - having been teaching economics and statistics at the college level for the past 30 years. About 20 years ago I took all the courses for earning a secondary teaching credential in mathematics, business education, and social studies. Nothing I learned in that program or in my own classroom teaching work has been useful to me as a homeschooling parent, other than to give me, perhaps, a higher level of confidence that I could do it successfully. Homeschooling is a very different experience than classroom teaching. It is far more like parenting, than like teaching a classroom full of children. Homeschooling parents can help their kids learn academic subjects in the same way they help them learn all the many other important things that parents teach their own children.

Answer 8

homeschooling is a waste

Answer 9

no way...they will barely learn anything and won't have a good future if their parents barely know anything themselves