A Bundle of Energy

We're planning to put our son back into the private school that he used to go to. There are several reasons for this, the most important of which is the pure convenience of it. There's some formalities associated with home schooling that the private school will take care of for us, provided he's in their care towards the end of the school year. Then there's the usefulness of having a professional teacher assess the success of our home schooling.

It's also nice for our boy to see that decisions never have to be permanent. He will in retrospect see that he was free to choose his own mode of learning. He wasn't taken out of school against his will, and he wasn't put back in against his will either. What we do in the future is very much up to him to decide, but right now, he's expressing a desire to be back in school to be with his peers. I'm confident our boy will remember this episode as one of great liberty, and that lesson will stick with him for the rest of his life.

I have on my part found the experience as a teacher for our son enlightening. There's an interesting pattern to how he has absorbed new knowledge which I believe most schools are poorly equipped to handle. Furthermore, I believe the pattern to be both natural and common, which has made me all the more sceptical to the standard school format currently in vogue.

First of all, we never spent much more than an hour a day teaching him anything, so schools are mainly there as day care centres, as I've long suspected. However, that's not the worst of it. The big issue is rather the fact that many kids don't learn anything at all at school, and the reason for this has been revealed to me through my efforts as a home schooling parent. Our short teaching lessons involves a great deal of theatrics, which I fully allow for in my teaching.

When confronted with something new, our boy first expresses despair, often to the point of throwing tantrums. Then he's reluctant to listen to anything. Then he'll give the exercises a half hearted shot. Finally, he'll emerge victorious, lesson learned, and full of energy that he has to work off by running and jumping about.

Not a single one of these steps are readily allowed for in regular schools. Boys are not allowed to move about while learning. Despair and victory laps are not part of standard teaching methods. As a consequence, many boys end up without much of an education.

Fireside education

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