Home Schooling Tactics

We sent our boy back to private school right after Easter, and what we learned confirmed all our suspicions when it comes to the efficiency of current teaching practices. Our son was only marginally out of sync with his peers. He had not fallen behind by much in anything, despite our relaxed teaching style at home. However, there were a few issues that needed attention. My wife and I had overlooked a few things, and it's a good thing we had them sorted out. Our decision to send our boy back to school was correct in more ways than one.

The conclusion we can draw from this is that our boy needed no more than two months of formal schooling to be up to speed with his peers. Any additional time at the private school would have gained him nothing. It's therefore tempting to repeat this trick this coming school year. However, that would be pushing our luck with the school's owners. They want kids to stay the year, not come and go as the parents please.

But it has come to our attention that there is at least one school in Porto that operates with reduced overall time spent at school as its guiding principle, and this school happens to be the one where our son is having his music lessons on Saturdays. The philosophy of this school is to keep things interesting, entertaining, and short. The school is not a day-care centre. It's an educational institution.

The idea behind this is that kids can do most of their school work at home. An hour or two at the school every now and again is all it takes to provide the education. If one or both of a child's parents are at home, there's no reason to have the kid at school for hours on end every day.

This is such an interesting concept that we're going to look into this in more details to see if it really is as good as it looks. We know that the school has excellent music teachers, so we can assume that the other tutors are equally good. However, there's a big formal exam coming up for our son next school year, and it may be more practical to do things more according to the generally accepted rules so that we don't get caught in some Kafkaesque nightmare at a public office somewhere.

Fireside education

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