Though home
schooling comes up with numerous merits in the field of education, meeting
different aspiration of common educational aims towards each and every individual in regards to the egalitarian society always remains unsatisfactory
and vague. It can be due to various constraint and limitations that homeschooling faces in reality. This short write up attempts to discuss a few challenges
of homeschooling to meet the prescribed common educational goals.
Home
schooling emerged from the years 1970 and 1980s with concentration to the
philosophy of freedom to have individual choices and autonomy. This philosophy
depicts an individual to have a random choice and empowers to enact on their
choices. However, creating an individually free child and a child aimed by the
common educational perspectives in accordance with the egalitarian society
always remains contradictory.
Some challenges of the homeschooling have been discussed below:
1. Lack of qualification/teaching skills among parents:
Qualified
and the experienced teacher plays a significant role in a child's education. It is
about the professional concepts of each and every teacher who actually can
figure out the child's well-being and ill-being before dealing with the children.
In addition, systematic planning, facilitating and overall class transaction are a major part of
every qualified and experienced teacher. However, such qualities and skills
are often vague in parents. The question is whether homeschooling parents have
these competencies.
They are not
teachers, they are parents. In homeschooling, we can't force parents to become
certified in teaching with some qualifications. Hence, children in homeschooling might not feel interesting and fun resulting in ineffective
learning. It’s not bad news completely, because we have also come across a few
parents who have walked the extra mile to learn formal ways of teaching and
learning through some certification courses.
2. Poor academic quality:
Quality
education comes from different dimensions. The major and foremost part of the
quality education that comes from is prescribed curriculum and its transaction
process. It is an inclusive course of study scientifically designed for the
child to be trained in the school. In contrary, the homeschooling doesn't take
chances to offer or follow such a disciplined and prescribed curriculum. The homeschooling is exclusively based on the choice of the parents. In the absence of such formal facilities, the
children miss so many learning competencies including systematic thinking
skills.
3. Lack of socialization:
Children who are in homeschooling usually get less opportunity to meet different children and people. Socialization
is an important way of social development of the children. The well developed social
skills alongside the academic are key for all the children. The social development should happen so as to know others and the
society that makes them think independently. And also social development makes children
question their parents on key aspects of life and society. However, homeschooling is very exclusive in this regards as such inclusiveness can't be
noticed there.
4. Limited access to exploration:
Learning
doesn't come from only prescribed books but, comes more from explorations.
Prescribed books are somewhere just imagined and shaded knowledge out of the
reality as it is difficult to justify the written information with the ground
reality. So, exploration programs would let children realize about the things
in real shape and is the best way of making children understand more precisely.
However, such facilities are not adequately available in homeschooling since
it is not the assigned programs for the homeschooling.
The article is published as part of a series of articles on homeschooling. By visiting our homeschooling page, you can read all the connected articles.
The above article is a reflection from the below article. Please
Click the link to explore the above reflection in detail from an external site.
Reflection is contributed by:
Satyasing Mushahary
An Alumni of Azim Premji University (2014-16)
Consultant @ CLLF