Is the Internet Better than Traditional Schooling?

This semester I’m having one of my subjects online, I love it, wish I could do the whole thing via internet, I pretty much think it’s the future, but I agree with the social part, it’s really important in life, don’t really know how that can be gained if it’s internet all the way.

Home-schooling may be fine up until grade 6, because then it’s just all the basics, but after that it just gets too specific in many fields for most parents to be good teachers. *Especially* when it comes to maths and sciences.

Few parents actually have the educating skills to be a good teacher to their children, regardless of academic subject (otherwise they’d all be teachers professionally!), and fewer still are polymaths to truly have the skills to teach their children all the subjects they need for a proper, well-rounded education in all possible subjects a teenager might want to study.

Also, children who are home-schooled through high school levels have a much harder time getting accepted to university for science programmes though they seem to do OK in liberal arts degrees.

Your kid may be bored in class, but is that really a good enough reason to pull them out of public education and take teh risk of giving them an inferior education? And if they are struggling, I think it’s even *more* important that they be educated by a professional who knows how to best do things.

The best option, I feel, is simply to stay engaged with your child in their education. When they are young, start a tradition of looking over their homework in the evenings. Ask them to explain it to you so you can see if they are struggling with anything. If you can help them with some problem, do that rather than having a beer and watching TV. Have regular meetings with their teachers to see how they are doing in class. Is the kid bored? Ask them what kind of school project they would find exciting, then research with them on the Internet how to do it. If they are struggling with something more than you can help them with, enroll them in Sylvan rather than taking them out of school.

Take them to museums and art galleries and music concerts and bird watching and stargazing at the local university observatory. Let them spend a Saturday helping their aunt the car mechanic or their uncle the farmer. Read to them when they are young and read with them when they are older, compare and discuss favourite books.

Simply being supportive and involved in your child’s schooling and help instill into them a desire to learn, even if they may struggle academically in some subjects, and that will be the best thing you can do for your child’s education instead of home-schooling them.

There is nothing wrong with homeschooling, as long as it done properly and effectively. Sometimes homeschooling is the best thing for a child. If the system doesn’t work for a child, for instance. There are 2 questions to keep in mind however: 1) How are you going to keep your child socially interactive? Social interaction is very important to your child’s growing process. 2) How are you going to teach your child?

With my experience in internet schooling, it did not work well for me at all. In summer school for 11th grade, I had to take an English and math class with a program called Plato. And in 12th grade I had to take a class in math online called Study Island.
If you have a teacher to monitor what you are doing, fine. That’s great. But At my place you just relied on the internet for everything. If you have a question that you are doing and have no idea what you are doing, or how you get the answer, you have nobody to help you.
I didn’t learn anything from online schooling. It was either way to easy or way to hard. Maybe they shouldn’t expect the student to learn everything at once the second they come there. That’s mostly the reason why they are there in the first place, to get extra help, not to stare at a screen all day and get ignored.

I think the main problem with home schooling is that in most cases it is done for religious reasons. I do think if proper math, english and science is learned it could be good but I think in many cases that is not the fact.

We home-schooled our three children for 15 years. Eldest was in 8th grade, next was in 7th grade, & the youngest started a year later. It was the best thing we could ever have done for our children. Our eldest is mechanically inclined, so went to work for 3 hours a day in a print shop, sweeping floors, cleaning up, helping collate, etc. He made some spending money, but learned the discipline of a regular job. He is now 39, about ready to purchase the printing company he has worked for during the past decade. After graduation, he went on to Jr. College & got an associates degree in offset printing, sailing through…because he had already been doing it for 8 years by then. His wife now teaches their children at home.

Our daughter loved music & the piano, so had lots of time to practice, & went on to college to get her degree in piano performance (with scholarships) & now is teaching her own 3 children at home, as well as teaching piano as an occupation. Our third child went all the way through home school, & is now an exceptional diesel mechanic. All three children are very successful in life, and have done very well.

A couple of comments. It takes discipline on the part of the parents to accomplish this. It is well worth the effort, as we all had to work out our differences & struggles. They couldn’t just get on the school bus with others who were disgruntled with their parents. Our kids were the toast of the neighborhood, because they got to study at home, and the other kids envied them. Our children are all socially well adapted, and are doing well…in fact, probably much better than if they had been in the government school system. Now our grandchildren are being educated the same way… hmmm…something worked!!

I don’t have children but I WOULD NEVER send my child (IF I have one) to do homeschooling. the most important thing in life is talking to people. Me, myself I wish i was the most sociable person alive, I couldn’t stand to not have any friends outside home. That would kill me. It would be like my parents are trapping me in a cage and educating me from there. I don’t know WHO would like that.

I’m reminded of Robert Frost’s poem, “The Road Not Taken.” Most people assume that the point of the poem is to take the road “less traveled by,” since “that made all the difference.”

What many fail to notice are the lines leading up to it, where Frost says:

“I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:”

He doesn’t say that taking the less-traveled road made the difference… only that he realizes that he will be saying this to someone in the future. Previously in the poem, he notes that there really aren’t significant differences in the roads.

I think the same thing is true with regard to the question of homeschooling. We look at choices we’ve made, especially for our children, and want to paint them in the best possible light, even if we have to engage in revisionist history. If our children succeed, or turn out “above average” (as they do in Lake Wobegon), then it MUST be because we homeschooled them (or because we didn’t, depending on who you talk to).

Do what feels right for you and your child, and don’t expect that anyone else’s choice will automatically be “right” for you. – Tim

I agree basically with what you’ve pointed out in your video. I don’t have a very high opinion of the education system (k-12) in this country.

Having said that I must point out that most people I know don’t want a better education for their kids; they want stuff left out that offends their belief system. This would be fine except that the result of having an ignorant/uninformed electorate can be seen in the anti-scientific behavior of the USG over the last 8-years.

Frankly, I don’t want my life in the control of someone whose scientific knowledge is limited to intelligent design. This is esp. critical now since most of these folk don’t want us to do anything about global climate change.