I am acquainted with two children of pre-school age. Both children are extremely fortunate to belong to their respective families, each of which is strong, loving and rather wealthy. The two fathers are well-educated, intelligent and successful, the two mothers are warm, caring and stay home to care for the children. The children themselves are both bright, happy and well-behaved.
There are two important differences, though. One child is six months older than the other. Also, one child will begin pre-school next year while the other is unlikely to ever set foot in an organized educational facility.
What I find incredibly interesting is to see how this apparently small divergence of intentions has already played a major role in the intellectual development of the two children.
Because they know their child will soon be heading off to school, the first parents are relatively lackadaisical about taking an active part in their child’s education. They read to him, of course, but it is primarily for entertainment – certainly not a part of a methodical process. Education, in their view, is the responsibility of his teachers and the educational establishment, which, after all, did a reasonable job of teaching them.
They are not in the least concerned that their child can only recognize 10 or 12 letters of the alphabet, and I am quite sure that they are correct that he will learn the rest quite easily in kindergarten and be reading fluently by the time he reaches second or third grade.
The other parents have elected to take full responsibility for their child’s education themselves. They began teaching him the alphabet using Powerpoint slides around the time of his second birthday. After he’d mastered both the lower-case and capital letters, they began introducing him to simple phonics, again using Powerpoint slides jazzed up with cartoon animals. A-a-alligator … B-buh-bear … and so on. They weren’t fascists about it, and they generally do a single daily session which lasts about five minutes, unless the child specifically asks to “play phonics” later in the day.
Once the simple phonics were mastered, the child began getting bored until his parents introduced a new set of phonics to him, and now he has worked up to a randomized set of 120, which includes more complicated, multi-letter phonics such as “ance”, “tial”, “iest” and “aught.” He has also learned the Greek alphabet, capital and lowercase, and has begun to make the distinction between consonants and vowels.
About a month ago, the parents were delighted to see that the child had discovered that just as letters combine to make phonics, phonics combine to make words. They then introduced him to the phonics-based Bob books, which he has now begun reading. Nor is he merely sight-reading based on familiarity, as he was tested by writing down some simple phrases which he could not have known in advance. I was rather impressed, since the child is all of three! The disparity between the two children is especially marked in light of the fact that the second child is six months younger than the first.
It seems highly probable that by the time the first child is able to read, some three years from now, the second child will be a much more advanced reader than he is today, and indeed will likely have already started learning specific subjects rather than merely building the tools necessary for learning. Furthermore, the first child will be progressing at the rate of the slowest of the 20 or 30 children in his class, whereas the second child will be continuing to advance at his own rate, which, if he is normal, will be significantly faster.
Thus, it is not hard to see how it can be true, as studies have suggested, that the average homeschooled child is as much as three years in advance of his age-peers by the time they have finished high school. Education is not a race, of course, but if it were, then it would appear to be a spectacularly unfair one.
I have strongly supported homeschooling for some time now, but mostly from a theoretical position. Now, seeing it in action, I am more confident than ever in the supreme importance of encouraging parents to teach their children at home.
