Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #73854 in Books
• Published on: 2000-07-13
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 156 pages

Synopsis
Schooling is so much a part of our culture that we have come to believe that education cannot exist without it. Yet the number of children being educated at home is rapidly growing . Moreover, the number looks set to grow further, with more people opting to work from home coupled with the great increase in educational software and knowledge available via the internet. This new book covers the issues involved in home education. Most importantly, Alan Thomas conducts a systematic inquiry in to how parents actually go about teaching their children at home. Based on the experiences of a hundred home educating families, the book assesses parents' motives and the ways in which they are forced to adapt conventional methods of education and learning, often challenging basic assumptions about the nature of children's learning. This book's findings, including an extended focus on informal learning, not only permit a long overdue assessment of educating in the home but also have tremendous implications for wider educational thinking. Dr Alan Thomas is Visiting Fellow at the University of London Institute of Education and was formerly at the Northern Territory University, Darwin, Australia.He is a Fellow of the British Psychological Society.

Customer Reviews

Full of information and eye opener!
I found this just a tthe right time and having read it I realised that my son did not need to suffer any longer. I took him and his sister oput of school and we have been having a the best time we have ever had together. Life is not about anything other than your kids and now the kids are so happy all because of the infomation that this book had.

A real eye-opener
As a home-schooler of 6 for four years, reading this book has been the turning point in my outlook on education at home. Prior to this I had heard of methods such as 'unschooling', and 'autonomous' or 'informal' learning, and I could appreciate the ideology behind those methods, but continued to struggle with trying to implement a scaled-down version of school in my home - not knowing how to do any different. This book has opened my eyes to the actuality of the freedom in educational experience those terms stand for.
Here, the author researches the reality of home-education: why parents opt to home-educate, its methods, and its effectiveness as an alternative to education in school - so widely accepted as the only way to an education. In it I have found direction, motivation and above all inspiration in reading the accounts from the 100 home-educating families whose recorded interviews make up the bulk of the research in this book, in particular some gems of insight from the children themselves. I don't think I'll be needing another book on how to educate my children at home! A brilliant book from beginning to end and well worth every penny I spent on it!

This book convinced me.
This is the book which convinced me that Home Education was the only way for me to obtain a good education for my children. Part of what helped me to this conclusion was that it is not written by a home educator, but by someone who was using home educated children to do educational research, and seems to have become an advocate of home education by observing how well it works.

It is well known that the majority of children who do well at school are those whose parents engage with them at home. After reading this book, you see that the school part is unnecesary for these children to do well. Engaged, interested children will do well.

Alan Thomas followed the methods of a good number of home educating families in two countries. He observed how these methods evolved as time passed. The more school-like methods seemed to be taken over by less formal ones, including much teaching done simply by talking to a child, engaging them with truely interesting material, often initiated by the child.

The book shows that a parent comtemplating Home education does not have to sit their child down and assign them 'work' if they are to educate them, but can experiment and find the method that suits their child best. This is a good thing, as as most parents realise, children are unlikely to cooperate with a parent who tries to act like a teacher.