by Milito » Mon Aug 25, 2003 11:40 pm
[quote author=klewlis link=board=6;threadid=548;start=0#4888 date=1061852633]<br />oh, it's very different here in canada....[/quote]<br /><br />It also varies from province to province here in Canada. I have a very good buddy who is at this exact moment in time in the process of moving from Edmonton to Peace River. She's homeschooled her four kids in BC, Ontario and Alberta, and thus far, Alberta is by far the most encouraging. Ontario badly discouraged homeschooling - school funding there is also based on enrollment, which may have had something to do with it - and wanted school board members to be able to drop in at any time to see how the teaching was going. (Note that school board members don't have to be any more educationally qualified than anyone else in society! They just have to get elected!) I don't recall what BC did specifically, but the mandatory public school curriculum was beginning to get very weird, and at one point was telling parents that it wasn't their business what their kids were learning in school(!!). To be fair, after an uproar, they did change their minds (and the curriculum) on this one...<br /><br />The expensive part in BC comes from the fact that you have to purchase your own curriculum supplies. You can choose whichever means of doing the teaching that you'd like, but you do have to pay for workbooks, textbooks, teacher's manuals, answer keys, and the like. This gets quite expensive! On the other hand, the curricula available to homeschoolers, from what I've seen, are several notches above what public schools are mandated to use!<br /><br />There are also standardized tests across the country that all kids have to take at certain grade levels, and most if not all the provinces now have provincial exams that kids have to take in high school, to ensure that everyone has met a uniform standard (and, potentially, win provincial scholarships....)<br /><br />A lot of people have commented that they don't think that homeschooled kids get "properly socialized"; this assumes that school is the only place that kids interact with each other. Given things like scouts/guides, organized sports, swimming lessons, and on and on, this certainly isn't the case! School socialization can be "anti-socialization", too, which is a part of why my friend is homeschooling her kids - she didn't want to see what happened to herself (and me - we got each other through high school) happen to them.<br /><br />I have a lot of time for the people who decide to homeschool their kids - it is a majorly big undertaking, but I don't see that it's disadvantaging them in any way at all. The kids are able to learn at their own pace, rather than being held back to the slowest level, and it's a lot easier in such a small class to see if someone is having trouble...<br /><br />Kilmeny
phpbb