The only official relationship betwwen AIT & TAS is that AIT staff get first priority for getting places.
[quote=“Screaming Jesus”]Believe me, home schooling from me would destroy their souls more thoroughly than school ever could. I don’t know much math, and literature class would focus on stuff like “The Turner Diaries.”
The USA taxes (theoretically) on world-wide income, but its benefits are substantially less global. And does TAS have some sort of official relationship with AIT? That would suggest that the government only intends to help the rich. (No! Say it isn’t so!)[/quote]
I think it’s hard to imagine you could do worse than the formal education system. Consider, for a moment, that a child who did four hours per week each of English and mathematics, 40 weeks per year, for thirteen years. That’s over 2000 hours in each of those subjects, not to mention homework. Yet so many end up functionally illiterate and innumerate, not to mention completely incapable of talking coherently for more than thirty seconds on other topics such as science, history or even about your average newspaper article.
I work with a woman who recently came to Taiwan from America and brought her fourteen year old daughter with her. Her daughter, who is supposedly a B to A student, was in my “immersion” English class with the Taiwanese students. Several write just as well as, and sometimes even better than, her. What are the C or D students at her school back in America like?
Anyway, homeschooling isn’t necessarily about teaching specific things, but about teaching your children/students how to learn those things for themselves.
Meh, GiT, I agree and I don’t agree. If I homeschooled my non-existant hypothetical kids, I know I could teach them to be numerate, literate, and multi-lingual with a fair knowledge of literature and history. Where it all falls down is if they need access to facilities such as laboratories and technical things. I couldn’t afford to provide facilities, and am not educated enough to provide guidance to a kid who wanted to become a car mechanic or a physicist.
I also think it’s wrong to control kids’ environment too much. If kids are never bullied, bored, ignored, etc, they will have a very painful early adulthood.
Even the best schools are always a depressing compromise, though.
Yeah, I see what you mean. Homeschooling is big in the U.S., so I wonder how they get around those issues to do with equipment.
Again, whilst you might not be able to teach a kid physics, I think you could either give them the right kind of skills and resources to teach themselves further, or you can have the right sort of support network to reduce the problem.
As for the social skills, homsechooling does not have to mean being locked away in a house somewhere. There are plenty of social activities (and even small classes) organised by homeschooling associations in America.
Plenty of fun, educational chemistry activities can be done at home. Like making meth.