AltaMeta Homeschool Auxiliary

09/07/2022

09/07/2022

The entire premise of a standard age at which children should begin formal academic instruction and standardized benchmarks against which each child is judged is fundamentally faulty in that it does not recognize any individual uniqueness. Forty-five years ago, Dr. Raymond and Dorothy Moore were sounding the alarm at the trend to start formal education earlier and earlier. In their book, Better Late Than Early (1975), they detailed the detrimental impacts of this tendency and their warnings have been shown accurate. Unfortunately, an individually tailored education is not pragmatically possible in the institutional school setting. Although there are alternatives, home education is the apex of customized education given the personal motivation of parents (the ones most knowledgeable about individual students), the flexibility of implementation, and the absence of educationally ineffective schooling paradigms.



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This back-to-school season, many parents are eager to drop-off their kindergarteners to begin the 13-year journey toward high school graduation. It can be a joyful time, full of anticipation and excitement. But just because something may be desirable for many families doesn’t mean it should be man...

08/24/2022

08/20/2022

I agree with the premise of this article, but something is conspicuously missing. I don’t know if the author was intentionally trying to avoid speaking of God and or the Bible, but the pillars he references cannot be rebuilt in a system with a secular humanistic worldview, which teaches science from the presupposition of naturalism and attempts to suppress religion with the alternate theology of atheism. How can we be sure that something is “good” outside of God, who is the perfect standard of goodness (Psalm 34:8)? How can we know truth without a standard of truth such as the Word of God (John 17:17)? How can one appreciate the beauty of a created thing without acknowledging a Creator (Genesis 1:1)? How can one learn to express goodness, truth, and beauty in a system designed to dumb them down (J. T. Gatto) and make them into cogs for the wheels of industrialized society? The existing public school system doesn’t need to be fixed; it needs to be replaced.

Few would argue that modern education is in crisis. Evidence suggests our system creates moral nihilists; professors admit they are teaching students who “know hardly anything about anything at all.” So what is to be done? If education is so bad, how do we fix it? We need to begin by reexamining...

08/19/2022

This “old school” example of education has a lot more in common with modern home education than it does with government institutionalized schooling. I do not believe that today’s schools can be reverted to this style of learning, because modern schooling has devolved into producing a cookie-cutter product, suitable for insertion into the industrialized societal system, rather than making independent and innovative thinkers ready to use their God-given gifts for the edification of society as a whole. Individualized education, such as provided in many home learning environments, definitely has the potential to do this, so long as families leave behind educationally ineffective schooling paradigms.

In the quest to reform the chaos which dominates America’s classrooms and the stagnation which plagues academic achievement scores, teachers, politicians, and education reform leaders are always looking for a silver bullet to solve our education problems. But there’s something we may not have co...

08/16/2022

The ethnic homogeneity of home educators may have been a valid stereotype in years past, but not anymore. All the programs intended to artificially manufacture diversity, specifically the ones within the schooling system, have failed to attain that goal. Once again, what the government tries to achieve by compulsory schooling (and fails at) the home education community accomplishes as a by product of a natural, dare I say God-ordained, way of educating children.

Black families are leading an exodus from public and private schools