On Sun, 05 Jul 2015 09:29:59 +0100, Stephen wrote:

> You should get rid of home schooling. That is a bad thing IMO.
> Discuss. ;-)

We home schooled our son for the last 5 years or so of his school career.

So, no, I disagree. :)

He passed his GED with top marks, went to uni, was on the deans' list 
most of the time he was there, and graduated with honours - from the 
University of Utah with a degree in Anthropology.

The Christian fundamentalists who homeschool give homeschooling a bad rap 
in the US.  There are people who do it properly - and in our case, the 
reason we did it was because we ultimately had little choice but to step 
up and home school him.

He was in a private school for highly intelligent students with learning 
disabilities (the two go together a lot more often than one might think). 
This is a kid (well, an adult, now) with a near photographic memory - 
scored the highest on the test given by the admitting psychologist in the 
school (yes, they test the kids before admitting them to the school in 
question).  Most of his classmates had mild to severe ADD/ADHD (again, 
diagnosed, not just "oh, this kid is fidgety so let's give him some drugs 
to calm him down".)

He was enrolled there for 5 years or so.  The school had an outdoor 
program that was meant to offset the lack of any significant athletic 
program (not enough students in any given grade or group of grades even 
for team sports).  So the school required a lot of teamwork in the form 
of camping activities and other outdoors stuff.

Except the program wasn't run with safety in mind - and on more than one 
occasion, students (and staff) ended up in the hospital because the staff 
weren't properly trained in first aid for the difficulty of activities 
they were engaged in.

So we pulled him out of the school, right before the fall term.

Our choices were:

1. Re-enroll him in public school (which doesn't mean the same thing in 
the US as it does in the UK), at his current grade level, which he had 
already been through in his advanced classes.

2. Re-enroll him in public school at a grade level appropriate to his 
knowledge and skills (which creates social problems for kids who do that 
- my wife and I both saw that up close).

3. Continue his education ourselves.

We chose option 3.

Jim

-- 
"I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and 
besides, the pig likes it." - George Bernard Shaw

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