Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
>>SIR KEN ROBINSON: Hello, I'm Ken Robinosn
and
this is one of my
video responses to questions I have been sent on Twitter.
What are your thoughts on home education and how that model can be applied to schools?
I have to say that I'm a fan of home schooling.
About five percent,
I believe, of all
young people in the U.S.
are home-schooled.
I can see, immediately, the attraction to
homeschooling and
and its counterpart, which is in some ways a more radical approach, which is often called 'unschooling.'
The advantages and the attractions are, of course, that parents and
their children
can devise their own curricula. They can have a completely flexible approach to
timing,
they can
have their own approaches to assessment,
they can move at their own pace according to the interest and learning styles of each individual child,
and
they can mold and shape the curriculum
around the emerging interests of the children
going through the homeschooling program.
It's not an easy option.
I think it's important to say that. All the people I know who are involved in homeschooling,
who are doing it well
devote a huge amount of time to it. They take it very seriously.
They approach approach it rigorously.
There are resources available to people who are committed to homeschooling. There are some great websites and some great
associations
and
the challenge, of course, is to
provide a broad-based education,
which uses the expertise and skills of the students and the people doing the homeschooling,
but brings in other talents and resources
beyond that immediate group as well. And the internet, of course, makes that more, and more possible.
Whether you do homeschool, of course, is a very personal choice.
Which school you send your children to is also a very personal choice.
It's still a minority of children, as I said, about five percent, who go through a homeschooling program.
The big challenge remains to
transform public education which, for all kinds of reasons,
will continue
for a long time, I'm sure, to be the
mode education for the great majority of young people.
Some people can't
practice home schooling. Their economic circumstances don't allow it,
they may not feel equipped through their own background
to tackle some of the challenges of homeschooling. Or their domestic situation may not allow for it.
For the vast majority of children, public school will be their option and route.
What i'm interested in is to encourage
a conversation between these two sectors, so they can learn from each other and apply their best principles.
This particular question asks whether the model of homeschooling
can apply to public schools?
In my experience there isn't a single model. There are multiple approaches
and
it's the principles that I think may be helpful to inform
what happens
in other settings apart from homeschooling. Those principles have to do with personalized learning,
They're to do with flexibility of time, and they're to do with
the need to
apply pedagogies, methods of teaching,
which are sensitive to different learning styles to each child or student in the group.
The best public schools do that, by the way. They try to apply those principles as well.
What all this points to, to me, is a key principle for the future education as a whole,
which is diversity.
Diversity of provision, diversity of teaching style, and diversity of curricula.
Those principles
stand, at the moment, in contrast to the ones that have dominated public education, which is
standardization and conformity.
So i think there's an opportunity here, for a much more open conversation about how
multiple approaches to education, in the home or at school,
can help to inform and benefit each other.