Homeschool is increasingly accepted among Chinese parents in recent years, meanwhile some parents question the huge challenge to the parents’ knowledge level, since not all are as professional as teachers in schools.
A homeschooling expert encourages those parents to “think outside the school-box,” at a workshop in Hangzhou. He clears that Homeschool is not to “make your home a school,” but to carry out the educational method that which is not available in the school.
“It takes a Super-Mom to teach her child if she just copies the school educational method. ” says teacher Xu at the workshop.
Xu gives an example to make the “homeschool” more clear to parents: It’s just like how the Mom tiger teaches her baby tiger hunting. What the mom tiger does is to bring her baby to grounds and observes. When it comes to homeschool, parents is to their children as mom tiger is to her baby. Education is work and life, so just take you children with you and together run the family.
Traditional school education is like teach the children swimming theory yet do not push him into the pool. This explains why many college graduates are afraid of entering into the society. However, homeschool is to teach the children to face the real life since a young age, and get practiced in the real life and work.
Xu quoted the theory of Raymond Moore on homeschool that “ Teaching should be mostly fun: relaxing, healing, inexpensive, low-stress yet successful like Tom Edison, Abe Lincoln and Christ.”
Moore Formula is also stressed by Xu to follow in home teaching, according to Moore:
1) Study from a few minutes to several hours a day, depending on the child's maturity.
2) Manual work at least as much as study.
3) Home and/or community service an hour or so a day. Focus on kids' interests and needs; be an example in consistency, curiosity, and patience.
Then it comes to successful low-stress education. The Moore Formula advocates that parents should seek balance in the mixture growth of head, hand, heart, and health. Mixed in with balance, and the parents’ sound example, they bring out great characters and personalities.
The Smithsonian Institution's study of twenty world-class geniuses stressed three factors:
1) warm, loving, educationally responsive parents and other adults;
2) scant association outside the family, and
3) a great deal of creative freedom under parental guidance to explore their ideas, drilling as necessary.
The above three key factors are more easily to accomplish at home. Xu claims that Generally parents, not workbooks and textbooks, are the best teachers for their children.
Translated By: Alice Wang
