I’ve been holding something back. It’s just, well, difficult to acknowledge this and feel certain that people won’t think I’m bragging. I mean, it’s one thing to homeschool your children. You already look like Superwoman to all those women out there who have real jobs and get paid and can afford to go out to lunch. They hear that you’re still wearing your pajamas at 10 a.m. and they are so envious that it’s hard for them to be nice to you anymore. And when they find out that you actually get your laundry done occasionally? Then the real jealousy sets in.
But on top of that, when you admit that you have a supergenius prodigy in your household? That you’re the mother of a homeschooling phenom? Well, that can be hard to admit. It’s a show-stopper, like telling a working mom that instead of taking the time to make your own lunch, you just eat the crumbs and slimy bits off your kids’ plates. I mean, you have to be careful not to make your friends too jealous, you know?
But I just can’t hold it in anymore. I am so proud of my little boy, the one I call my little bandit. He’s amazing! He talks, he does math, he steals things, and he proves over and over that he is much smarter than his older brother, who is six.
And here’s the kicker: he’s only two.
Oh, and he’s also my most handsome child. Here is a recent photo:
I’m sure you can just see the intelligence pouring forth: the distinguished brow, the alert ears, the apathetic expression.
He’s seen it all. You can’t fool this boy.
So perhaps you think I’m exaggerating. He can’t be all that smart. Well, let me tell you a few things:
Most two-year-olds have a limited vocabulary. They get what they want by throwing fits and grabbing.
This child has never, ever grabbed something or thrown a fit. He is a perfect gentleman. He speaks in complete sentences. Now, it’s true that most of his sentences contain only one word, but that’s because he’s a master of brevity. He always gets straight to the point.
Most two-year-olds don’t even know what heat registers are. They walk right by them without a notice.
Look at my brilliant young man. He’s not just sitting on the heat register: he’s guarding it. He knows a secret that even most adults haven’t yet figured out: If you sit by a heat register long enough, occasionally a tasty fish pops out!
Not only that, but he knows how to open up registers. People deny that a two-year-old could do such a thing, so he finds it necessary to prove his abilities over and over. He opens every register in the house and leaves them for us to find, just to remind us of his brilliance.
Another piece of evidence that he is the most intellectually advanced two-year-old on the planet:
He steals reading glasses.
You probably find that ridiculous. Of course he doesn’t steal reading glasses – he can’t know how to read yet! But he does. I bought a four-pack of reading glasses from Costco, and I’m down to one pair. My prodigy has been taking them and hiding them in his secret fort, where he also takes the books that he reads them with. We haven’t figured out which books those are, but we’ll keep looking and I’ll start his reading list on Goodreads soon.
OK, one final proof of his brilliance: do you know any other two-year-olds who can do such insightful self-portraits as this?
Imagine the mind that can produce such an image, and in the medium of cake and frosting, no less! He’s a born master of modern art. I’m sure he’s ready to start selling in galleries, if we could only figure out how to preserve his creations so that they wouldn’t get eaten.
So there you have it. My secret is out. I know you’re probably raging with jealousy at this point. You’re going to call me all sorts of nasty names online, and write scathing notes on your friends’ Facebook pages. But I just felt that it was unfair to my precious darling to hide him from the world any longer.
He is a homeschool prodigy, and I am his mother.
I feel so fulfilled, I think I will go eat some chocolate. And then I’ve got to take some time for phone calls. CNN and the Huffington Post will want to know about this, for sure.
Note: I have been teaching a teen literature circle and have been thinking a lot about why it’s so hard for some teens to write when they have such wonderful and wise things to say in our workshops. Here is the first piece of advice that I want my students to think about.
When teachers talk to each other about teaching writing, they often talk about “process over product.” Most teachers try to instill this idea through how they teach. I think that teens, who often focus on the product, can improve their writing experience by rethinking their mindset and intentionally focusing on process over product while they write.
What are process and product?
When we are little kids, process is everything. What is process? It’s getting our hands all sticky and gooey in fingerpaint and the smooth feeling of spreading the paint on paper. Process is telling our parent a long, imaginative story that we made up, which is fun to tell but actually has no point at all. Process is getting on a bike, going a few meters, tipping over, crashing, getting up, and then doing it all over again. Process is grabbing Dad’s camera and taking one hundred and fifty-six photos of the mound of dirt we just made.
When we become adults, product seems to become everything. Product is getting an A in a tough physics class in college. Product is getting the diploma and the job or the promotion. Product is handing in that research we had to do by Thursday. Product is winning an award, meeting a goal, or earning a title.
Our culture teaches us that product is supremely important—more important than anything else. We read about a musician’s award, an actor’s pay, a businessperson’s stock holdings, and a politician’s victory as if the end-product is the most important thing. But is it?
Which is more important, process or product?
My process includes a cup of tea, Trident gum, Altoids, and a bowl of nuts (now empty).
Consider a woman who was raised to believe that her self-worth is equivalent to how much money she earns. Because she believes this, she chooses to study a major in college that will lead to a high-paying job. This isn’t the major she’s interested in, but she reasons that this isn’t important because the major she’s interested in doesn’t lead to a high-paying job. After college, she’d like to move to a quiet, rural setting, but she knows that her industry is based in a big city, and that’s where she will find success. So she moves to the big city. She gets a great job, works hard, gets promotions, and soon is earning large amounts of money.
If you ask this woman if she has achieved success—the product she sought—she’d probably say yes. But did she enjoy the process? Is she now a happy, fulfilled person? Of course not. Though she has achieved a product that looks great, in the process she lost everything she loved and was interested in.
Imagine next an actor who is at the top of his game. His recent movies have been blockbusters. The movie he’s just about to work on is with a great director. Imagine he turns up for the first day of shooting with one thing on his mind: Will this be a successful movie, too? Will it make a lot of money? The actor ignores everything that has made his acting great—the process—and is focusing only on the end product.
Will the actor be successful this time around? Will he look like he is in character, or will he look like he’s thinking about whether this movie will be another blockbuster? Obviously, in focusing on product, the actor will lose what he had in his previous movies. (This in fact seems to happen quite often in Hollywood!) He will seem like he’s not really engaged with the part. He will appear as if the process doesn’t matter to him. And his product will therefore suffer.
One final thought experiment: Imagine you are a concert pianist and are about to perform a wonderful but difficult piece that you have spent months preparing. You also know that a very influential critic will be in the audience, and this may make or break your career. You know that your best performances have always been ones in which you relaxed into the music—the process of playing—but on this night, all you can think of is whether your right hand is playing too loudly, whether the critic would notice that you missed a note, and what you will do if you get a bad review in tomorrow’s paper.
Your process, clearly, is misery. And your product? You may be lucky and find that no one noticed how your performance—your product—suffered. But most likely the audience will go away wondering why everyone recommended that they go hear that stiff, self-conscious pianist.
What do teens learning to write have to do with the businesswoman, the actor, and the pianist?
When we hear about successful adults, there is mostly a focus on product. We hear about the businessperson’s millions of dollars, the athlete’s awards, and our neighbor’s new job. When we see a picture on the cover of a magazine, we see the product, not the process of making the subject of the photo look perfect. When we read about someone’s achievements, they look inevitable, as if the award at the other end had always been there waiting.
But if we focus on process rather than product when we study successful adults, we would see that their product was not, in fact, inevitable. Life led them through twists and turns they could not have predicted. And this is exactly like the process of writing.
Rule #1: Don’t start with your product in mind
When you ask a teen who is sitting down to write an essay for her English class what she’s doing, she might answer
“Trying to get to the end of this dumb essay”
or
“Working really hard because I want an A in this class”
or
“Worrying about whether I can actually write down all the ideas I have.”
In all three cases, by focusing on product she’s inhibiting herself right from the start. This is a big part of what people call “writer’s block.”
Rule #2: Do start with a brain dump
There are many ways to do brain dumps, so I’m using a neutral term to include them all. Writing teachers usually swear that the one they like is the best, but I’d say the best is whatever works for you. I once had a student who would write sentences on the subject she was writing about on individual index cards. Then she’d lay them out in front of herself and shuffle them around. Personally, this approach seemed alien to me, but I was glad she’d found it.
Maybe your brain dump will be one of these:
Word associations scribbled on a large piece of paper
Various thoughts dictated into a recording device
Doodles and cartoons on the subject
An outline
A brainstorming session with a fellow student
Imagining that you are being interviewed about the topic and typing out your responses
There are countless ways you can dump what you know into some sort of “hard” form. The important part of it is that you get it out of your head and into some external form that you can look at or listen to.
Rule #3: Figure out what you know and don’t know
If you’re writing about something you really care about, you might just need to look up a few facts and figures. So you can make some notes:
How many pounds of plastic do Americans throw away each year?
Was it Henry VII or Henry VIII who had six wives?
What year was it that our family went on that trip to Costa Rica?
If you’re writing about something you don’t care as much about (and yes, that happens sometimes), you’ll find that you have more blanks to fill in. But again, don’t focus on the blanks so much as the process of filling them in. Just be confident that you’ll figure it out in the end and stop worrying about it!
Rule #4: Write a roadmap
Some of you are outline people. You really like using the Roman numerals and nesting all your individual ideas. Go ahead and do that.
Some of you are graphic types and you might just want to start putting color-coded circles around each idea you wrote down and grouping them together. Go ahead and do that.
You may even have a teacher who requires you to use a specific method. Go ahead and do that to please your teacher (if you want to), then go back and do it your own way because that’s the process that appeals to you. (In my experience, most teachers will accept deviation from their instructions if the student shows that it was a successful alternative process for them.)
In any case, this is where you figure out what all your ideas amount to. It’s actually a fun process if you let it be, and part of letting it be fun is continuing to ignore the product. Consider again working with a partner or an imagined partner here. Talking about what you might want to write can be very helpful. Have your partner take notes, or do it in a text chat so that you have all your ideas typed out already, or record it.
Rule #5: You don’t know to know where you’re going when you write
Lots of people think that professional writers spit out polished prose like water out of a faucet. They don’t. They struggle and strain just like anyone else. The difference is that most of them actually enjoy it. They come to like the process of figuring out what they want to say, and how they want to say it. Even if you don’t become a professional writer, your writing will improve if you view the task as enjoying the process, not as creating a product.
At this point, lots of different things could happen:
some of you are going to feel comfortable following your roadmap
some of you are going to veer off of your map and find out you are writing about something else altogether
some of you are going to skip around and write disjointed pieces
All of these things are fine. All of these approaches are part of your process.
Rule #6: Nothing you write is set in stone
Finally, remember that even more now than when I was a kid, your writing is temporary. You can erase anything you write. You can hit the return key a bunch of times and start over or write something completely different. You can get halfway through, type, “Wow, this is stupid,” and go get a cup of tea. (That’s something I do pretty often.)
No one has to see what your process was. It’s yours, so own it!
When do I start thinking about the product?
Well, at this point, I advise you not to think about it at all. Like that pianist worrying about the critic and the actor wondering about how many tickets he’ll sell, this is simply not the time to care.
This is the time to remember that businesswoman who threw away the subject she loved and the place she wanted to live in order to gain a product she actually didn’t care about.
Your job now is to figure out what you think about a topic. You might surprise yourself. You might think of some really good jokes (and when you do, you’re not going to worry about the probability that you’ll cut the jokes out of the final draft). You might make a parallel between a book by Jane Austen and your favorite video game. You might take the time to text your friend a drawing of yourself holding Jane Austen upside-down by the ankles. You might decide to spell everything really badly. You might write the end of the essay because that’s what came to you first. You might type it all in Comic Sans even though your assignment clearly states that it has to be in Times Roman. Who cares?
You’re in process mode, not in product!
The more fun you make your writing process, the less you actually think about your end-goal, the better your product will be.
Note: This post is outdated. I am leaving this post up in order to provide information, but since this piece was written, many more A-G certified options have become available. Check out currently certified providers here. Please see comments below for more recent feedback!
I have known a lot of homeschoolers who have approached the high school years with trepidation. I am trying to remain calm, cool, and collected, but I have to admit that at times I join in the fear. What if I don’t inspire him to do his best and expand his horizons? What if he spends all his time playing video games? What if he doesn’t get into college?
It’s that last fear that sends homeschoolers running to their local high schools for help. Homeschooling is frustratingly lacking in hard data, but it seems from observation that a lot of homeschoolers bail out at the end, when they see that the stakes are highest. Despite the fact that the available evidence points to homeschoolers getting into and doing just fine in college, we quake at the thought that our educational choice might limit our children’s opportunities.
Roadblocks
In California, one of the biggest limits we see looming on the horizon is the University of California’s “a through g requirements” system. Our best public universities now require* that applying students prove that their high schooling has met these requirements as a pre-condition to application.
*A caveat: individual homeschoolers report that their completely homeschooled and sometimes unschooled students did get into UC schools without jumping through these hoops. There are a number of ways to do this, and if you’re interested, you should join a “homeschool to college” e-mail list to get more informed. In this piece, however, I am going to focus on those who are more comfortable finding a way to push their student through the hoop than finding a way around it.
The a-g requirements are not overly demanding. As any homeschooler knows, your student can learn everything a traditional high schooler learns—and more—in a lot less time and with a lot less stress. The stress, however, comes from the documentation end—how do you prove that your home biology course makes the grade? One way is to take standardized tests that document achievement (the required tests and scores are listed on this page).
Enter UC Scout
A new option is being offered through UC Scout, now updated and certified to fulfill a-g requirements. Scout is primarily designed to be used by teachers in the public school system, but that doesn’t mean that homeschoolers can’t use it to their advantage, as well.
“We’re finding that a lot of homeschooling families are very interested,” says Kevin Heller of Scout. He kindly agreed to answer a few questions in order to clarify how homeschoolers, both those who homeschool independently and those who use a public school program, can use Scout. Also, please note that if you do not reside in California, the Scout resources are open to your student as well.
A general introduction
Scout is a set of online classes in a variety of curriculum areas geared toward meeting UC’s a-g requirements. The lessons can be completed independently, under the guidance of a local high school teacher, or with a Scout-assigned instructor (for an added fee). California public high school students taking the course through a high school teacher pay no fees to take Scout courses. Private school and independent students pay a small fee for self-paced access to a course, and a higher fee if they would like to work with a teacher.
Answering a few questions
For homeschoolers, I felt like the website left a lot of questions unanswered. Here are my questions and Heller’s answers, which might tell you more about how your student might use Scout:
I see that you have a self-paced option and a teacher-led option. If the students buy the self-paced option, do they have a time limit to finish it or is it open-ended?
All options do have an associated start and stop date, however, those dates are variable. Open Access classes typically run for a year, but we also have a Summer semester version that is shorter. If a student or family wants a Personalized Section, we can customize the start and stop dates to their needs. If a student or family wants to hire one of our teachers, there are pre-set start and stop dates.
With the teacher-led option, what sort of access do they have to the teacher: e-mail, Skype sessions,…?
Students can email the teacher, chat live with the teacher, video chat, and teleconference with the teacher on an as-needed basis. We are working adding a video chat feature to our LMS, so that a student would not need to use Skype or Google Hangouts.
Will doing the teacher-led option look better on a homeschooler’s UC application, given that there will be an outside teacher responsible for it? Or is it enough for a homeschooler to do the self-paced option and submit scores from that?
UC Doorways does not differentiate between courses that are facilitated by a Scout teacher, a school teacher, or a student being supported at home using the self-paced version of a Scout course. However, Scout is also not a credit-granting institution. Students receive credit from their local schools, and school officials must choose Scout from the UC Doorways website to assign credit for Scout courses on students’ transcripts.
Will you be adding a feature so that potential students can see the curriculum before buying? Specifically, since homeschoolers don’t always have a degree in the subjects their high schoolers are studying, they are interested in the length of the lessons, how they flow, what sort of help is available from within the system (for example, pop-up definitions in the text), and how often the curriculum presents quizzes to help the student confirm his or her mastery level of the material.
We will have demo lessons available soon, but they are not yet ready. The lessons were created for mastery learning, and they contain frequent checks for understanding and interactivity.
What happens if students don’t pass quizzes, or don’t do as well as they’d like to? Are they able to go back and repeat material in the curriculum, or does it only flow in one direction?
All interactive lessons contain self-check quiz questions that allow students to practice what they have learned and test their understanding. They receive immediate feedback from the system and are able to retake the quiz or resubmit their answers as many times as they need to. There are also official quizzes and tests for each course that would be administered by a teacher (or homeschooling parent), who would decide what those options are.
What are the accommodations for students with disabilities and different learning styles? Is there audio text of all the written text? Can the size of the text be changed? How much multimedia/interactive content is there per chapter?
All of the courses are fully ADA-compliant, and a transcript of all spoken materials is available. The courses are compatible with standard screen readers. While each course has a great deal both multimedia and interactive content, each class is different. For example, the Physics classes were created at UCLA, while the Computer Science A course was created at UC Santa Cruz. So, they all have multimedia and interactive content, but each course has different amounts of each.
Are all the materials in the curriculum created by Scout or does it link to offsite web resources? And are there recommendations for further reading if a student is particularly interested in one topic?
99% of the content is Scout content; there are a handful of vestigial external links. They will be disappearing soon, but as we have current users, we do not want to remove the links until the replacement content is ready. Also, there are recommendations for further reading.
Parents of home-schooled students who are affiliated with a local school or school district should seek credit approval in advance of enrolling students in a Scout course. Local schools and school districts may also require proctored exams for full credit. It is always best to check with your local school affiliation before starting a Scout course.
My son will probably be taking a science course this fall that will use Scout as its backbone. His independent teacher will register as his teacher on Scout, and will offer in-person labs to compliment the online learning. Although he will not get public school “credit” for the course (and we’ll have to pay the small fee on top of his teacher’s fee for the labs), it seems like a great option for students who want to show that they completed a rigorous course of study in their homeschooling high school years.
I signed my son up for two courses and now understand the system a bit better:
First, only CA public school students get a-g credit for these classes, and that’s only if you go to a public school that’s officially allowed to offer a-g. So for example, my son is registered in a public school independent study program which is not certified, so he will not get a-g credit for the courses. But our local homeschooling charter does have authorization to offer these courses for credit, so their students will get a-g credit. It’s really important that you understand that if you are homeschooling independently or outside of California, you can’t get a-g credit by taking a Scout course. The courses are approved for a-g credit, but Scout doesn’t actually grant a-g credit.
The other thing to note is that their documentation doesn’t clarify the difference between the levels. If your student signs up for the Core Basic level, they get access to the course materials only. And when I say only, I really mean only. My son and I were shocked to see that after he finished the first quiz in Algebra and clicked Submit Homework, it was just gone. No results posted to his account, no way to see that he’d ever taken the quiz. Core Basic really is just access to the course but absolutely nothing else. Given that it costs non-CA public school students to take the course, even $19 seems pretty steep if you can’t even get quiz results, so I would suggest that you only consider this if you choose a Core Premium account.
The Core Premium courses require you to sign up with a teacher and the teacher oversees your progress. In that case, your scores are posted in your account and you get those usual features, I assume. (We haven’t paid for Core Premium.) It costs more to hire one of their teachers. According to the Kevin Heller, it’s possible for a homeschooling parent to sign up as a teacher. It’s not clear, however, how much/whether you have to pay. (Again, no documentation that I could find.) And the form makes it seem like you have to be a CA public school teacher to register, so if you want to do it, you might want to query them first about how.
One of the questions that new homeschoolers often ask is “how am I ever going to get my child to do any work?” Having had a child in school, they lament, “it was hard enough to get him to do homework!”
Like everything in homeschooling, the answer depends on the family, their values, the choices they make, and how they view their roles. But in general, the approaches can be broken up into three groups: authoritarian, pure unschooling, and authoritative.
Authoritarian homeschoolers are perhaps the ones that the general public is most familiar with. Most conservative homeschooling families work on some version of the authoritarian model, because that’s also the model they parent by. Authoritarian families, when they transition from school to homeschool, are less likely to have a huge change in their relationship with their children. They started out already viewing their role as parents in a way that works well with a school-based model of homeschooling: “Because I told you to” is an explanation that their children are familiar with, so transitioning to a school-based model of homeschooling can work quite smoothly.
Homeschoolers who embrace pure unschooling—child-led learning where the parents do not impose any restrictions or requirements on what and how the child learns—generally spring from families that already follow a similar model of parenting. I’ve seen plenty of parents who express an interest in pure unschooling quake at really following through when their children decide to play computer games for 36 hours straight! This model of homeschooling is as hard for parents to follow as authoritarian homeschooling, if this isn’t the way their families work already. The families that this approach works for are families that already follow something like this model in their parenting style.
What what are we left with? Most of the families I know who are moving from school to homeschool do not already run authoritarian households, and would not be comfortable with a pure unschooling approach. Immediately, they ask the question, “How am I ever going to get my child to do any work?” and it’s a complicated question for them. I think the best answer for those of us in the middle lies in translating the “authoritative” style of parenting to a similar model for homeschooling. Parenting Science offers a nicely laid out definition of what authoritative parenting is (whether or not you consider yourself “science-minded”). Starting from that definition, here’s how I would translate this approach to homeschooling:
Like pure unschoolers, authoritative homeschoolers respond to their children’s interests, passions, and desires.
Unlike pure unschoolers, however, authoritative homeschoolers offer firm guidance and structure to help their children learn knowledge and skills that the parents believe are important.
Like authoritarian homeschoolers, authoritative homeschoolers embrace the idea that there is a body of knowledge and certain skills that should be taught in their homeschool.
Unlike authoritarian homeschoolers, however, authoritative homeschoolers encourage their children to question the validity of what they are studying, argue for changes in curriculum or approach, and lead their own studies when appropriate.
Authoritative homeschoolers value a balance between freedom and responsibility: for us, homeschooling is about freeing our children from the unreasonable and sometimes harmful expectations of school, while not freeing them from the responsibility to become educated, productive adults.
Authoritative homeschoolers want to produce independent thinkers, but we also want to produce adults who have self-discipline, understand how to set and meet goals, and respect the differing opinions and goals of other people.
Here are two examples of how this works in a real-world homeschool:
I hate math!
Your 9-year-old daughter says she really hates math and wants to stop studying math altogether. You believe that not only are math skills important for life in general, but you know that your daughter’s current ambition is to be a veterinarian, and without strong math skills, she will not be able to make that goal.
As an authoritative parent, you know that your child will not necessarily have the same goal when she’s 18 that she has now, but you honor your child’s goal and support her in trying to achieve it. You are tempted to lay down the law and say that your daughter WILL learn long division NOW and she won’t get up from the table until she does it. However, you know that the result will be screaming, tears, and bad feelings that will result in no learning at all.
So instead, you back off and set a meeting time to talk about what is going to happen with math. You ask your daughter why she doesn’t like math, and you listen without criticizing her. You find out, about ten minutes into the conversation, that she actually doesn’t want to stop math—she wants to stop (for now) working on long division, which is very frustrating to her. She tells you that what she’d really like to do is some cool geometry projects. You remember a curriculum you looked at and show it to her on the company’s website. She agrees that it looks fun and that for the next few months you will study geometry and lay off long division.
You may or may not (depending on how your family works) set an official meeting time in a few months to revisit the issue.
I’m sick of this class.
You have a 15-year-old son who agreed that it was time to try out taking classes that had assignments and deadlines. He has done some goal-setting with you and has stated an interest into getting into a certain university that is quite competitive. Together you’ve researched what that college and others like it will want to see on a transcript.
So he signed up for two classes: an online math class and an in-person English class. For the first couple of months, he was doing pretty well. There was a hump where he wanted to drop out of the class early on, but after you talked it through with him, it turned out that he was feeling demoralized because he didn’t know about something that all the other kids seemed to get really easily. So you asked his uncle, who is an engineer, to help him out, and once he understood the problem he got back on track.
But now it’s spring and he has been playing baseball and spending more time with friends. The English class, he says, is too demanding. He just can’t do the work. He wants to drop out. You don’t tell him that dropping out is not an option because you know that this will turn it into a power struggle, which will mean no one will really win. Instead, you sit down with him and look at what he’s done so far, and how much is left. He has done 90% of the reading and has one paper left. He sees already, once you present what he’s done, that he’s on the home stretch.
You ask him what he will put on his transcript for spring semester when he’s applying to colleges, and he admits that it would be good to be able to say that he completed a course. You ask him if he wants to repeat it in the summer, when he was hoping to take time off from academic work, or in the fall, when he was planning an already full schedule. He agrees that he should just put in the effort to try to finish. He asks whether you think the teacher would give him a short extension on the paper. You say that it wouldn’t hurt to ask, but that he should have his reasons ready. Well, he admits, wanting to play more baseball is probably not the most compelling argument. He asks you to help him put goals on his schedule so he can make sure he gets it done on time.
These two examples are idealized, though they are altered forms of things that have happened in our household. But I think the authoritative model offers parents a way to work through homeschooling snags without damaging their relationships with their children. I admit that I don’t always remember to follow my own advice, and there are days in our house when I attempt to force my will, or just give up altogether and let them do something I don’t agree with. But our most successful homeschooling moments follow the authoritative model, where I involve my child – and sometimes the whole family – in decision-making and goal setting.
MOOCs, Massive Open Online Courses, have lately been promoted as the new phenomenon that is going to destroy the university system. Why will people pay for a university education, the line of reasoning goes, if they can get the same thing online for free? And given that college grads are having so much trouble getting jobs to pay off their loans, won’t people start seeing college as a bad investment?
As I’ve written before, I am not a fan of the “college for everyone” theory that has dominated American educational planning for the last generation. On a policy level, I think it’s shortsighted to think that we’d want a country where everyone was college-educated, or that it was even feasible. On a personal level, college education simply doesn’t suit everyone. All of us have our own individual paths in life, and sometimes a college education does not lead in the direction we need to go. I think that pushing more and more kids into college as the default option after high school has degraded the quality of our universities and led to less respect for all the important and valuable pursuits for which college is not a prerequisite.
As a homeschooler, however, I do think that MOOCs are a welcome new addition to the options for learning outside of structured environments, and I love the idea that the breadth of human knowledge is being made available to everyone, everywhere.
But will MOOCs make the whole idea of the university education obsolete?
I don’t think so, but I do think that they will change the way we view self-education, and their use will drive what incoming college students will expect to get for their investment of money and time.
What do MOOCs do well?
MOOCs provide access to information and current ways of analyzing and presenting it. They provide connections between professors who once were perched on a pedestal to the rest of the world. They allow students who formerly were cut off from college–by geography, money, or life experiences—the ability to access some of the teaching they would have otherwise missed. MOOCs allow people to continue their education or just to fill in areas of interest. They also allow the students to access to help and ideas from fellow students around the world.
What do universities do well?
When the right students attend them (see my note above about “college for everyone”), universities are places that bring together advanced thinkers with less-educated people who want to advance their knowledge and skills. An optimal undergraduate experience is one in which the student’s perspectives get broadened and they are introduced to new ideas and ways of thinking. And this happens largely because of the new environment, being able to work directly with professors, and hanging out with other students who are going through the same transformation. The other thing that universities offer is a place for the highly educated to work together, exchanging ideas and research. Sometimes this part of the university life seems inaccessible to lower-level students, but usually they are worked in to the process, especially if they are in a field that mostly happens in the university environment. Lastly, universities provide an all-important networking opportunity. Future entrepreneurs find each other, future political leaders develop their skills together, and—I won’t deny that this is important—future best friends and spouses meet each other.
So if MOOCs won’t kill universities, what will they do?
First, a caveat: I do think that MOOCs may end up changing education as we know it at community colleges and lower level universities. Already, what with the recession and the sudden availability of free education, they are feeling the pinch. Some of these colleges are already doing what I expect all of them will eventually do: using MOOCs to provide part of the education that they offer their students. [See how San Jose State is doing this.] Other lower level colleges are just going to fail to attract enough students to remain viable, especially for-profit colleges which often prey on their students rather than educate them.
But I believe that MOOCs will never be able to provide the benefits that an in-person degree at a good university can provide:
Working directly with the best thinkers in your field
Developing mentoring relationships with professors or more experienced students
Learning from, helping, and arguing with your fellow students
Creating the sorts of connections that in some fields are absolutely necessary for success
Having guidance in honing your analytical skills in ways that can’t be done alone
What bothers me is not that people are excited about online learning (so am I) or that people think it has some benefits over traditional college (it does), but that everyone is so happily throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Traditional college is still going to be the best choice for people who should have been there to begin with.
So will MOOCs destroy education as we know it?
No, but they are a welcome addition to the tools available for self-education and advancement.
