Home-schooled kids on the rise

Number of 7-year-olds being educated away from school is 60, double that in 2003.
The Straits Times, Home, April 18 2008


The article focuses on the growing trend of parents who decide to pull their children out of the mainstream education system and home-schooling them.

Home-schooling is a system where parents are the mentors and tutors to the child, who in turn is the student. Home-schooling provides excellent flexibility as parents are able to decide on what to teach, when to teach and how to teach - creating a completely different syllabus which is specially tailored to fit the students (in this case, the child's) needs.

The article tells us that parents who decide to home-school their children "are generally middle-class and well educated" who "tend to be Christian families who want their children's education to focus on values amd character development". This implies that parents with to infuse religous values with the education of their child. The parents who home-school their children are described as "sophisticated, well-educated professionals who give up careeres to take care of their children". The decision to home-school children come from a wide range or reasons such as unhappiness with the mainstream system.

Personally, I feel that home-schooling has many benefits. For a start, it is extremely flexible. The mainstream education syllabus, which is tailored to shape the general student population to fit the future needs of the nation and to study a wide range of subjects to achieve a well rounded education, has a major flaw which is that it is impossible for the system to specially cater for each student's individual requirements. It also does not allow the student to progress at his/her own pace, forcing the student to catch up with the highly rigorous education system. On the other hand, as home-schooling is deisgned by the child's parents - the ones who understands their child best - the syllabus can be tailored to suit the learning pace, capacity and interests of the child.

One benefit of home-schooling is that it allows the child to have more emphasis on a certain area of study, usually an area he/she shows an interest in. By allowing the child to have a major emphasis on a certain area of study in which he/she shows interest, it allows the child to enhance his/her knowledge of that particular topic. It also allows the student to realise that learning can be fun, and not boring. This is in stark contrast to the mainstream system, where students often do not have a chance to develop their interests and are instead forced to study common topics which may not appeal to everyone, giving them a mentaliy that education is boring and meaningless.

Another benefit of home-schooling is that it fosters stronger parent-child bonds and shields children from negative influences. Through home-schooling, parents play a double role of parent and tutor. As such, every aspect of the child's development involves communication between parent and child. Over time, the child will learn to trust the parent and treat the parent with respect - both as parent and mentor. Besides, learning together fosters great relatonships, which is seen clearly even in mainstream schools. Also, the child is often shielded away from many negative influences. For instance, many students who smoke, gamble, get into fights or are addicted to computer game often start doing these due to peer pressure from fellow classmates. However, home-schooling blocks all these distractions and bad habits, allowing the child to grow and develop in a morall upright manner.

However, one cannot deny the many disadvantages home-schooling has. One major cause of concern over home-schooling is that home-schooled children would be unable to fit into society, especially among his/her peers. Because home-schooled children interact only with family members and occassionaly, relatives and their children, they often miss out certain social skills acquirable only in schools where interaction with peers occur everyday. Such skills include being able to tolerate uncooperative peers or giving way to others - in a home-schooled system, this exists only in theory (ie. parents tell children to do this and that without them actually experiencing it themselves). Personally, I feel that when they finally enter mainstream education, they may find it a bit awkward to socialise with others and may not be able to understand why their peers act in a certain way.

Another problem is that home-schooling does not push students out of their comfort zone. More than often, home-schooled children are often allowed to progress at their own pace instead of stretching them to catch up with a fast pace. In todays highly competitive society, it is essential to be on the balls of our feet at every single point in time. However, home-schooling often results in the child being too comfortable and thus rendering the child unable to push him/herself to a competitive pace. As stated from a student in the article, " I choose to study when I want to study". Unfortunately, home-schooled students must realise that they cannot choose when to work as the workforce will keep progressing at an uncomfortable pace - in order to stay ahead of the workforce, one must suit the workforce's pace and not his/her own; the ability to accomodate to other's pace is something home-schooling is unable to provide to students.

Ultimately, I feel that if parents really want to home-school children, they must strike a balance. Perhaps in the lower primary age can they be home-schooled as it is important to develop the right areas and keep them away from negative influences at a young age. It is also important to inculcate a passion for learning at a young age. However, the longer one is home-schooled, the longer one is cut away from his/her peers and the mechanisms of society. Thus all students should, by upper primary age, be re-introduced back into mainstream education so as to ensre that they would be able to survive the highly competitive society in future.

JonTan

Unusual scholarship gives dropouts hope - Home, The Straits Times, 7 April 2008

Unusual scholarship gives dropouts hope
S'pore company starts scholarship scheme for troubled teens keen on IT

The article is about scholarships worth up to $10000 being handed out by Evohub, a Singapore based company, not to high achievers, but to school dropouts and teenage video game addicts. This is done so as to offer a lifeline to those who gave gone astray by "gaming their lives away", allowing them to adapt back into society and to obtain the necessary education required to secure jobs to contribute back to the community.

Often, teenagers dropout of school for a wide variety of reasons, one of which is video game addiction. As they begin to get hooked onto their video games, they begin to neglect their studies, allowing their grades to slide to the extent of dropping out of school. Once they have reached this level, it is sad to notice that the majority of society labels them as incapable of studying and that they have no further use to society.

Obviously that is not true.

I feel that they had just set their priorities wrong. Yes, they made a mistake, but we should not condemn them forever because of that. They are still intelligent and a second chance should be given to them, hence the creation of this scholarship. I am glad to read that so far, 3 teenagers have recieved this scholarship to study Information Technology (IT).

Personally, I feel touched that Evohub has come up with this scholarship. It is unique in its sense as a scholarshiped catered solely for dropouts is unheard of anywhere. The mere act of restricting this scholarship only to school dropouts serves as a message to those who have dropped out of school that the community has not abandoned them and have not discarded them as 'wasted students'.

Given the description in the article, it is clear that the scholarship, which will fund an advanced diploma in IT, has been specially crafted to suit the ex-gaming addicts. For a start, an education in IT will definitely appeal to them more as it is related to computers, something which they would be very good at given the amount of time they had spent on it. This would, in turn, convince the dropouts to reconsider entering back into the education. Indeed, no other factor can be more attractive than pursuing an interest.

Secondly, the diploma courses have been specially tailored to suit the habits of the students. For instance, school hours are from 10am to 6pm, the reason being that these students have gone too long without formal education and as such are not used to waking up early. Of course, this diploma includes some form of discipline to ensure that these students would not reverse to their old ways. One of which is giving them very little days' leave to ensure they would not spend entire days playing games as before.

Overall, offering a lifeline to gaming addicts is a sign that society is beginning to accept them for who they are despite the mistakes they have made. Singaporeans are beginning to shift away from the elitist mentality and have begun to help those who have been otherwise neglected in the past. A supportive community is the ultimate key in helping these dropouts back to their feets. This way, they would be able to once again recieve the education they deserve and eventually, enter the workforce to contribute back to society.


JonTan

10 Ideas that are changing the world - TIME magazine (March 24 2008)

#9 : Women's Work - Tapping the female entrepreneurial spirit can pay big dividends.


When it comes to business, females have always been victims of gender discrimination. The 21st century society's perception of gender roles has been built upon centuries of stereotyping women as incapable of handling business and finance, and thus should be confined to menial household labour, leaving men to put food on the family table. As a result, women all over the world are often denied job opportunities. And that is only the situation in developed countries. In third world nations, women are often completely cut off from the basic human rights of education and proper training, condemning them to the life of an overworked, yet underpaid housewife.

The article I read showed concrete evidence that societies which tend to be more productive where those which gave women opportunities to receive higher education. From the article, "A recent study by the London School of Economics...showed that states in India where women are better educated were also those with higher economic growth rates."

The article continues to describe the efforts undertaken by many countries and organisations to ensure women are able to enter the workforce. One of which is the microfinance movement, where organisations such as Grameen Bank and International Community Assistance lends small sums of money (ie. $100) to thousands of poor women in India as start up capital for their small businesses.

Personally, I support such movements to ensure that women are given opportunities to receive education and jobs. The world we live in today has a highly globalised economy, and a nation leaving out women, which forms approximately 48.8% of the world's population (Source: Wikipedia), from the workforce would result in the nation's economy being unable to keep up with the fast pace of the world.

The stereotype of women as incapable to doing business probably stems from the perception of women as inferior in comparisn to men. However, this is certainly not the case. There are many high-flying women out there, such as Hillary Clinton, who is running in the 2008 United States Presidential Elections, and Mrs Lee Ho Ching, Chief Executive Officer of Temasek Holdings. Indeed, there are more and more women stepping out into the forefront of the economy, thus the world should similarly stop stereotyping them.

However, the problem of women being unable to contribute to the workforce is not much of an issue in developed countries such as Singapore and the United States as compared to developing countries such as Cambodia and India, where a vast majority of women are unemployed. In order to appropriately target the problem, many organisations around the world have therefore financially contributed to these countrie in order to give women a fighting chance of entering the workforce with the necessary education required.

While such foreign aid is undoubtedly beneficial, my personal viewpoint is that the benefiting country may become over reliant on foreign aid. With the promise of millions of dollars from other countries, governments and civil servants may begin to slacken, bringing a country to its knees.

At the end of the day, developing countries counting on foreign aid should treat it as start up capital to build a new economy where women will be introduced into the workforce. Ultimately, each and every nation will have to be responsible to ensure that every of their own citizens, women included, will be able to do contribute to the country's economy. And as a globalised society, we should all adjust our mindsets away from the stereotypes and perceptions of women. Such perceptions stemmed from the way the world lived in the past. However, as we progress economically, we should progress in out mindset too. We should not keep women out of the workforce, but embrace them.

JonTan