Home School - Realizing the Special Needs of Children
By Mimi Rothschild
That people are unique and have individual skills, needs, strengths, talents, and weaknesses is a widely held belief. Indeed, it is foundation to the home school approach to education. It is curious then that the standard approach to education is just that, standard. The fundamental problem with institutionalized (some say industrialized) education practices is that they utilize a ‘one-size-fits-all’ pedagogical model so that every child is expected to fit a particular role and do/learn particular activities according to the interests and dictates of a teacher, their supervisors, and the school board –none of whom can really claim to ‘know’ the abilities, interests, and aims of each student. The advantage of home school is that studies can be tailored to suit just these interests and needs of the homeschooler.
To put all of this in slightly different terms, in an institutionalized setting children who fail to conform to the standard model are either written off as disciplinary ‘problems’ or ‘learning disabled’. Some families elect home school for just this very reason –that the school has ‘written off’ their child as problematic and in so doing written off their child’s particular needs and very likely their child’s future. A peculiar though not surprising phenomenon, many of these home school families discover that these disciplinary problems and so-called ‘learning disabilities’ evaporate as education becomes tailored to the homeschooler (and therefore more relevant and interesting).
If there is suspicion developing that your child has a behavioral or learning disorder, home school might just be the best solution. When to obtain the opinion and tests of professionals and specialists is really up to you. However, it may be beneficial to give home school a chance before going over to the ‘gray area’ that is the world of therapeutic diagnosis and prescription. Use your instincts. Allow the homeschooler to pace their work and study at a speed and intensity appropriate to their needs. Some people absorb material at great speed and intensity, other people need time to grasp things and mull them over. It may well be that the learning disorder was nothing more than a bored or frustrated individual.
That being the case, certainly providing a more intense and rigorous, or a slower and more deliberate educational program through home school is preferable to psycho-active drugs with any number of potentially harmful side-effects –not to mention the somewhat stigmatized label of ‘mental illness’ attached to such ubiquitous diagnoses as ADHD. This is not to suggest home school is a magical and miraculous solution, but it is to say that it is an option to consider and that it may make more sense to alter the educational environment to meet the needs of the child rather than chemically altering the child to better fit a particular institutional model.
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