[Author Prev][Author Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Author Index][Thread Index]

Re: [seul-edu] Home schooling question: parents better than professionals?



Leon Brooks wrote:

dress themselves etc before they arrived at the school gate? Are teachers free to give a despondent student a big bear-hug?
Well, not in the UK, where I hear it is now illegal for teachers to touch students in any way whatsoever. I've hugged despondent students, but then I live in Turkey, which has an extremely touch-feely culture (in my experience only Arab students are more touchy-feely, but only same-sex touching - I wouldn't even shake an Arab girl's hand unless I knew her very, very well). This is one thing we'll never get software for.

Returning to the only slightly OT level, I think many of the advantages of homeschooling come not from the fact that students are educated at home, but just that they are getting one-on-one tuition. In the past it was the norm for those who could afford it to hire private tutors (and some well-off families still do, though usually as a supplement to school, rather than a substitute). In some cases a private tutor could be better than a parent (I suspect most teenagers would not like the idea of being educated by their parents!) and I suspect that some of the success of CAL is that the student relates to the software as though it were a human tutor.

Robin

--
"Some guy breaking into a government computer system and wreaking havoc
makes for a more interesting movie plot than some guy writing device
drivers. It's hard to work in a good 10-minutes car chase scene with some
guy who writes device drivers..." - tjc, post to LWN

Robin Turner
IDMYO
Bilkent Univeritesi
Ankara 06533
Turkey

www.bilkent.edu.tr/~robin