I am not anti-school but I am pro-home education. However, I have concerns that for many of us home education is not a choice but a necessity because there are not enough suitable alternatives out there. If we could have a range of flexible schooling systems, there should always be one to fit the child.
I am the first to acknowledge that home schooling is not suited to everyone. Many parents would find it impossible to be with their child(ren) all day, some would feel overwhelmed by the responsibility and perhaps doubt their ability to meet the challenge, and for others the financial burden would simply be too much. The following notes are my musings on the positives of home education for anyone who feels they might like to give it a try.
We all work best in an environment that suits our personality and needs and where we can develop the skills we need in life at our own pace, building on small successes.
One of the main reasons people wish our children to attend school is that they have a belief that everyone must learn to fit into society and that the only possible way to do this is through school. Both assumptions are false - we don't find every home educated child failing in society when they reach adulthood! This attitude also indirectly states that if you do not fit in, you are not good enough as you are and must be forced to tow the line, to fit in. I know many adults with aspergers that find this constant pressure to mix and socialise offensive. If you take an animal (a bear say) not wired to be social and place them in an environment with lots of other bears believing that they should be happier in a group, you are essentially inflicting your needs to socialise onto them. Not surprisingly when placed in this wrong environment they become distressed and aggressive - our children are no different. If they can learn to fit in and still feel happy I have no problem with school, but if they can't, how dare we force them to spend a miserable childhood in an inappropriate environment. I would like to force psychologists to live and work in situations which are totally at odds with their needs - I wonder how they would cope? I have often said that if I forced an extrovert person to live in a world entirely inhabited by people with aspergers and made them attend the asperger school and fit in - they would soon crack, and forcing them to spend their whole childhood in this alien environment would not change them even if they learnt to follow the rules. In other words think about the child from their perspective and wiring.
The view that being in school teaches a child to fit in, is not born out in many cases. Some children benefit from being in school and are able to learn the skills to become social and cope but this is not in my opinion the result of the interventions, but is due to that particular child having a milder version of aspergers which makes them able to learn these things (albeit with assistance).
When school fails, the child becomes deeply distressed and may become aggressive, the child then becomes so stressed that they become awkward at home, this stresses his/her parents and other siblings. When things fail to improve parents will ultimately be blamed! Home school cannot be worse for a child than being at school distressed and unable to focus on learning. Home school can always be tried for a short time and the child then integrated slowly back into mainstream schooling.
Home education allows us to:-
Control The Whole Environment - Particularly Sensory
A child with severe sensory issues and sensory integration problems cannot be expected to function in a loud, artificially lit, smelly environment. It would be like me beating a drum round your head all day long and expecting you to acclimatise to it and ignore it. Eventually you will crack and get angry.
My son so hates smells and sounds that we no longer use smelly products and I am careful what and when I cook and he wears protective sound proof headphones to help him cope with any background noises.
You can learn when your child's body clock is most receptive to learning - you do not have to follow traditional school hours.
Facilitate Social Skills
It enables one to build on successful social interactions. By working at a time when one's child is not tired, hungry, in a mood etc. one can set up small social-type events, controlling the variables which may lead to problems and building up confidence through each success. When things go wrong one can analyze the triggers and adjust any future exercises in the light of what has been learned. You are perfectly placed to interpret the situation for your child increasing their understanding of the world.
The reality of school for a more severe end aspergers child is that they don't actually learn to socialise or ever really feel that they are anything other than peripheral, so they actually become more isolated and can suffer with the consequent loss of self-esteem.
Children with aspergers tend to have a very black and white understanding of language and rules, and the school system (however well meaning) simply cannot adequately decode the school and social rules to ensure a child with aspergers can understand and cope.
Offer a Flexible and Consistent approach to Learning
Your imagination and enthusiasm is your greatest tool. I often managed to find an alternative way of getting my son to do something he found hard and was resistant to doing. Eg. he hated handwriting and found imaginative play difficult so when it came to writing stories I had to overcome his resistance. I was correctly advised by an educational psychologist to let him use a keyboard for work or dictate to me. I knew that he loved walking in the woods and so I bought a cheap tape recorder and as we walked I made up a story and every five minutes when my timer went off, he had to continue for 3 minutes - he really enjoyed this and came up with some great plots and descriptions. Had I stayed at home and forced him to sit at his desk and write he would have flipped and developed a hatred of a subject which he later really enjoyed and excelled at.
You can allow your child to follow their obsessions which lead to phenomenal amounts of learning. If they enjoy cooking then you can make bread and turn this one exercise into maths - weighing, converting into other types of measuring eg grammes; history - bread being a staple of many cultures; geography - where wheat originated from, where it is currently grown, under what conditions etc.
You can allow your child to focus on just one thing and allow it to follow through to its natural conclusion without forcing them to stop mid-flow. My son's obsessions with computers led to a lot of mathematics, the history of technology and keyboard skills.
I have never met a child (now 16) with such a love of learning. My son never has to be encouraged to learn - I allow him to follow his interests and recently he developed an interest in economics and has taught himself a phenomenal amount and learnt about the stock market, and a historical perspective of why we are now in a recession. What other 16 year old do you know who would do this voluntarily?
I have found that home educated children that have not been coerced and forced into learning, have the most amazing ability to find things out for themselves when they need them or see a reason to do so - to me that is true education.
It enables you to be responsive to their moods and levels of wakefulness, if the child is tired, you adjust. It may be that they come alive at eight in the evening one time and you capitalise on this. It also enables you to give adequate warning of change. Eg. when buzzer A goes off you will have five minutes before buzzer B goes off when we will then do X.
You can learn at your child's pace and adjust according to their physical and emotional state.
Communicate Clearly and Quickly Clarify Misunderstandings
In a home school environment you can communicate clearly (I often write things down) and you can swiftly intervene to deal with misunderstandings - deal with events in the present and sense problems before they arise and escalate into an outburst. In school, subtle and very individual cues are less likely to be picked up or understood and therefore develop into an outburst with the consequence that little learning takes place as one spends all day fire-fighting.
When they have an outburst or you have a disagreement, it can sometimes be useful to write to your child how you saw the situation and then allow them to respond. I learnt an awful lot about my son through doing this and when we tried to do the same face to face it led to huge rows and I failed to learn anything.
The anxious Child
If a child is very anxious in addition or due to aspergers, they spend their school day in a hyper-vigilant mode, overloaded with sensory stimuli, struggling to interpret what is being asked of them, struggling to understand social rules etc. This is hardly a good place for them to learn to manage their anxiety - they are so overloaded that they will be ready to fire off into panic mode at a moment's notice. If we keep the environment more controlled they can slowly build up a resistance to anxiety and learn skills to manage their condition. I was an anxious child and I attended school and university and this did not in any way teach me to manage my underlying anxiety.
Anna van der Post
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