Re: [seul-edu] Home schooling question

[Leon Brooks <leon@brooks.fdns.net>]

On Thu, 26 Jun 2003 08:07, Petr R. Vicherek wrote:
> On Wed, 25 Jun 2003, Jim Wildman wrote:
> I looked it up and the results are impressive!

> * The average SAT scores of home-schooled students were 568 Verbal and
> 532 Math, above the national averages of 505 Verbal and 514 Math.

Casting aside statistical weighting brought on by differing 
circumstances (e.g. home schoolers often have jobs or businesses before 
they get to SAT levels so I would expect that a larger proportion of 
those sitting are academics), one of the major advantages that home 
educators have is that they are able to tailor their education 
(content, timing, environment etc) to exactly suit the student, whereas 
a school is more or less forced by its nature to homogenise content, 
lop time up into common arbitrary units unrelated to either student or 
content and plonk everyone down in the same environment. This on top of 
the "smaller classes" advantages like reduced distraction.

These items are also something that FOSS is extremely good at. Oddly 
enough, zero-dollar FOSS is at a particular advantage because it costs 
only time and bytes to try out some new application, so a student (or 
educator selecting for them) can pick and choose and try out a large 
range of applications fearlessly. It's also easy to herd a flock of 
apps up onto a CD (witness Freeduc, Quantian, Knoppix for Kids, 
GnuWin2, Educational Linux) and publish that.

There's generally not even a registration form to fill out, which is a 
much-underestimated advantage. How many of you despise parking meters 
as much for the fiddling and fussing they cause as for the fee? Imagine 
the impact of a universal tax from The Canopy Group T/A The SCO Group 
(TSG) on this. But I digress.

Done properly, FOSS educational software will be at as much of an 
academic advantage over more heavily encumbered packages as 
homeschoolers are over conventional students, and for very much the 
same reasons.

Take care when you simplify things for ergonomic reasons to keep the 
complicated features, the flexibility and Lego-ness around somewhere.

Cheers; Leon