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

[Robin Turner <robin@bilkent.edu.tr>]

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