Teach Yourself

I've been following a conversation on homeschooling at one of the Amazon forums. In it, someone made a couple of points that I felt the need to follow up upon. The first of these was that teaching a child to read required specialized knowledge and the second was that teaching most subjects through the high school years required a professional, "expert" teacher. Here's my response:
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I have to disagree that teaching reading requires specialized knowledge. I've taught two of my kids to read in the past few years and all it took was researching a good phonics program to use, and then using that program for just a few minutes a day. (We used "The Ordinary Parents Guide to Teaching Reading"). Reading is just not a difficult thing for a child to learn, nor is it difficult to teach.

Regarding more complicated subjects in the high school years, there are a couple of schools of thought about this. A parent can first teach themselves a subject and then teach their child; a parent can, instead of "teaching" the subject, learn it alongside their child but act more as a facilitator of the process; an especially self directed kid may simply be able to teach themselves if they have a good set of books to use; or, by the high school years, a teen can often just take a class or two at a community college, which also helps get them college credits.

Earlier this year I decided to teach my son Latin (He's 9 years old). I took 2 semesters of Latin myself in college almost 20 years ago, but I didn't remember much about it. Instead of hiring a tutor (which I couldn't afford anyway) I studied the language myself every day for about 6 weeks and then researched and purchased a good Latin primer directed at elementary school kids. Now we do 1-2 lessons together from this primer each day and we're both learning the language together. It really just takes a conceptual change in now we think of learning. A teacher who lectures and then tests isn't necessary for most subjects up through high school (or perhaps beyond) when an adult and child together can learn alongside each other with great success.

I believe that one of the problems with our school system is that it conditions people to think that experts are required in order to acquire all new knowledge and skills. In school someone else always decides what you learn, how you learn it, when you learn it and (most importantly) whether or not you've succeeded. I believe that this process has conditioned many people to over-rely on expert opinion rather than trust their own capabilities. Don't get me wrong, there are definitely times when a good teacher is critical, but I believe that we've come to rely on them too much.

There is so much we can learn ourselves, and all it really takes is planning and dedication. As a homeschooling dad, part of my job is to teach my children, but it's also critical that I teach them how to teach themselves.