Basil Venitis prefers homeschool and unschool to school. Homeschool is a legal option in many places, for parents to provide their children with a learning environment as an alternative to school. Parents cite numerous reasons as motivations to homeschool, including better academic test results, poor school environment, improved character development, and objections to what is taught in school.
Unschool refers to a range of educational practices on allowing children to learn through their natural life experiences, including child directed play, game play, household responsibilities, and social interaction, rather than through the confines of a school. Unschool differs from school principally in that standard curricula and of school, are counterproductive to the goal of maximizing the education of each child.
Venitis asserts there is no direct relationship between education and schooling. You might be schooled but uneducated, and you might be educated but unschooled. Schools are concentration camps for the drones of society. Unschooling is much better than schooling. Internet is the best source of knowledge and information, replacing schools, libraries, media, parliaments, and postoffice.
Increasingly, states and school districts are using technology or online learning to improve the delivery and efficiency of elementary and secondary education. As many as one million children in USA are participating in some form of online learning. Today, 27 states offer statewide virtual schools that allow students to take classes online, and 24 states and the District of Columbia allow students to attend a virtual school full time.
Online learning can be more than lectures. Another element involves presenting information in an interactive form, which can be used to find out what a student knows and doesn't know. Teachers have very few tools to gauge just how many students are grasping a concept in real time and reshape the curriculum to meet their needs.
Few people have a clear picture of what online education really looks like, which is one reason so many people are reluctant to consider what it has to offer. Learning online won't turn your country into a nation of home-schooled nerds, sitting in their basements, keyboards clacking. And it doesn't mean handing your kids over to robots for the day. Some online learning models eliminate human interaction, but the vast majority do not. Instead, they connect students and teachers via polls, video, chat, text and good old-fashioned phone calls.
Online education gives students in dysfunctional urban districts the chance to enroll in high-quality classes or language instruction without an expensive move to a suburban district or a private school. Cities benefit, too, as families uncomfortable with the quality of urban public schools can continue to live near their downtown offices while enrolling their children in Web-based programs, reducing white flight and suburban sprawl.
But though the families of students enrolled in online programs rave about them, cultural resistance has been slow to fade. And winning hearts and minds isn't the only hurdle to widespread adoption. Virtual education remains essentially illegal in many states, including New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. Seat-time requirements, which mandate that students' butts be in classroom chairs, often within the sightline of a qualified teacher, for a certain number of hours, are a major barrier.
The only way online education companies can respond to concerns about quality and age-appropriateness is if they are given the chance to experiment and win over students and parents. Government policies need to be tweaked, and companies need investment to grow. But for online education to really take off, we need to let the chalkboard in the little red schoolhouse go, and learn to love the glow of a child's face lit by a laptop screen.
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