If you have not checked out part 1 you may want to do so before continuing here.Follow this link for part 1  So why would anyone consider home education over and above the convenience of conventional modern schooling? Everybody goes to school don’t they? Why would parents want to keep their children at home?

1.Children are already natural learners.

Children have already mastered an impressive list of achievements by the age of three. In the right environment their natural curiosity leads them and their nature is to learn.

“If, in any two years of adult life, men could learn as much as an infant learns in his first two years, they would have the capacity of genius. To focus his eyes (which is not an innate, but an acquired skill), to perceive the things around him by integrating his sensations into percepts (which is not an innate, but an acquired skill), to coordinate his muscles for the task of crawling, then standing upright, then walking—and, ultimately, to grasp the process of concept-formation and learn to speak—these are some of an infant’s tasks and achievements whose magnitude is not equalled by most men in the rest of their lives.” [Ayn Rand – The Comprachicos]

For too many young people it is the system of modern schooling that specifically robs them of the desire to learn, the want to know, that precursor to knowledge.

2. Self-led learning is the most effective learning.

A far greater degree of retention occurs when an individual wants to learn something and is interested, enthused and engaged. We all know this from our personal experience. Information that is assimilated this way, when we are engaged and self motivated is far less likely to be forgotten than information that is forced in under threat of testing (humiliation and punishment), or in a context of disinterest in the subject matter. Learning that is self led will inevitably build on the child’s understanding of their world and their reality, as they naturally follow their own sequence and learn what they are ‘ready to learn’ which means what is appropriate to learn or context relevant, or when they are learning what they need to know to achieve what they want to do. Contrast the enjoyment, engagement, meaning and relevance of this type of learning, to being forced to memorise half a page of phone book names and addresses.

3. Self-led learning facilitates individualism and sense of personal identity.

Schooling is all about conforming to a narrow mould, and at best knowing the same limited and prescribed information (the syllabus) as everyone else. Given that those who prescribe the syllabus in mainstream education cannot even agree amongst themselves what should be on the curriculum, how can anyone really presume to know what another should be learning. This is particularly true in a world where technology is changing so fast as to make information obsolete at an ever-increasing rate. Interestingly, far more information becomes available to society as a whole when many individuals pursue their own customised learning agenda, collectively acquiring a greater aggregate of knowledge ultimately then available to the community. When children are free to pursue their own agenda they are up and running defining their own identity from the start. Their life is about them, their choices, their accomplishments, their plans, their dreams. They soon learn about cause and effect, of the need to think and to plan and to act. They develop a sense of self far more ably away from the school environment of conformity. They learn self knowledge through introspection, self-responsibility from having to make choices, a sense of self efficacy from being at large in the real world not isolated from it within an arbitrary bubble. They develop their own individual character free from ...