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100% this.
Schools are underfunded, teachers criminally underpaid, ministers have no proverbial skin in the game having overwhelmingly been privately educated and sending their kids to private schools, so the system that many choose to criticise continues to creak. In the circumstances, I would prefer schools to teach what they are eminently better at doing than I am, and I'll spend time on the other stuff.
Markyboy-
But to bring it back around to teaching your kids from home, given the issues you've raised, teaching your children yourself would give you the time to do both. The 1-on-1 nature means you'd bosh through it faster too. (obvs I do get where your original issue stemmed from)
The challenges for me from listening to peoples personal accounts are:
- Skills: you need at least one parent to be competent enough to teach all the subjects. Most bright people could do this up to secondary school, but past that? GCSE's probably, but not necessarily all the subjects. A-levels?
- System: if you can't do 1. then, in our system, what is jumping into secondary school going to be like for them? 6th form college would probably be less brutal I'd guess? How/when do you make that call?
- Costs: Everyone I've heard talk about it says they did loads of extracurricular / after school activities and subsequently had a great number and more varied mix of friends. No one ever mentions how their family afforded to send their kids to all these clubs and live on one person's income. Maybe I'm naive and you can do 5 d/w of free clubs.
- Skills: you need at least one parent to be competent enough to teach all the subjects. Most bright people could do this up to secondary school, but past that? GCSE's probably, but not necessarily all the subjects. A-levels?
hugo7
agreed, people complain about a,b,c, isn't taught at school but education doesn't have to end at 3.30 on a weekday.