Educating Children at Home - (Cassell Education) by Alan Thomas (Paperback)

About the Book

With increasing numbers of parents choosing to educate their children at home, an opportunity exists to explore education outside the school environment. Parents often discover that classroom approaches to teaching and learning do not easily translate into the home. As a result, some radically adjust their approach to educating their children, in some instances virtually abandoning any structured teaching or learning. Focusing on informal learning, this text examines in depth how children can acquire an education simply through everyday experiences. The text sets out to challenge fundamental assumptions about the nature of teaching and learning. Research has been drawn from a wide cross-section of parents from 100 home-educating families.

Book Synopsis

Schooling is so much a part of our culture that we have come to believe that education cannot exist without it. Yet the number of children being educated at home is rapidly growing . Moreover, the number looks set to grow further, with more people opting to work from home coupled with the great increase in educational software and knowledge available via the internet. This new book covers the issues involved in home education. Most importantly, Alan Thomas conducts a systematic inquiry in to how parents actually go about teaching their children at home. Based on the experiences of a hundred home educating families, the book assesses parents' motives and the ways in which they are forced to adapt conventional methods of education and learning, often challenging basic assumptions about the nature of children's learning. This book's findings, including an extended focus on informal learning, not only permit a long overdue assessment of educating in the home but also have tremendous implications for wider educational thinking. Dr Alan Thomas is Visiting Fellow at the University of London Institute of Education and was formerly at the Northern Territory University, Darwin, Australia. He is a Fellow of the British Psychological Society.

About the Author

Dr Alan Thomas is Visiting Fellow at the University of London Institute of Education. He is a Fellow of the British Psychological Society.