Home Schooling

I have been going back and forth over the idea of home-schooling my children. I know that I can't shield my kids from all of the potentially harmful things that society can teach, but I do believe that I can teach them better than a public school can. It may sound egotistical of me but if IQ is more genes than anything, my son will have a high one and I want to make sure that he has the right environment to cultivate that. If I do decide to home-school, I think I've convinced myself to take an approach that is a combination of Montessori and Vygotsky. In our class on Tuesday we read a quote: "Every time we teach a child something, we keep him from inventing it himself." I actuallly went home and pinned this up on my fridge because it speaks to the heart of how I want my son to learn and grow. I also think that there are times when a child needs a little assistance. I think that is the sole reason that we make such advancements with every new generation: We build upon the discoveries that past generations have made. We don't start over all by ourselves, we build off the past ideas and come up with some of our own. Montessori's idea was to let kids interests guide the directions that they took because she believed there was a crucial period that kids were cognitively ready and eager to learn something in particular and that if that stage was passed, we could not get it back. Vygotsky described there being a range of tasks that are too difficult for a child to learn by his/herself, but his idea was that they could learn it with guidance/assistance from older children or adults. Unlike Piaget, he believed that kids learn from the outside in. I believe it to be a combination of both. I think that kids do have stages where they are ready and eager to learn something, but I also believe that, if the stage comes and for some reason they experience a glitch and can't figure it all out by themselves, it would be essential to have somebody their to guide them to a full understanding of the task at hand. Whether or not I decide to home-school my son I will be teaching him at home using a combination of Montessori, Vygotsky, and a dash of my own ideas.