To illustrate this point, I’m posting an email I received on a mailing list from another homeschooling mother regarding her nine-year-old gifted son. (printed with permission).
Over the summer, I took DS (now 9) for IQ testing, to a psychologist in our area who specializes in gifted kids. When I went to him for the initial consult (without DS), he kept mentioning to me that homeschooling was “OK for now, but you simply MUST put him in school in the near future…”. I just nodded, and figured I wasn’t going to argue with someone whose opinion I wasn’t going to change. Plus, I knew I was going to do my own thing anyway, so it didn’t make sense to argue.
Then he met with DS on two separate occasions, and administered two different tests to him. When he was finished at the end of the second session, he sat me down and talked with me. He said that he
was obviously quite gifted, but that he differed from most of the highly gifted kids he had seen in his over 30 years of practicing. He said the difference was that my son “still had life and happiness in him”. He said that usually HG kids end up feeling very pressured and unhappy, and that they essentially have the “playfulness kicked out of them”, but that my son didn’t.He then (much to his credit, and my own surprise) suggested that homeschooling him was a very good idea, and that potentially it was a good idea to continue homeschooling him until college. My jaw nearly hit the floor. It was nice, however, to hear him acknowlege the obvious, which was that he was happy precisely because he was NOT subject to the “school experience”.
I originally decided to homeschool him after pre-K when the teacher told me that most likely the kindergarten teacher would request that he be put on medication to keep him still in his seat, so that he could sit and do work SEVERAL grade levels below his capabilities.
I read this article and wonder to myself what this generation of public-schooled kids are going to be like as adults. Sad.
Children are entitled to live their young lives as they were meant to be: children! If we institutionalize them from a young age, we are merely preparing them to become drones meant to fit into life as society has deemed as being acceptable. If they deviate from the stadard norm, they are often medicated or labelled a miscreant or learning disabled when all they want to do is follow their natural curiosity in order to learn about the world around them.
Much easier to learn about a river from visiting one, than it is to have to study it from a book which more often than not, just rambles on facts and doesn’t offer the experience that the real world has to offer.
