Digital Meh: Homeschool "Education Hacking"
http://www.wired.com/2015/02/silicon-valley-home-schooling/
I'm all for the personalized learning that homeschooling offers - my homeschooled friends growing up had exceptionally well-developed talents because they had the time/learning space to pursue the things they really intellectually thirsted for, be it a music, coding, art... But OOF, some of these commenters are mega-proselytizing the Church of Digital Learning/traditional education-shaming.Â
The way I see it, things like Khan Academy in a classroom context should do more than just "free up time for one-on-one mentoring" - in all this personalized learning talk, shouldn't it also free up more time? Time to work on projects as a class? More "unconventional" learning experiences? I had a group of 6th graders from a nearby middle school come and visit MIT and I got to show them around the Personal Robotics Group at the Media Lab, the Koch Institute for Cancer Research, and then they got to mentor a bunch of MIT students on science communication. I'm pretty sure it was only possible because they were part of a STEM enrichment class (that not every public school has) and had a principal and teacher who were very enthusiastic about taking on this kind of thing (and being okay with having the students miss some of their other classes to come). </horn toot> Those previously-mentioned homeschooled buddies of mine also had parents who made sure they took part in lots of communities with other students (sports, extracurriculars, etc.). Point is, I cringe thinking about visions of an "alt school" where kids get bused over only to sit at a computer for the majority of the day and where their interactions with each other only occur over recess. 1. Lord knows self-assembling socio-economic stratifications already occur enough on their own in middle school - can't imagine what purely personalized learning would do to exacerbate this. 2. Why does everyone want to hide the classroom landscape of learning diversity? Heaven forbid having a kid who learns faster having to wait for a slower learner. I had a classmate in fifth grade who was a painfully slow reader, and also one of the coolest kids who totally embraced his dyslexia and legitimately made it okay for everyone else to be okay with themselves. I also had an amazing fifth grade teacher who established the classroom environment to facilitate that happening. Public school in the middle of Missouri. (Okay, yeah, maybe that was a rare experience.) Point is, it was somewhat formative in developing empathy and self-confidence at a pretty critical age, an experience that I probably wouldn't have had at Khan School For Kids Who Want To Read Good But Don't Want Anyone Else To Know They Can't Read Good. (Although, to be real, I probably wouldn't have had that experience at any other school on any other planet, because Mrs. Winchester's Rock Bridge Elementary fifth grade class was unreal.)
tl;dr There is more to school than academic learning. Working with others builds character, etc.
Jyri Engestrom, Caterina Fake’s partner, signed up with AltSchool this year. The couple had been homeschooling for a couple of years, an experiment that gradually expanded into a 10-student “microschool” called Sesat School. This year, his students started attending AltSchool part-time, in what he calls a “hybrid” approach. He says it’s just one example of how a new crop of startups could use technology to create new educational models, somewhere between homeschooling and traditional school. He foresees a day when the same forces that have upended everything from the entertainment industry to transportation wreak havoc on our current model of education, when you can hire a teacher by the hour, just as you would hire a TaskRabbit to assemble your Ikea furniture.