Home Education (Part 2)

What is a good learning home environment?

A well-modified (i.e., well-planned and organized) learning home environment is highly helpful in giving children, ages 0 to 3 years, a strong foundation for future schooling and life experiences. The content of the home environment as a learning place should be more than what a child could take as a learner. This is to maximize what his/her learning faculties would permit him/her to absorb. It's like an eat-all-you-can buffet set up in a restaurant where the foods are always more than what the diners could stuff into their stomach. Only in a similar arrangement could a child have the opportunity to learn so many things that are, nonetheless, just a fraction of what has been made available for him/her to learn. This, I believe, is the best kind of learning environment for infants, toddlers, and other pre-school children.

It's nothing new that any human being from birth up to a certain age will absorb almost everything that is within his/her capacity to learn, especially in an environment that offers a wide array of objects of cognitive curiosity. Montessori (1967) expressed a similar view as she saw the child’s mind as a sponge that absorbs nearly everything around him/her, and in the process, he/she also constructs him-/herself into something like a better and more complex structure. There, however, are many important things (e.g., computer technology, high-level reasoning) in the context of the modern learning environment that a child could not learn easily without the assistance or guidance of a good guide. It is here that Vygotsky’s scaffolding teaching strategy needs to be employed in order to get the young learner to advance what he/she knows and is capable of doing all by him-/herself. Learning, of course, should not be confined to cognitive development. I could not disagree with Plato and Howard Gaardner that there are different areas of learning. Home education program thus should be concerned with the development of skills in various areas such as cognition, creativity, psycho-social activities, values, and so on.

Facilitators of learning

The adults whose task is to facilitate the development of the child must have clear and tidy categories of the kinds of learning that children, more or less, need most. This means that home education is not just learning of anything at random. As was suggested, a good home education is purposive learning in various areas. The experience must be planned and learning should be highly organized.

With proper guidance, it may be expected that efforts to advance the learning of the child will give rise to a highly developed set of mental and physical abilities. The product then is a child whose learning is remarkably more advanced than the learning of those who were raised in an environment that had not been customized according to the learning needs of a very young human being.