By Joseph Quesnel
Marie-Françoise Guédon vowed long ago to not send her children to public schools.
The religious studies professor at the University of Ottawa was an anthropologist at the time, teaching at the University of British Columbia. Her husband, studying to be a teacher, asked her to speak to a class as part of his practical training on the subject of archeology. The supervising teacher introduced the students in terms of their life prospects.
“This is Lucy, she will go far. This is Joseph, he is not very bright and he has trouble with these subjects,” the 60-year-old recalls the teacher saying.
The shock came when a student asked how to become an anthropologist.
“No, Jessie. You shouldn’t ask that question,” she remembers the teacher saying. “The best thing you can hope for is to be a good secretary.”
That was the turning point for Guédon.
As a result, she and her husband opted to home school their children. Despite public conceptions, Guédon believes her children’s home education prepared them for university and life’s challenges.
Home schooling is not new for the Guédon family. Guédon was home schooled herself, as were her parents.
Her three daughters, Anne-Marie, 24, Reine, 21, and Joelle, 17, are all third-generation home-schooled students. Home schooling, for the Guédons, emphasizes a more flexible, student-centred approach. Over the years, the girls have experienced different home-schooling methods, ranging from a more structured form, which includes formal teaching, to correspondence courses.
When Guédon’s eldest daughter Anne-Marie attended the University of Ottawa, she found the experience close to what she was used to.
“We’re already used to being self-motivated,” says Anne-Marie. The freedom, that one finds at university, to choose your own courses and direct your own studies, is similar to home schooling, she says.
While Anne-Marie has succeeded at university, having almost finished a BA and now preparing to start a master’s degree, Reine remembers having to make adjustments.
“The worst thing for me was sitting still,” says the fashion design student at Algonquin College. “We weren’t used to sitting down that long.”
However, when Reine started university, she recalls being less stressed than children who hadn’t been home schooled.
For home schoolers, the challenge is to overcome public perception that they are poorly socialized.
“When you’re interacting with peers, there is a lot of opportunity to learn in a different ways than with adults,” says Prof. Robert Coplan, a psychologist at Carleton University.
Coplan says students need to learn negotiation skills with children their own age in order to properly deal with their peers. Children must be familiar with peer culture to not feel alienated from friends as they enter university, he says.
Alienation, however, is not the reality for most home schooled children, says Guédon.
Home schooling, she says, involves plenty of social interaction outside the classroom.
Home-schooled children are involved in groups that teach subjects such as theatre, science, gymnastics and sports at a new family’s home each week. Studies have found that home-schooled children socialize as much as other children.
“What they’ve found is that home-schooled kids tend to be more involved in the community than school kids,” says Bruce Arai, a sociologist at Wilfrid Laurier University and home schooling expert.
One of the obstacles, he says, remains acceptance at the post-secondary level.
Many universities are still cautious about home schooling. Carleton University, for example, considers applicants on a case-by-case basis where student prove their program qualifications.
“In Ontario, I don’t think there’s a big push to deal with home-schooled kids,” Arai says.
Many universities, such as the University of Ottawa, are trying to develop policies that spell out what home-schooled children need to get into university. Canada, he says, is behind the U.S., where schools like Harvard and Stanford have been accepting them for years.
For the Guédons, however, the real battle is in convincing parents to consider a different way to educate.
“You don’t have to lord over your kids the way a teacher sits above the kids because you have to live with them,” says Guédon.
“It’s different because sometimes your kids have a lot more to teach you than you have to teach them.”