Are home-schooled children smarter?

welcome to beyond the headlines this is your chance to discover some of concordia's top leading academics some who are making news around the world i'm caroline locker and i'll be hosting these conversations today we're talking about child learning so as parents we all want the very best education for our children of course but what if that education isn't found at school in canada you can choose to educate your children at home in fact it's estimated about one percent of all canadian children are homeschooled in sweden or germany for example that's illegal you have to send your children to school but in america it's quite popular to homeschool your children in fact about 1.5 million american children are homeschooled so which children learn better those who are taught in the public school or those who are taught at home in fact there's been very little scientific research on the topic up until now and that's where we're very pleased to have with us professor sandra martin chang of concordia's department of education welcome thank you very much for being with us also joining me is wendy had who's a mother of six and who has decided to homeschool all of her children wendy's also a teacher she teaches at john abbott college here in montreal welcome wendy nice to have you so in a moment we'll see how widely debated this topic can be and we'll find out from our guest if or not it's controversial but first i'd like to know professor martin chang how did you first decide to do scientific research on homeschooling well at the time i was working at mount allison university in new brunswick and my sister-in-law um homeschools her six children actually and there had been some discussion about uh this her decision to homeschool which i was very much in favor of and so i just was looking in the literature to see what we knew about homeschooling and i found that there was a real lack of literature on how children performed academically children who had been homeschooled so being a scientist i decided to ask the question myself you took it up upon yourself to find those answers that's great and and wendy as we get started can you first just explain why you chose to homeschool your children um i really didn't choose to homeschool my children in reaction to public public school system i think it's really important to say that because i know there are a lot of people who homeschool for excellence that they believe that they can do so much better than the public school system the public school system is failing but i chose to homeschool my children because i wanted to spend more time with them so i really approached it from that perspective that we were going to be all together that i would spend much more time with them that i would be more influential in their lives than either teachers or their peers so that really was the beginning of it and you've homeschooled all of your children yes for how long um well probably about 20 years now i started about 20 years ago with my eldest um so yeah it's been so how long were they homeschooled for through primary school and high school yes all of them yeah and um my second eldest is going to be in cjep in the fall so that'll be the first time that he's actually in an institution for school and did you do it all on your own or did you share the teaching with someone else um really it fluctuated from one year to the other when they were very little we had i had a lot of friends who were homeschooling and we would often sort of arrange to look after you know just like babysitting services kind of thing and but mostly we did it on our own that's it's it's you know homeschooling is kind of like a saturday every day is saturday and so you're at home and you're doing whatever that you need to be doing that's way to see it sandra martin chang is that a common reason that parents give for deciding to homeschool their children that they simply want to spend more time with them that is one of the main reasons yes but i've also heard many people speak of religious reasons as well as some are dissatisfied or um or a little bit frightened of what is could be happening in in the school system so for example uh for example bullying i've heard bullying come up often as a reason not to necessarily send your children to school a hidden curriculum i've heard that come up as a reason so parents who don't necessarily want their children to be exposed to different gender stereotypes or barbie dolls or so i've heard those things come on definitely does that resonate for you oh absolutely i think that's why i always when i tell people i always state from the beginning that i don't have cons you know i mean i have concerns with the public school system but i'm not sort of slagging the public school system that's you know not one of the reasons that i chose but a lot of those are a lot of reasons that people get particularly religious reasons i was about to say though that the the demographic that we worked with uh had not started in the public school system and then opted out i think there were probably different that might be a different population who had let's say sent their children to school until grade two and then decided them out in reaction to something that happened so um the parents that i spent uh some time speaking with um they they were perhaps in fear of things that they hadn't experienced themselves in public school okay so now you've identified it in your research two types of homeschooling and i think it's important that we clarify the difference from the start can you explain them well originally when i got into this research i was planning on just studying you know homeschoolers but i quickly came to discover that within the um within the the demographic that chooses to educate at home there there was uh there were many different types first of all almost every family was different but there seemed to be a larger discrepancy between people who felt that they were schooling at home so i've heard people call it kitchen school table uh kitchen table schooling kitchen table school as well as uh unschooling or unstructured homeschooling homeschooling unschooling what is that exactly it means you're not following a specific curriculum is that right yeah usually what it means to is child-led learning so there's no imposed curriculum the understanding is that children are naturally curious that they want to learn things that they have many interests and so the parent will follow whatever interest the child has if they show an interest in dinosaurs for example which is really common with little kids then you would take them to museums so they could see you could read books you could watch a video so that they sort of become immersed in whatever it is they're interested in and their interests will grow as they grow okay now that's unschooling or unstructured schooling as we call it but parents can also choose can't they to follow the government curriculum it's available where online for them to certainly but uh we we called it structured and unstructured simply because again you can have very child-centered learning we can have it even in the daycares concordia is a big fan actually of child-centered learning but you can also say well my child is interested in dinosaurs so tomorrow we're going to and you can have a plan so tomorrow we're going to look at all words starting with the letter d or we're going to but there's still a plan for the day yeah yeah you can be really flying by the seat of your pants yeah and it can be very sporadic so it can also i had one mother say that um her daughter spent a lot of time uh watching tv and playing video games and so it it can be the amount of structure varies and it can be very structured to where the parent is following a bot curriculum or a government curriculum and they're saying today we're going to do these exact tasks on the ver one end on the other end very unstructured would just be child led to the point of of very little parents guidance at all and just to clarify in canada you can do anything you want you can decide not to follow a curriculum you can decide to have your child watching video games all day and the government won't do anything about it well education is is a provincial um it's covered by the project okay let's talk about so where were the marine times where you did your in the maritimes yes there was no truancy officer um and under under the the freedom of religion act parents are able to educate their kids any way that they see fit and they're as i understand there's a wide discrepancy among what parents you know how parents see fit to educate but all of the parents all of the homes we went into had parents that were loving and caring and interested in their kids and the the environments were certainly child centered and i learned a lot as a parent going into the homes and talking with the people i mean it was very wonderful experience for me yeah now wendy had you chose not to follow the government curriculum why is that um i just didn't feel the need really i'm a but i'm very aware of the government curriculum and i think that most people are whether they choose to follow it or not because you know now my son is going to see jeff but certainly didn't want my children to you know reach a certain age and not have any sort of basic knowledge or not be able to hold their own in conversation with somebody else their age so i'm aware of it but i didn't follow it sort of you know this year we'll do this and next year we'll do that but always in the back of my mind i'm keeping an idea of you know what does a person need to know to be educated because it's very interesting you're a teacher yourself you teach at college here at john abbott isn't it a bit ironic that you decided to turn your back on public education when it comes to your children but you participate in it yourself and your everyday job i don't think so i think that at a certain age 17 18 people are ready for very structured schooling that they've chosen and so i mean i know that a lot of people go to egypt without choosing it in the sense that you know they're sort of compelled to go there but they don't have to be there legally and so i for me once you've sort of spent your childhood being a child and you've spent your teenage years sort of learning who you are as a person then it's great now it's time for you to go into a structured program and start working to the demands of a curriculum to the demands of a teacher in the classroom situation so i don't really feel that it's um sort of contradictory but it's a natural continuum of how i see people learning you were gonna ask well i was gonna say i think as we get on in education it's been my experience anyway that we become more unstructured like that my students at the university level have more choice yeah they have i i mean they're no longer raising their hands to go to the bathroom you know they're given choice in assignments in that in that sense i can see there's a far more choice in let's say doing your phd than there was in grade one so yeah now just before we get into the results of your research which i'm very keen to get into can you take us through a typical day of homeschooling what's it like what's the reality of a typical day there is no typical day that's the problem with with unstructured school homeschooling is that we have no typical day it really depends and now my children are sort of in flux because um so some of them actually used to say what do you want to do today is that how it works uh they they have projects that they're working on so my my oldest daughter who is 15 has developed this incredible love of mathematics and i don't know why because i you know you don't share it yeah i i i do actually i used to teach statistics so i kind of you know but she lost she decided she loved math last year and so she did from september to december she did grade nine math curriculum and then from january to april she did the the grade 10 and now she's gonna do a grade 11. so she'll spend easily three or four hours a day just doing math but she also has a learning disability and she reads very poorly so she also has to spend and sanji will probably be really interested in this because she has difficulty reading she's reading at a very low level so she has to spend a couple of hours she has a tutor and chest you know so her day is very structured but she has chosen to structure her day whereas the other children especially the younger ones they you know they play playmobil for a few hours or do some lego or play a video game or you know maybe they don't really watch a lot of tv they go through periods where they watch too much tv and right when i'm ready to sort of step in they usually go do something else for a month or so sandra wendy mentioned the reading that is your specialty reading children for these particular for this particular study did you look specifically at their ability to read uh after you've tested them or was counting and other things were they also included we looked at a broad spectrum at least we tried to because we wanted to make sure that it was it was a fair representation so i didn't want to go in and it wouldn't have been a very interesting study if i had gone in and looked at only things that they were doing in the formal schooling education and then come out and said well children in formal schooling had done better that's a very interesting study so we wanted to make sure that we had represented certainly the social sciences and we just tried to we had looked at seven main things but i think reading was overrepresented for the reason that it was a love of mine it's sure so let's get into the results of those findings tell us how the different children performed in the three groups the unschooled children meaning taught at home with no structure specific structure or curriculum the structured home schools those who whose parents followed the government curriculum and those who went to public school okay i'll just clarify one thing it's not necessarily that the parents were following the the government's uh curriculum at all it's that they followed some sort of curriculum and often it was self-made okay okay because sometimes they had bought it sometimes it was a christian curriculum or sometimes the parents had just sat down and said what do they need to know let's do a unit on dinosaurs um but it was planned so they had they had an idea of structure from the parents um well we had a fairly we had we had a moderate sample of our structured homeschoolers so we had 25 formal home schoolers formals so those whose parents established a structure at home and then we had a comparison group of children of the same sex in the same age who were attending formal or traditional school public school delicate school yes and we had equated for the mother's education as well as we had done our best to equate for the mean family income although formal uh children attending formal uh public education they tended to have two working parents so sometimes the mean level of income was a little bit higher okay uh and what we found in those two groups and those are the groups i feel most comfortable talking about because we at least had a an okay sample you know um what we found was that the children uh who had been taught at home were outperforming those going to public school yeah by how much well significantly significantly stronger scores significantly stronger scores in five out of the seven areas and um and again this was in spite of the difference in in income and it wasn't even that if you looked at the children attending uh public school and you compared them to the mean of the test it wasn't that they were doing poorly they weren't doing poorly these kids and which makes sense because this was a self-selected population so these are people who invited us in and so they were doing well too those kids going to public school they were doing well um but it wasn't that they were doing poorly it's that the kids being educated at home were really outperforming in some instances they were five grade levels you know higher than those kids being taught in the public school and you tested them it was a standardized test and you tested them at what age or after what grade this is this is primary we're talking about primary it was primary and we had quite a uh we basically worked with the people who volunteered so we had quite a spread of ages so our youngest kids were in kindergarten and our oldest kids were in grade five and then you also looked at the unschooled children those who didn't have any kind of structure at home for example that mother you mentioned who looked at video games but also some parents who decided they were just gonna get the child the child itself to decide what they wanted to learn and what they were what were the results for your standardization we had we only had 12 kids okay so it was a very small sample but having said that i think it was one of the first studies that that looked yeah i think so because there aren't that many children in the population who learn well their parents don't volunteer for research i think is is often the case yeah i would agree with that and how did those 12 kids perform uh again we had a comparison group um with kids of the same age and same sex coming from similar families and in this in this case there was a very small group but we found a pattern where they weren't performing as highly okay significantly uh certain scores or certainly significantly lower scores compared to the um those taught with structure okay so we had those taught with structure who were very very high yeah and we had those taught with less structure who were lower and then we had the public school who was more you know somewhere in between okay that's great um i think wendy had you're familiar with this study or you've looked at it at least how what do you think about those findings this didn't surprise me at all particularly given the age group that the research was dealing with and certainly anecdotally i've seen exactly this that children who are unschooled tend to be um much not slower uh they read that later later on you know whereas kids who are who are public in the public school system or who are homeschooled in a structured setting will learn to read earlier it's been my experience with my own children and just with friends who've unschooled that our children tend to read start to read later so they will not read until they're nine sometimes ten the thing that i've noticed is that once they start to read they zoom up really quickly so instead of for example um one of my children when he learned how he learned how to read he didn't sort of progress through baby books or you know books with small little words but he immediately started reading a novel because he'd suddenly decide he you know should learn how to read so clearly he had been learning how to read just in his daily sort of you know interactions with with print you see printed words everywhere in games and on the computer so he had been sort of mobilizing all of these resources but hadn't actually used them and i noticed that with with several of my children that they they read later but then they became very good readers very quickly and i've seen it all in other things like mathematics for example where they'll be very slow to get going but then once they decide that they're going to learn it they'll learn it quickly and i think it's important to mention at this point that your research only looked at primary school kids we don't have equivalent numbers for high school kids in your case your kids went through primary school and high school at home or or they didn't go at all through primary school in high school but um uh so it's difficult for us to compare and to see if maybe you know kids would learn very much quicker what we need as long as you do i think we need to follow the same kids you know at multiple points and then you can look at proper change over time which is what's needed yes however that is a huge study it's a very ambitious study and you would almost need to get the kids before the parents decide so you would need to follow them from a very young age and then group them yourself you'll have to be oh no you'll have to have an instructor you'll be stressed well which in order for it to be perfect exactly well it might be perfect but ideally that's what we'd like to do is look at the same kids over time and look at you know their trajectory of learning and how they progress now just focusing on primary school for now because that's the research we have um can we the test you use the standardized test it um it follows i guess what kids at that age are supposed to know at school when they learn reading and counting and so on is it possible that this sort of standard test um doesn't see other forms of intelligence or development that maybe the kids who stay at home acquire and that are not seen in a standard public school test for example well one of the things that we did purposefully again was we looked at a test that wouldn't have been used in the public school that wasn't tied to the curriculum in any way just to make sure it was a fair assessment and we expected there well i thought perhaps that there might have been differences in the social sciences and the arts those types of uh of disciplines and we didn't find that what we found was and and again you could imagine um the public school kids might have been better readers certainly at a younger age you can imagine that we didn't find that either what we found was that those being taught at home with structure they were better readers they were better at math they were better at social science so they were better in a large number of disciplines now i guess i keep on hearing this structure i guess it's very it's very much a gray zone isn't it this structure where very much i mean you consider yourself unstructured but you do you know your daughter you said has herself a very she's developed structure a structure for her math um but you've let her develop that herself is that the difference you would make between structured and instruction well i i think you know we started off all through primaries as very unstructured and we didn't have workbooks and things like that but there became a point where they were asking for them so if i'm going to engage in child led learning if my child asks me to have you know to enroll in a course or to have a workbook then i have to go with that as well but i know people who wouldn't do it right that they would just say no that's not part of our philosophy of learning so there are people even more radical than i am now i want to talk about socializing because i think it's part of the one of the things you hear most about is that kids who learn at home don't get to socialize with other kids because they're not at school what kind of impact first of all in your study have you seen a difference but in terms of i guess or maybe you didn't specifically look at socialization and it's a whole other field of study but is this something that you hear a lot as a common sort of stereotype that kids who who learn at home are not as socialized it's something that i have heard and we didn't look at it so i can't comment on it from from my research at all except to say that the kids that we worked with were in a lot of groups i mean they did a lot of activities they were in a lot of groups and anecdotally um from going to the homes it seemed like that a lot their days were longer they had more time you know they had more time to take violin and go to skiing lessons and it there was this not this huge chunk of the day that was was busy with other things busy at school what would you say about your children and socialization well as sandra says children who are homeschooled tend to be involved in a lot of groups girl guys boy scouts violin lessons sports activities and generally homeschooling families have organizations where they'll meet and go on field trips together so i know that it's something that people are very concerned about because our sort of the norm is for children to be in a large group of other children the same age as them and but really i don't think that's the best place for children to be social learning about their you know social skills from other children who maybe haven't learned them yet and i think because they don't spend all of their time with one age group they tend to develop skills in dealing with people who are older than them and also in dealing with with children who are smaller than them or younger than them so i you know just from what i've seen they tend to be very compassionate because the older brothers and sisters are teaching well and then if you go into any kind of group situation if we organize a field trip as homeschoolers we're not all going to be ten some of us are going to be two and some will be five and some will be 14 and so they learn how to work in groups of varying ages and they spend more time with adults as well which i think is really important for children to have adult contact not just your parents but other adults around you so you've got the phone numbers of other moms who homeschool their children and you get together and i used to i don't anymore to be completely honest i just my children are not they they have now their set of friends and you know when they're little you know when children are little we bring them to play dates and they'll play with whoever we like right if i like a person her kid will be my kid's friend but once you're 14 or 15 or 12 you're not necessarily going to be friends with somebody because your mom likes their mom you know so my we're sort of out of that most of my children's friends are schooled they go to school and they come to our house after school and and then you know do whatever how do they react when they come home and they see their friends don't have to school they're really envious they really are and and i think it makes them see the a lot of their time at school is wasted you know in in them trying and i don't mean on purpose and i don't fault teachers for it but you're dealing with 25 kids in a class right for a lot of the time you're gonna have to wait while the teacher helps the children you know so they do see that we've talked about how homeschooling is actually illegal in some countries do you think today it's still a very controversial topic from what you hear around you and the people you've you've met do you think it's controversial i do think i think particularly in quebec it's really controversial particularly other provinces and i actually don't know many people from the maritime provinces but i have friends who are homeschooled in bc and alberta and ontario they're much more homeschooling friendly alberta you can register as a homeschooler and receive money for your educational supplies interesting um you can you know get textbooks from the school quebec doesn't have anything like that and they tend to be very adversarial with homeschoolers um and so i like how adversarial very demanding um they often threaten people who are homeschooling that they're going to report them to the dpg if their children don't come to school or they don't sign a contract have you had that kind of threats no i've never had them but other people definitely have and i think that what happens when when you know when they have this adversarial relationship is it drives people underground and so most of the people i know aren't the scoper doesn't even know that they exist if your child has never been to school you don't have you have no relationship with the school board and so they don't exist at all which i make which i guess makes it very hard for researchers and to actually find people who will talk definitely and i think the fact that i wasn't in the department of education at the time helped um it helped people come forward because you were in the department of psychology yeah uh and i didn't know i was going to be going to a department of education at the time but yes it makes it very difficult because we can't find the base population ideally as i mentioned in our study it was self-select population which means that our results might not be reflective of the general population people who felt confident who felt good who knew their children were doing well those were the people who were most likely to volunteer for our study but the good thing about our study was that we had this comparison group so the same restrictions would apply to those people in public school it wasn't the ones that were worried about their kids they weren't inviting us over to their house you know um and we still found these differences though yes i was going to say even though the parents were very confident for example in an unstructured setting where they were teaching where they were not really teaching their kids where they decided to leave their kids to sort of learn on their own uh the parents felt confident but still the kids were performing in at lower levels yeah the high school kids yeah the whole yes um in some cases i think that was one difference i noticed i noticed going to the home so this is all in donald truly but uh the the the public school kids the parents would be off making dinner or cleaning the house or doing something i mean they were doing something the home schooled parents we asked them to just not uh to not make their kids nervous but they would be practically right right behind here listening how are they doing how are they doing and in some instances uh those being taught without structure were surprised like they they would say to me shoot you know we've been covering um the the governmental system in russia and i didn't realize that my my child didn't know all the letters of the alphabet wow um like we just forgot to teach the alphabet but they were already about they were learning so there were some areas of real gaps yeah gaps exactly some areas of real specialized learning but then there are some foundational i feel foundational skills and it's very difficult this coming from a researcher who studies literacy it's very difficult to learn the letters of the alphabet you need in that case we need some explicit instruction and so i had another mother who was a wonderful kind warm loving parent but she said oh my daughter takes books to to bed every night trying to teach herself the alphabet how did your kids learn the alphabet oh boy i don't know were they just singing maybe i honestly can't remember them learning how they learned the alphabet um but we read a lot uh we had games where you would use letters so you know as much as we're unstructured we did things that lead to learning like i think but i i really believe that children have to read and read well in order to accomplish anything at all so um two of my children learned how to read when they were six two of them didn't learn until they were one was nine one was ten i have a nine year old now who he will read but he tells people he doesn't know how because he thinks people can ask him to read stuff to to them but he plays games or he didn't wear you when he was 10 and and still he couldn't i was starting to get a little a little concerned absolutely yeah but i i i knew you know it's it's almost like a religious experience you have to have faith that it's going to work out and they're going to learn it but i really was encouraging him um to pick things up and try to read um but i really did think that he probably would soon and sure enough he just his sister learned how to read the year before his twin sister it's very interesting i just wonder if can you get equivalents in terms of tests if they want to go to sejap afterwards how does that work do they don't have a high school degree no he doesn't have a high school degree um they've sort of changed the rules to get into stage up in the last three or four years when my eldest went to siege he just went down made an appointment went down and talked to them and they were like oh okay in you go that was many many years ago my second eldest he wrote a letter and he um prepared sort of some stuff that he had written sort of a little you know promo package for himself but he also had taken um because he wanted to go to egypt last year and he wasn't old enough so in the in he took a few online courses uh grade 12 online courses so he had those grades as well to sort of back him up okay so but it really just went on the letter that he wrote right and so they called him and spoke to him on the telephone about this letter what he had been doing and that was all his own initiative yeah i think if you want to go you need to make the case for yourself that you know that you should go sure sandra martin i don't know if you saw in your study a certain profile um for kids that may be more uh how can i put it that may be just a better profile to be home school uh compared to others we we had a very small sample okay uh so i we i'm not able to to answer that question based on the number of kids that we had um with with research what you'd like to do is add a little tiny piece and go you know a little tiny piece further than what has been added and then see if it fits and what we found does fit within a larger literature um from the united states looking at larger samples but where they did where most of the literature comes from it's where it's where the literature that we have again there isn't a lot of it but what's been done a large part of it has been done in the united states it's flawed in different ways but the nice thing is is when you get a picture that's kind of consistent from looking at many different uh methodologies then you can start feeling a little bit more confident in what you're finding sure i will say though that i think whenever i talk to people about my research there are areas where we can all learn from each other i think so right now when i'm training pre-service teachers we certainly talk to them about allowing lots of choice in our classrooms we talk to them about getting kids reading authentic literature a lot of explicit instruction at the beginning because i think i think learning the alphabet is very difficult without explicit instruction but then making things authentic and so it's we don't need to have this dichotomy between these artificial worksheets and silly things these make you know make work for the kids and necessarily just you know being completely unstructured especially in school we don't want kids we don't want kids unstructured i don't want kids unstructured with the teacher sitting in the corner doing something else and a lot of kids will fall in the cracks if you do that also that every child is not going to learn to read in the same way so i think it's important to see you know who are we dealing with some kids need tons and tons of reinforcement i mean you know that you're a reading specialist exactly you know whereas others will pick it up relatively quickly you know so my my older daughter has she's had a reading tutor since she was six she's still only reading at about a grade five level she has a whole sort of list of accommodations that would be made for her when she goes into to see shep i i couldn't just let her like oh she'll learn how to read one day i'll just leave her she's slow you know you can't do that either you have to be away and i knew and i'm not sure how i knew but just her pattern with language was very different from her elder brothers and so i knew when she was six something wasn't going to work out for her without some very intense reinforcement i think that's a beautiful way to come to an end to this conversation finding balance between a completely unstructured setting and having the child have some autonomy and some decision making in in in their learning i'm going to ask very short questions to each uh to each of you and you can answer in very short answers one or two words if possible we have one minute so let's go are you ready go go uh wendy had if you could do it all over again would you do it any differently no no sandra what is the number one misconception about homeschooling would you say i would say probably the socialization okay wendy is it harder to find a job when you've been homeschooled not to my understanding sandra does the canadian government or quebec government rather encourage or discourage parents to homeschool probably in quebec maybe sadly discouraged but in other provinces it's really left up to the parents discretion i think it the government is quite neutral okay wendy should all parents be allowed to choose how to teach their kids regardless of the government's curriculum yes same question yes but we need to get more information to parents because parents are loving and they want to do what's best for their kids and we don't have the research right now i think necessarily for parents to make informed decisions wendy why don't more parents homeschool ah i think that they are using schools mostly for as a custodial as function because people somebody needs to be at home it's very costly for a lot of families and a lot of people feel that they're just not they're not competent to do it and that's fine if you're not you know i have nothing i don't i don't encourage all parents to homeschool just like i don't encourage all people to have children if that's your thing then that's good sandra what would you say was the number one reason that you're unstructured no sorry you're structured homeschool kids got higher scores than kids who went to primary public school i would say this is a hypothesis but i would say the the one-on-one instruction and the the sensitivity so that's another thing we encourage in our teachers is for teachers to really get a sense of how each child in their class is doing so that you can teach just above it just beyond what they can do alone and i think parents working with a smaller number of kids at home have a better idea of exactly where their parents where their children stand and then they can give instruction that's a little bit higher that would be my guess wendy what was your biggest challenge homeschooling it was really easy wow and sandra finally if you had to do it all over again would you homeschool your kids oh no i wouldn't however um i am certainly very involved in their schooling another misconception is that either you send your kids off to school and you have no idea what they're doing and some parents do that and i don't agree with it or you keep them at home and then you that's all you do is you school them i think there is a lot of overlap so if you send your kids to school which the majority of canadians will continue to do we still i mean have projects with them do things with them take them places read the books they're reading be involved you know and the teachers at school it should be a community sandra martin chang and wendy had thank you very much for coming in today thanks for being here thank you and thank you for listening and join us soon for another beyond the headlines i'm caroline locker till next time

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Keywords: Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, home-schooling, home schooling, sociology, education

Id: AGp4KFLuQNc

Length: 40min 19sec (2419 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 06 2012