. . . and no experience in homeschooling. We're even in that respect.You cannot legitimately teach a subject to anyone unless you have a grasp of the subject itself. If someone who barely finished high school themselves expects to be able to instruct their 15 year old in Algebra, they are seriously deluded.
If someone barely finished high school, there will be a reason or three:two graduate degrees plus five years of teaching experience at the graduate level.lack of intelligence,Presumably we can agree that homeschooling is not the easy way. Those who choose it, and especially those who stick with it, will be motivated.lack of motivation, or
lack of educational opportunity.
Likewise I hope we can agree that people who find learning hard, and are being told by those in authority that public school IS education, are extremely unlikely to undertake to be authorities on Advanced Placement Calculus (a subject in which, as it happens, my daughter needed my help; she wasn't given the prerequisites and thus benefited from my BS education).
Those who barely finished high school who are motivated to tutor their children will almost exclusively be those whose own educational opportunities were substandard. Such people will as I suggested benefit from the learning experience of teaching their children.
Teaching at the graduate level implies teaching people only a few years--at most--below your own educational attainment. That is an undertaking from which you presumably learned a good deal about your subject of specialization. This is highly analogous to our weakly-trained high school graduate after five years of teaching her/his child elementary subjects. Either the parent will at some stage decide that "this is too hard" or--more likely--the child will encourage the parent to learn cooperatively with him/her. In that case more total education occurs than if the child were to actually be taught successfully (contrary, in the hypothesis, to the expectations of the parent) by the public school.I am put in mind of my older daughter, who somehow just yearned to be smarter about something than I was (you can understand that that was quite a challenge to undertake at an early age). LOL! In college she undertook to learn Chaucer in the Old English original, and took satisfaction in the fact that I was clueless about it. If a homeschooled student were to react in a manner remotely similar to that, he/she would come to adulthood rather well educated, don't you think?
If you remember from the original thread, I made the point that my wife, who does the bulk of the teaching at home, hated high school and barely graduated. If someone's teaching skills are limited to passing on pure information to a child, then I would agree with CholeraJoe that the best candidate is obviously the most educated. But teaching goes beyond just the transference of information from one parent (adult) to child. My wife absolutely adores children and loves nurturing them, and this "skill" is absolutely necessary in the learning process. This love is the birthplace of learning, which makes the home an ideal place for early learning.
As the child grows, it becomes more important to that the parent have a grasp on the "knowledge" part of teaching or the child may become frustrated. If the parents skills are lacking, the child will suffer. The proverbial Master/Pupil theory of education becomes very important at this stage of the game. That is one reason we encouraged our oldest kids to start taking classes at the local Junior College when they were 15 or 16. They were beyond our abilities to teach "knowledge" in some subjects.
If I am not mistaken, education followed this pattern up until the mid-1800's. Parents taught the children the basics at home, and then the child, if he/she displayed above average abilities, might be privately tutored or sent to university for a formal education. Other children, with lesser abilities, were apprenticed into a family business or some local trade.