Indigo Valley mum, Ruth Oates has worked at home for the past sixteen years in what has literally been a learning experience.
At the end of last year, Mrs Oates completed home educating her five children - Bill, Nathan, Sharon, David, and Michelle - after having begun the process in 1990 when the oldest three were withdrawn from primary school.
The qualified teacher pursued home education after being dissatisfied with traditional schooling.
Mrs Oates first spoke to The Border Mail about her experiences in 1993 and at that time said the proof of the pudding would come in 20 years.
Now with Michelle, 19, having finished year 12 and pursuing nursing studies, Mrs Oates is thrilled with the results of her hard work which involved lessons from 9 am to 2 pm including morning tea and lunch.
“I’m really glad, I have no regrets,” Mrs Oates said.
The kids are our friends and they have all done academically reasonably well to very well - they all had or are having tertiary education.
“I have people say to me, ‘You’re so lucky. Your kids are so lovely’ and I think, ‘It’s not luck.’
“We put in some really hard yards and I’m glad I did it.”
Two of Mrs Oates children are studying mechanical engineering and medicine and the others are an emergency nurse and a radio broadcasting engineer.
Nathan, 25, is doing a medical degree at the Australian National University and is in the middle of a training stint at the Albury Base Hospital.
He believes his homeschooling has given him the skills to cope with higher education.
“They really tried to teach us to think for ourselves and if we didn’t know something then we were encouraged to find that information and that’s what’s helped me the most because it is essentially the philosophy my medical course is based on,” Nathan said.
“There’s so much information, it’s not possible to know it all but if you know how to find it, it’s more important than knowing it sometimes.”
It cost about $500 a year in text books to home educate - a lot cheaper than a private school, Mrs Oates said.
“From a teacher’s perspective, you were able to individualise information, for example, David was really into electronics and we started him on an electronic technicians course in Year 10, which we could never have done in an open school.”
- The Border Mail May 10 2007
