Archive for the 'Grown Home Learners' Category

How Do They Turn Out?

Many people think that home education sounds all very well… but how do the kids turn out? Will they be wild, unsocialised, unemployable? Not at all. Read these articles for an insight into what grown home learners are like.

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Meet Dr Chan, High Achiever with a PhD at 21

by Adam Morton / The Age
© The Age. Reproduced by Permission.
March 8, 2006
It figures: after completing year 12 subjects at 10, mathematician Yao-ban Chan has now become Melbourne University’s youngest-ever PhD graduate.
WHEN he was 10, while his peers swung from monkey bars and charged around with rugby balls, Yao-ban Chan sat year 12 exams in [...]

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Home Ed is a Success

By Levina and Geoff Snow
We chose to home educate our two children after the kindergarten experience for our elder child was a disaster – bullying and being excluded by the other children and being overlooked by the teacher. The choice initially was to home educate for a few years – then for primary school – [...]

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When Home Ed Kids Grow Up

by Katharina Russell-Head, Templestowe, Vic
Why has the Victorian government suddenly become concerned with regulating home education? Who has brought up objections to the existing legislation? What is the problem that they want to solve? What fears are being expressed? Are they afraid that children outside the public school system will be uneducated? That they [...]

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Other Ways

By Dindy Vaughan, Ringwood Victoria
Not every child is happy at school.
Some struggle along grudgingly, some fight the system, some opt out and refuse to achieve; and mostly their parents worry.
In many cases it comes down to ‘school refusal’. The state of Victoria currently has not hundreds, but thousands of school-age children who are simply refusing [...]

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Celebrating 100 Issues of Otherways!

Our Founders on Otherways and the Early Days of AERG

Lauris Jephcott

Fancy ‘Other Ways’ reaching its 100th issue! Congratulations to all the ‘generations’ of parents and educators who have thought it important over the years to look at alternatives.

Whilst my memory plays some tricks after more than 20 years, I remember most clearly the desire I had to make life happy and interesting for my first child, Owen, which started the quest for alternatives in education.

As a former teacher, and someone who did all the right things at state primary & secondary schools, I had assumed that my son would go to the local state school when he was five or so, and enjoy it. I even went along with him for the first week. Now, most mothers of young children share their children’s interests. I had an active five year-old brain, and when I went to school, I was bored! Despite good intentions and a friendly teacher, Owen (and I) decided that school was not for us at that time. I started looking round for alternatives to the conventional school format, and that’s what led to ‘Other Ways’. There were one or two very small ‘alternative’ schools in Melbourne at the time, and I think I wrote a short article about them which was published in The Learning Exchange, a community newspaper based in Malvern. It was shortly after this that people such as Heather Cousland, Clare Cole & Christine Gazjago made contact, and we began our alternative education journeys together. …

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