I routinely meet academically successful homeschoolers and their parents, and the reports are almost always the same. These academically successful homeschoolers rarely spend more than 2 to 3 hours a day in formal studies and almost never report doing “homework”.
What's going on? Why are academically successful children ( homeschooled or institutionalized) successful?
We spend as a nation up to a quarter of million dollars per child for K-12 education, yet we do NOT know the answers to the following questions:
1) Is the government school merely sending home a curriculum for the child and parents to follow in the home?
2) Is child acquiring his knowledge due to the afterschooling efforts of the child and the parent?
3) Where **exactly** is the child acquiring his knowledge, in the home or in the school?
4) Who is doing the real teaching? Is the parent and child by following the curriculum that is sent home, or is the teacher?
5) Is the school merely functioning as a developer of curriculum, a testing service, and an evaluator and grader of projects?
6) What are the commonalities in habits between academically successful homeschoolers and institutionalized children. Have these habits be identified, measured, timed, and tested?
When my daughter was in high school in CA, neither the algebra nor the Geometry text books had any examples, so if the parent wanted to help the student, at home, they had to go to the bookstore and purchase other materials.
I have always thought that the absence of examples was intentional, to purposefully prevent giving an advantage to students whose parents would teach at home, what the teacher failed to get across in the classroom.