Vision | Home Education Foundation

Vision by Craig Smith

5 years today since Craig’s funeral

Loving and genuinely concerned parents are the best qualified of all to teach their own children. Who else is more motivated to invest the time, the money, the blood, sweat, toil and tears required for the child’s best interests than the parents? Who knows and understands the child better than the parents? A homeschooling parent has the vast advantage of a tutoring situation: one parent/teacher to one or two pupils, recognised worldwide as the most effective teaching method. Whatever they may lack in the area of formal educational qualifications they will usually more than compensate for in motivation and the advantages of one-to-one teaching.

Teaching the three Rs is no big mystery, as the state schooling system would have us believe. It is almost a natural extension of what parents do all the time: teach a brand new baby to speak and understand a language. There is nothing in the rest of the educational realm to compare to this incredible feat, yet parents do it naturally with little special effort.

Most home educators find the lifestyle of home-based education rather fun, as they are flexible enough to have field trips, holidays, special projects, extended time on one subject whenever they want. Because the formal instruction per child need only be two hours or so per day, preschoolers can be napping at that time, or other pupils can look after them in turn.

Schools and teachers only control the access to “schooling”….lecturing, pre-digested notes, certain classrooms and labs, and paper qualifications. They do not control “education”. An education is available to all and is virtually free of charge: it is not in short supply, it does not diminish as more people get it. Schooling in schools and other institutions is in a limited, finite supply, and it is this which people like to control for they can make money out of it. Once a person learns to read, write, compute and has some research skills, he can teach himself virtually anything….that is, a true education is out there to be acquired by anyone with the initiative to dig it up for himself.

Taken from

An Introduction to Home Education in New Zealand

(home schooling, home-based education)