Incoming email:

Hi Brian, I've been enjoying your blog and thought you might be interested in this article.

My own comments here.

Jeremy Hiebert

Indeed. Me and quite a few readers of this, I believe. The links are both worth following. At the end of the second, we find Jeremy saying, of a computerised home schooling set-up of some kind that the regular teachers somewhere or other in America are getting angry about:

This new model may be bad for teachers, but what about kids? I didn't really understand a couple of weeks ago when he said that homeschooling was a bad idea because many parents are not qualified to teach. The idea that none should be allowed to because some can't do it well seems a bit absurd, and the public system is in the midst of trying to figure out what it means to get "qualified teachers" when funding keeps getting cut and districts face teacher shortages. We all know smart people who would make better teachers than many of the ones that the government says are qualified. And what if they had good curriculum to use with their kids, online collaboration tools and all kinds of extra-curricular social activities available - sports, clubs, friends, travel, etc - wouldn't that have the potential to be an excellent learning experience?

As they say in America: you'd think.

By the way, in case you'd not noticed, I regard all incoming emails from strangers to Brian's Education Blog as publishable unless it explicitly says otherwise.