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Problems with this page
Where are the citations that [[Karl Marx]] was homeschooled? I'll look further for them, but haven't found any yet.--[[User:Aschlafly|Aschlafly]] 22:56, 15 March 2008 (EDT)
Where are the citations that [[Karl Marx]] was homeschooled? I'll look further for them, but haven't found any yet.--[[User:Aschlafly|Aschlafly]] 22:56, 15 March 2008 (EDT)
== Problems with this page ==
I think there are some major problems with this article; not in terms of the content being wildly inaccurate but rather being rather narrow in its focus. If you look at the opening line, it defines homeschool as "a movement consisting of 1-2 million students in the United States". That's problematic because for a start, because homeschooling is not a "movement" (at best, it's a subsection of the conservative movement) and it's definitely not isolated to the United States.
Furthermore, I think you're striving a little too hard to give homeschooling as much credit as possible. Don't get me wrong - I have nothing against homeschooling. But at no stage in the article have you clearly and accurately defined what homeschooling is, because as I noted, the opening definition is extremely flawed. Consequently, when you get to someone like Charles Dickens, I reckon you're drawing a bit of a long bow. To take the Dickens example: as a history teacher, I feel that we should be quite clear that Charles Dickens was never formally homeschooled in the manner that the article implies and the fact that he didn't receive an education for much of his childhood had nothing to do with such things as "a different, often better, education environment with different, often better, opportunities" or "freedom from liberal and/or atheistic bias and culture in schools". To simplify things as much as possible, he ceased to have a formal education because his father was imprisoned for financial reasons. And I can tell you that his mother was no great believer in Dickens getting an education: she was the one that forced Dickens to work in a factory. In short, there is no evidence whatsoever that Dickens received any active home education. Dickens is just one example of the wider problem with the entire article, in that you suffer from a poor definition which consequently makes many of the names that you list as "arguably homeschooled" look silly. Even under a solid definition of homeschooling, I don't think people such as Dickens qualify. [[User:PeterS|PeterS]] 05:36, 19 March 2008 (EDT)