美國有些孩子是在家上學的

童話大王鄭淵潔的教育方式另類得很著名：兒子鄭亞旗小學畢業就輟學，完全由父親在家展開私塾式教育。如今35歲的鄭亞旗是北京皮皮魯總動員文化科技有限公司的CEO，還擔任了北京鄭淵潔品牌管理有限公司董事長，據說鄭亞旗的年收入在1.5億以上，是一個非常成功的經商人士。但是在中國，父母在家給孩子上課還是非常少見的，而在美國，在家上課的孩子并不少見。今天我們采訪到的這位老外，就在家教育自己的四個孩子，讓我們一起來聽聽她對此的看法吧！

We have different educational choices than China does. We have public schools like China. We have private schools which I think you have a little bit of. We have charter schools (特許學校) and we have homeschooling which is people that are not sending their kids to school. 10% percent of Americans are homeschooled.

charter school是革新、改良的公立學校，中文譯成政府特許學校。在《不讓一個孩子掉隊》的法令下，一個公立學校如果連續三年在州標準化統考中不合格將面臨被關閉的制裁，當一所學校面臨被關閉的厄運時，州政府，當地的社會機構，企業，甚至個人可以將其接管，轉為charter school。

charter school與一般公立學校最大的不同是它不受一般公立學校的法令條例限制，可以有自己的操作系統，而同美國公立學校系統一樣，charter school從如何啟動成立，如何運作，資金來源，教師執教資格等等各州都不一樣，都有自己的一套。

So home-school, you mean you teach them by yourself?

Yes, and they can do online classes but it is a very big market in America. All the different types of curriculum you can buy and teach at home.

Do you compare to the lessons from school that, are they leaving behind and how they're catching up or so? So do you do that or you just go with the flow?

More go with the flow. You have to understand most people do home school to get away from that type of education. There are different types of education in different types of educational theory. You have a wide variety and options for an America, like my youngest daughter, she's six years old, but she is two years ahead on the standard math. She loves math by letters, wouldn’t have enough all day long. She has online classes on math and she does, without exaggeration, about a year’s with the math every three months since she started. She's six and she's almost halfway through elementary math, which is pretty cool because they can run at their own pace.

Sure. For each kid,?do you have like a daily routine—when you would get up, when you would have breakfast and how many lessons you would have every day? Well, it's a little bit hard to divide because they are in different phases. There are four children and of course they would have different lessons. How do you manage the time for them?

Some things like literature can be done in groups. I do the older two in a group and the younger too in a group, a lot of subjects can be done together. Like my older two got done with astronomy. They were using the same textbooks even though they're a year apart. And then we’ll also do biology, my oldest one is doing a high school biology and the other one is doing a middle school type biology, but they're doing it together. So studying the same material, just the one a little bit more advance has more work than the other. So they can be done in groups. They can do that in the same subject matter.

Do you plan to home-school them all the way to university?

Homeschooling students across the board have tested higher on the standardized testing to get into university than their public school peers, which is really nice, cause they get more individualized attention.And where I live in America, in Florida, all dual-enrollment (雙重入學) classes, dual-enrollment is a program the state has where if you're a high school student, you can take a college class and it counts as your high school and college class. It is free for every student, and if you’re home school family, you get the same benefits. And you need a principle, a counselor and a parent to sign off. And when you home school, you are all three, so a parent only has to fill out the form and they can take free college classes, until mom and dad say they graduated high school or home school in high school, which for my kids is gonna include a bachelor’s degree before there is a requirement for high school.A lot of homeschoolers will have their kids get their college degree paid for by the state before they graduate high school. There are high schools, the actual charter schools in the state. My brother went to one where about 20%of the graduating class has their associates and about, I think, maybe 5% have their bachelor’s degree before they had their high school diploma. So that's a really nice benefit. Instead of paying college for children, I can have it free if I homeschool.

So did you plan to do this when you had your first kid or you just gradually came up with the idea of home-schooling??

When my first daughter was about three, she really wanted to go to school and she was too young. So I started looking into things we could do at home and it sort of grew off that because she was reading at three which they don't normally start until end of kindergarten beginning of first grade. So it's a waste of time, the public school.

Yeah. So do you have a criteria on how many hours they study every day??

Yes. I prefer them to study about three hours. The reason is when you're not teaching a large group of people, you don't need as much time. I can sit with you and explain the color red really quickly. And if I do IT with a group of fifty people, it's gonna take a little bit more time to make sure everyone in the group understands. Homeschooling, they've done studies, independent studies, if you work with one child, one on one, and like the homeschooling environment, you can cover the entire day at the public school in about two to three hours.

How do your kids take that? Do they want to play with other kids? Because they are staying at home the whole time. Are they playing with other kids from school?

We have a good homeschooling population in America. They said ten percent, one of every ten children are homeschooled. So there's a lot of events in our cities for homeschoolers. We actually live right next to a park. So there are kids in the evening every day. They can see the same kids as they would at school.And then also companies like dance classes you would put your kid in normally during the school day, they have discounted classes for homeschoolers. So like my kids do Krav Maga(馬伽術)which is sort of like karate(空手道), but they do it fifty percent off because they do it during the school day while everyone else is at school. The gym gets to extra classes, which otherwise they won't do because everyone's in school, for homeschoolers. So it's a win-win. They make more money because they can open up during school hours and the homeschoolers can go in big groups, because most homeschooling families are a little bit larger. So for the price of one kid, I get two kids in the Krav Maga which is basically karate class, which is nice. It makes all the extracurricular activities very cheap if you home school.

It's really tempting. It's really uncommon here in China but I do have heard of one Chinese author...he had a boy. The boy didn't go to school and he basically home-schooled the boy and that is one thing I've heard that ever happened in China. But it turned out that the boy was quite good with the studies and the whole thing and he went to a famous university in the end. So it turned out that it's quite a good way if the parent is a good teacher obviously.

It doesn't have to be the teacher. The parent is good is that your parent is invested in your child. You are more invested in your child so that you would put more effort into it.A teacher you know they don't care, they're getting paid, but they're not going to spend all night with you, going over papers twenty-five times until you have it perfect. Apparently, I will stay up with my kids; we will go over maths for five hours straight until she gets the concept. But, you know, if I'm teaching a class, it's like, okay, our time's up. Thank god.

How long will each of your class be?

With my children, I try to keep lessons very short, like fifteen to twenty minutes.It's over a subject. It might have a little bit of an assignment afterwards, but that's it. I mean, it's mainly literature based I do, and be amazed, even their math book is a story based math, which is entertaining and fun for them.

在家上學當然有在家的好處，不過也不是所有孩子都適合在家上學，也不是每個家庭都具備在家培養孩子的條件。教育最總要的是給孩子足夠的尊重和愛。