And they will hopefully complement their program with family industries and community services. It is the pressure from the states as well as the tendency to teach the way they were taught, which causes home teachers to use the cookie or sausage-making technique that has driven most homeschoolers to use package curricula which burn out both parents and children. We plead for breadth of thought when reading research. The article's researcher, Brian Ray, may readily find technology helping it grow. Yet, far more basic is the ideal of promoting creativity by avoiding early academic pressures and valuing children's interests.
Technology provides tools, but creativity cultivates great character and self-worth.
Research from Harvard, Cornell, Yale, Tufts, Temple, Wisconsin, Stanford, Cal-Berkeley and Washington State leads to firm conclusions that, for optimum learning, academic pressures should not be firmed up before junior high school begins. It will help Ray's research if he would read the founding homeschool research more closely and generalize less on the basis of limited samples.