Is what my husband said this morning!! I’ve been home ed’ing for 4 years now & our oldest is coming up for secondary school age. My husband has decided to jump on the school is best bandwagon, shame as he’s been so supportive up until now…. Apparently all our kids need to go to the comp to “feel the pressure” because apparently they won’t succeed in life otherwise…. *sigh*

I think that’s rubbish….I certainly remember “feeling the pressure” at school and it definitely didn’t do me any favours! If anything it completely turned me off doing any higher education. I was very driven at school and did well regardless of outside issues at the time, but when I finished it was like “wow, what a relief, not putting myself through that again!” So I guess my grades have never even been put to any use, so it seems a bit of a waste, but at least I have the option I suppose. Think I might have had more enthusiasm after school had I not had such a pressurised, perfectionist-driven education, rather than leaving those sorts of establishments feeling somewhat burnt out!

Um, doesn’t fear and pressure activate the ‘fight or flight’ centres of the brain, shutting down the learning centres?

Kids need to know that everything in the outside world isn’t all beautiful and lovely, but the way you teach them that doesn’t have to be chucking them in at the deep end.

I don’t know, I can see the argument for kids feeling some degree of pressure and learning to deal with it. I think ability to deal with stress is pretty important and I am not sure how well you can learn to deal with stress if you never experience pressure. I also know that I do best under some amount of pressure. I think the issue is with pressure that is unnecessary.

I agree with Edith, you do need to learn how to cope with stress, as life does throw things at you that require stress management.  And working to deadlines etc or working on things you don’t find particularly inspiring, but still need to do a good job at.

I agree that coping or dealing with stress is a useful skill to have but I am not convinced that the best way for children to learn these skills is to put them under pressure.  I went to pieces in all my school exams and consequently got terrible grades in them, in my life since school both at home and work I have had to deal with pressure and did not/have not gone to pieces, so the pressure of school taught me nothing I would say.  The skills you need to deal with pressure and/or stress are the one’s that would be more useful for a child to learn, perhaps you could come with a list with your children and then think of ways of developing these skills, if they have not already been learnt!

I wonder if your partner is concerned that your kids are not feeling enough pressure, and if so, is there a way for them to feel some pressure without sending them to school? My HE’d kids actually do a certain number of exams, perform in music concerns, and do other stressful things. Could doing stuff like this (if you are not already) be a compromise position?

More specifically, is he concerned that they don’t have the life skills needed to cope with pressure and/or taking exams? Like I said above, if that’s the case then I think it could possibly be an issue in the future, but there are many, many ways to remedy this without school. And as sustainablemum has pointed out, just going to school is no way to guarantee that they get these skills anyway: a better strategy might be to work specifically on how to manage stress, seeking out activities outside your kids’ comfort zones, etc.

It is not necessary for children to have experienced something in childhood in order to be able to deal with it in adulthood.  Everyone here could probably give many examples of things they have been faced with as an adult that they had not experienced until then.  Adults learn just as well as children do, and I see no sense at all in forcing things onto children as some kind of ‘preparation’ for what they will have to do as an adult.  The same argument is used to excuse bullying in schools (‘they’ll meet this sort of behaviour in the workplace, and how will they cope if they didn’t experience it at school?’), and to deride autonomous home educators who are told ‘they will have to do things they don’t want to when they’re grown up!’ - the implication being they should be forced to do things they don’t want to do now to ‘prepare’ them for this.  Our job as home educators is to produce adults whose love of learning is still intact, and who have the wherewithal to learn whatever they need to know at any given time.  If we succeed in that then any kind of ‘this will happen later in life so you’d better get used to it now’ idea becomes redundant.