Ministry urged to consider home-schooling

The COVID-19 pandemic has proven that home-schooling and online teaching can become a norm across Barbados, home-school advocate Paul Simba Rock has said.

He argued that during the last three months when face-to-face teaching was forced to be suspended due to the coronavirus outbreak, students had to revert to online forms of learning while some parents were happy to start home-schooling their wards.

As a result of this, Rock, who recently introduced a new online learning channel, said he was calling on the Ministry of Education to seriously consider updating the learning experience in Barbados to include home-schooling.

“The ministry could develop a way to have a working relationship that includes mandatory public school, distance learning and home-schooling. They are three different things.

Currently, a parent who wants their children to engage in home-schooling must complete an application and meet several criteria. If granted, then a review is to be done every year.

However, Rock believes that such a process should be discontinued since one of the requirements was for the parent wishing to homeschool the child to be “qualified”.

“Where has that gone now, everybody had to homeschool and [do] distance learning, something that the ministry, if it was proactive, would have created a long time ago. So your classrooms don’t have to be overcrowded. Not everyone wants to stay home and not everyone wants to go to the school,” he said

Rock, who supported a mother in starting a court proceeding against the government in 2018 regarding homeschooling, said since the closure of schools several parents have been expressing their desire to homeschool their children since they now had the time.

“Quite a few people I know are glad for this because they will not be sending their children back to [the classroom] jump high or jump low. I know at least four of them and they don’t know how the ministry will deal with it, but they are willing to do it. They say it is more convenient, it is cheaper,” he said.

Rock said it was about time the Ministry of Education develops a model that could incorporate online learning, classroom and homeschooling as options.

He said he was willing to sit with officials and “think out what such an educational system would look like”.

“I want to see now as things go back to the old normal and how they will infuse the new normal and how that will affect the education system. Will parents still be given the opportunity then to do distance learning from home, which would be incorporated into a form of home-schooling and would they need to apply to do that, because this is what they have been forced to do during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“They should be allowed to continue because neither home-schooling nor public education should be mandatory. It should be what is best for your child. I am hoping that the ministry goes the route of revamping the whole idea of home-schooling and incorporate distance learning in it and the mandatory learning with the school,” he insisted.

Rock said he was of the view that there were too many people in the ministry that were set in their “old” ways of doing things.

“The problem is that the ministry is bogged down with people that find it hard to pass on the baton . . . the ministry needs young creative minds, and not minds coming out of the same institutions that fed the same thing that coming in – young people with old [way of doing things]. It could even be an old person with a young fresh mind,” he suggested.

“Everything I have said has come to pass. You didn’t want to do it voluntarily, but you had to do it forcibly . . . the pandemic was a violent change to our society. It wasn’t something we had a lot of time to prepare for. We didn’t know it was coming it was a force and violent change, so the ministry had to make changes that they were not prepared for, but that they could have been prepared for if they had just listened to me, and I am sure a lot of people were calling for this way before me,” he said.

Over a month ago Rock launched the Youtube channel BAASE Homeschooling, after his home-schooling/evening classes were disrupted by the pandemic.

He said for some subjects such as science and art, he would instruct the parents on what to look for as the students carried out their practical.

“It has been working out,” he said, adding that “what I did was to create an evaluation sheet and email it to the parents . . . so they themselves can have a record of what they have been doing with the children.” marlonmadden@barbadostoday.bb