Part Four of Seven:
“When you say no one needs to really start before age 8. That is crazy!”
When I say that you don’t really start homeschooling until 8, I mean two things:
1) I mean it literally — because our compulsory attendance is from 8-18, you don’t legally start homeschooling until your child’s 8th birthday. At that point, you’ll file the DofI, and come under the HBI law, or you have to send them to public or private school. At that point, you begin really homeschooling.
2) But I also mean this in the way the author took it. If you want to, WA law allows you to delay ALL formal instruction until your kidlet is 8. Your child remains as educationally free as *he was as a toddler, right up until the age of 8.
And here’s the thing: science backs this approach. Every last bit of good research on the topic points to delaying formal instruction.
Here’s a bunch of reading on that exact topic:
Here’s some more:
People thought the earth being round and germs spreading disease were crazy, too, because these ideas went against what they were taught in school, and their limited experience in the world. The cool thing now is that there’s lots of research from all over the globe to back up WA’s delayed compulsory attendance age.
~Jen