Jon's Homeschool Resources

Home-ed FAQ file, pt 1

Questions:

Last edited: Thu Sep 8 19:24:21 1994

Changes:

• added mention of alt.education.home-school.christian
• added question 0.3
• renumbered the questions in section 0.

0.1 What is the Home Education Mailing List all about?

We come from all walks of life, from across the United States and Canada, with some subscribers in the U.K., Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia, Estonia, Italy, Sweden), and from many different philosophical backgrounds. Everyone is welcome, as long as they are willing to engage in polite (if occasionally animated) discussion with people holding other beliefs.

This is a place to share information, to ask questions, to discuss problems and successes; it is an electronic general store, post office, village green, or whatever metaphor you like, where people interested in educating their children come together.

Children are welcome on the list. If your child is able to use a computer well enough to read our postings and respond, they are mature enough to participate in the discussion.

We use the term "Home Education" to try to encompass all approaches to children learning at home, whether by schooling, child-directed learning or any other process.

0.2 How is the list different from the newsgroups misc.education.home-school.misc and misc.education.home-school.christian and alt.education.home-school.christian?

The list is older than the newsgroups.

The newsgroups were created at least partly to allow more wide-ranging (aka "off topic") discussions than the mailing list: News reading software allows you to choose which threads to read and which to ignore, which mail reading software does not.

alt.education.home-school.christian is a moderated newsgroup, created because, at least early in its history, misc.education.home-school.christian was dominated by discussion of the theory of natural selection, due to an unfortunate cross-posting between it and talk.origins.

The list has fewer ``interlopers'' --- it is composed primarily of people who are actively interested in homeschooling, as a result, it sees fewer repetitions of the ``socialization'' question, and fewer messages questioning the wisdom of home-schooling.

While the mailing list does wander off the topic on occasion (the digest is kept pretty much on topic by its editor), people are somewhat more sensitive to the need to make messages germane.

The digest is posted to misc.education.home-school.misc.

0.3 How do I unsubscribe?

   unsubscribe home-ed your-email-address

Part of Jon's Homeschool Resources. Markup copyright © 1994..2002 Jon Shemitz <jon@midnightbeach.com> September, 1994..September 23, 2002