Day 611 of 1000
This is an addendum in a series of posts on the benefits of skipping high school and going straight to college. The introductory post and index to all the other posts in the series is here. You can see their undergraduate results and post-graduate (PhD) chase here. I try to keep the results updated as they occur.
Shortly after I finished writing this series of posts, articles started to show up in print media and on the internet about the Hardings, a family of 12 (10 children) that homeschooled and graduated their kids into college at age 12. You can see an example of one of these articles here. It is an awesome success story. You can see the family’s website here. They have a homeschool framework they follow that allows them to succeed early at their own pace, go really fast, and own the material well enough to succeed at higher levels.
One of the things I really like about the mother of the family, Mona Lisa Harding, is that she clearly states her kids are not geniuses. Sometimes when we say things like that about our kids, people think we are fishing for compliments. We are not. We want to think the best of our children, but we have no illusions about their level of intelligence. After all, we taught them. I understand exactly what Mrs. Harding is saying. Normal, non-genius kids can handle school at this pace. But they have to work hard. The good part is they learn to love to work hard after they have had some success. Younger kids raise their expectation when they see their older siblings benefit from performing at a high level.
One of the great strengths of homeschooling is that just about everyone within the community acknowledges there is more than one way to do it well. The way the Hardings do it is very successful. I am sure we would learn a lot from their methods. I doubt whether we would have made wholesale changes from the way we did it ourselves. It seems like the Hardings were able to provide good worldview education along with the academics. Our kids might have been able to handle the move to community college by age 12, but even if we would have thought to put them there at the time, I do not think we would have done it.
The two years before they started college helped them academically with CLEP testing and the like, but the benefit that was derived from two additional years of hard work on worldview issues was invaluable. They knew what we believed all along, but they acquired a much deeper understanding of why we believe it in those last two years before college. That is just the way our family worked. The Hardings did some things differently. It surely looks like they have served their family well.
Mona Lisa Harding has written an eBook about the way they do things. I have not read it. I encourage others who are interested in this topic to read a few of the articles on line (Google: Harding College by 12). If you like what you find, her book might be worth a read.