Self Education vs. Having a Teacher

I've always said that the strength of homeschool is the training on how to be self-taught.

There's a process to it - you don't just start doing something. To try to teach yourself something without a plan gets frustrating and counter-productive.

Fortunately, the process is relatively simple, it just takes time.

First, find a good instruction book, manual, tutorial, etc. There are a lot of good resources available for free now online. You'll probably have to dig though, because they usually don't rank high on the search engines.

Then, you repeat the following cycle until you can't stand it, then you do it some more:
A. Read the instructions or watch the videos.
B. Try to do what the instructions tell you.
C. Repeat

It works like this: The first time you read the instructions, they make no sense. This is hard, and this is where it's easy to give up. It's like reading a foreign language.
Then you try to do what the instructions said. You will fail miserably. If you're doing something physical, you may fail painfully (more on this later).
Next you go back and re-read the instructions. This time they will make more sense.
Retry the instructions - you will get a little farther before you get stuck.

When you've finished the assigned exercises, try to do something "off book" and see if it works. It won't. Go back and apply the instructions to the new attempt and try again.

When you can do that without having to refer to the instructions, you've learned what the instructions were trying to teach you.

It's a frustrating and time-consuming process, but if you learn to push through you will find it very rewarding.

So why have a teacher?

My ideal is that a good teacher will guide the student through the above process. The teacher compiles and provided the instruction materials, assigns practice that challenges the student while reinforcing existing skills, and most importantly, helps to push the student through the frustrations and keep moving forward. A good teacher makes the whole process move much faster.

When is a teacher required?

If you don't have access to a teacher, then what? History is full of famous scientists, musicians, etc. who rose to the top of their field because they were self-taught. Being self-taught give you an advantage of approaching problems in new ways because you are not limited to what had always been done before.

But there are certain instances when having a teacher is a necessity.

It depends the risk factor of what happens if you fail during the practice steps.

Teaching yourself to do origami is a low-risk activity. If you fail, the worst you may get is a paper cut. SCUBA diving on the other hand is not something you just want to "try." There's no good way to really try it without risk. An instructor provides safety while you are learning, but they don't short-circuit the process, either.
Example: you assemble your SCUBA gear according to the instructions. You will probably get something wrong. You have two ways of finding out what you missed: you can jump in the water and try the life-support equipment yourself, or the instructor can double check your setup for you and show you what you've missed.

A good instructor mitigates risk.

A controversial subject for self-teaching is martial arts. Instruction can be expensive, and there are so many different styles out there that it can be hard to find a convenient quality place to train what you want.

It's tempting to self-teach martial arts, but it has a hidden danger. If you try the moves you see from your instruction videos without a solid foundation, you will hurt yourself. Maybe not the first time, but as you try more difficult things it will happen.
It's very rare to find a black belt that hasn't had a training-related injury. Because they had oversight from an instructor, those injuries are usually minor. Trying to reach black-belt level proficiency without an instructor is almost a guarantee for significant injury. Adding weapons (especially sharp ones) increases the likelihood of injury significantly.

Once you've learned the basics (black belt or equivalent) you are now encouraged to learn from books, videos, etc. Every proficient martial artist I know is self-taught once they are past a certain level of training.

I even know incredibly proficient swordsmen who have resurrected training styles from reading old fencing manuals from the 16th century. But before they did that, they had a solid grounding from good teachers.

Dr. Shinichi Suzuki

On the other hand, one of the most popular methods of teaching the violin is the Suzuki Method, developed by Dr. Shinichi Sukuki. It's a fantastic program and one I recommend. According to his biography Dr. Shinichi Suzuki: Teaching Music from the Heart, Dr. Suzuki has access to violins when he was young, but didn't have access to a teacher. He taught himself to play by listening to classical records and playing along. After his playing caught the ear of certain people, they were able to arrange for him to receive formal instruction. By this time he had already had the basics, and he needed refinement.

This was encouraging to me because I don't have access to a violin teacher, but I have been teaching myself to play for many years. If I had the resources for formal instruction I would love it, but since I don't I make do with following Dr. Suzuki's footsteps. So far it has been frustrating but very rewarding.

Faith vs. Science - the battle continues!

I'm currently watching "Cosmos" hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson on Netflix. I'm thoroughly enjoying it. It's very well done.

Should I be enjoying a documentary that teaches the big bang theory and evolution? I went to a conservative Bible school for crying out loud! I'm still active in my faith and in church so I'm not a "backslidden" Christian. Shouldn't I be offended by something like that? I was always taught that I should.

But I'm not offended. I see no need to be. Stephen Hawking and other astrophysicists I've read have been very courteous and respectful toward the concept of a god, and have always been respectful toward the God of the Bible.

They're following science. The process of science was designed to remove personal influence in the testing process. One of the main test of a hypothesis is that it has to be reproducible by other people. In other words, if it only works for one guy and no one else, then it's suspect. People should be able to produce the same results using the same equipment under the same circumstances.

Someone once explained it to me this way: Science is allowed to ask how something happened. It's not supposed to ask why?

Confused? Try this example:
How: A whip makes a cracking sound by focusing kinetic energy into a small tip which then moves faster than sound, creating a small sonic boom.
That's the process of how it works.

Why: My whip cracks because I watched Indiana Jones too many times as a kid (and as an adult) and I like to play with whips, particularly with multiple cracks.
That's the intent of why it cracks.

The process is true of all bullwhips that crack.  How a bullwhip cracks is universal. Anyone can use a bullwhip under the same circumstances and cause the cracker to exceed the speed of sound.

The intent behind why I crack it is individual and unique.

So in other words, science questions and tests the process.
Science is not allowed to test the intent.

Now, let's take a classic example straight from my high school biology textbook: the giraffe. My textbook said that the giraffes grew taller in order to reach food that was not available to the competition. (I did go to public high school).

This sounds an awful lot like intent. If you have a giraffe that intends to grow taller to get better food, and passes that height on to it's children, you're dealing with Lamarckianism, which was debunked almost as soon as it was introduced.

That's not allowed in science. The scientific method can't test the intent of the giraffe, because intent is not reproducible.

Here's a statement about giraffes that would be acceptable to science regarding the process of tall giraffes: Some giraffes were taller than others - the short ones died out because they couldn't reach the food. Since the taller ones had an advantage, the tallest giraffes passed on their height to their offspring.

There's a good historical reason for regulating science: Back before the modern scientific method was accepted, there was no distinction between astronomy and astrology. Alchemy was still a high pursuit. Science was seen as a form of theology.

Thanks to the notorious DaVinci Code, everyone heard about the Fibonacci sequence. It goes like this: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, etc. It's really simple, you just add the two numbers next to each number to get the next one.

Now these numbers and their relationships to each other are all over the place in various different categories. They're in music (the pythagorean scale uses these as ratios for tuning), they're in faces (the "ideal" relationships represent the spacing and size of facial features), they are freakishly present in geometry, etc.

Seriously, just look up fibonacci numbers and the "golden ratio" (phi) derived from them and prepare to lose your grip on rational thinking for a few minutes.
Or you can start here:
http://www.goldennumber.net/

Architects, mathematicians and theologians all thought they found a "key" to understanding God. They found a pattern that crossed a lot of disciplines, and ascribed that pattern to the intent of God.

The pentagram (five-pointed star often associated with witchcraft) contains multiple examples of the golden ration in each arm of the star.
https://www.mathsisfun.com/geometry/pentagram.html

In fact, the pentagram was originally a religious symbol - it only got associated with witchcraft by intent. Basically, only authorized people were allowed to use it for religious services. When unauthorized people used it, they were accused of practicing religion without a license, also called witchcraft.

If you've ever wondered why people thought dueling to the death was an intelligent way to solve legal disputes then congratulations! You're more like me than you want to admit. The truth is that at the height of judicial dueling, the practice was permeated with mysticism. It was argued that the skill of dueling was an indicator of a person's harmony with Truth. So by default, whoever won was a true person.
The fencing manuals and teaching were as mystical as any kung-fu movie, it was just Roman Catholic based mysticism, instead of Buddhism or Confucianism.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_vault/2014/09/25/history_of_fencing_geometrical_images_of_sword_fighting_by_gerard_thibault.html

This came to a head with Galileo. His model of a solar system challenged the astrological and mystical beliefs of the "scientists" of his day as much as it challenged the authority of the Pope. When Galileo was eventually proven right, the whole scientific process had to be reexamined. The mysticism and religious aspects were removed, systems were put in place to remove intent from the process, and science was allowed to pursue what it found without fear of imprisonment from whoever was in charge of religion.

So science is not allowed to ask about the existence or intent of God. God's miracles, teaching, authority and nature are not within the realm of science. They are not repeatable, nor testable. In fact there is a lot of knowledge and belief that lies far outside the realm of science. To put it bluntly: Science will never prove nor disprove the existence of God. If it tries, then it's bad science.

Science has it's place. Where it fits into one's religious beliefs is a question for philosophy, and that's a subject of a whole other article.