I recently found out a bit about the US schooling system. In America, high school students study a certain amount of subjects each year, and their teacher gives them a grade for it (if you’re home-educated, your parents are your teachers). During the last year of High School, you sit SATs, which are completely different from UK GCSEs/A-Levels. They’re testing if you have a broad knowledge of the subject, whereas in England, we learn a very narrow, prescribed syllabus that we’re then tested on in great detail. In the US, you have to take Maths & English SATs and you get to choose three others. The ones that appeal to me the most are probably History, Latin and English Literature.
This might be quite a cool option for me because I’d love to go to university in America. I’d love to attend St John’s College, a liberal arts university in Annapolis (or there’s another campus in Santa Fe), or, obviously, Harvard! If I took the US route, I’d still be able to use these qualifications to get into an English university too if I wanted to─just as American students get into English universities without having to take A-Levels.
What I want to get out of my home-education is a very broad education in everything: not just a few arbitrary and random pieces of a subject that I might be tested on in an exam. As it is, I can explore the subjects I want to, specialise in the topics that interest me most, or choose simply to not study for anything at all and spend all day playing in the woods. Another reason not to take lots of GCSEs is that I really hate using textbooks! I find them dry and restricting and they only go into the exact amount of detail that is required for an exam. In fact, they won’t tell you anything else, which sometimes just makes it harder to understand. It also means there’s no scope for looking in more depth into something that interests you, mainly because you haven’t got time as you’re studying for so many exams! My plan at the moment is to take the minimum amount of GCSEs that I need to take, i.e. maths, English, a science and a language.
As for what I’d like to study at uni, that’s complicated… I would like to go into something writing-based, be that journalism, law or just book-writing! Though recently I’ve been considering going into medicine or even forensic science. The world is my oyster after all!