As a child who was homeschooled I can testify for the lack of structure and substance. 75% of homechool families are on a faith basis with the mother being the primary instructor. Most have no college degrees or any teaching experience.
Homeschooling also leads to an extreme decline in social skills due to seclusion in the home and prolongs the stage of a child that believes whatever their parents say. Homeschooling and unschooling are detrimental to the education of society. As a result I believe we need to end this so called freedom.
According to an article in Forbes earlier this year, “the ranks of homeschoolers are rising rapidly across every social strata, faith, and ethnicity.”
According to their polls, more and more people are choosing homeschooling based on factors other than religion such as safety and dissatisfaction with academic performance in public schools.
In some areas, people choose to homeschool their children because the bus schedules require their children to get up at extremely unreasonable hours, be gone all day for school, and then arrive home late in the afternoon/early evening, thus leading to exhausted kids and little family time.
Homeschooled students score 15-30 points above the national averages on the standardized tests, which they are still required to take, even in households where the parents have no higher education themselves. They also typically score above average on the SAT and ACT exams. So it would appear that having a teacher’s accreditation is not a prerequisite for above average academic performance of the children being taught.
Homeschooled students, on average, participate more in local community service than non-homeschooled students and also vote and attend public meetings more often, which would appear to refute your claim that they all lack socialization.
I’m sure that in some areas homeschooling being conducted by parents who aren’t concerned with their children’s actual education and performance will lead to limited academic and economic opportunities for those children in the future, but then again people raised in environments where education is not a priority, do not tend to break free from that value set and pursue higher education anyway.
Given that the number of families who choose to homeschool is increasing at a rate of 2-4% yearly and homeschooling has been shown to have no negative affects for a large number of kids whose families choose it, it seems disingenuous to make homeschooling illegal on the basis that some kids will perform poorly.
Many children, especially in low income areas, perform poorly in public schools but no one is suggesting that we end public schooling because of it.
My family is Jewish. In high school, my friends joked about it a lot. “That’s so Jewish,” “Don’t be such a Jew,” “You’re Jewing me,” etc, etc. These were my friends, and I finally got to the point where I told one friend that if she did it again, I’d punch her in the nose. She got my point, I got through HS.
Fast-forward to my brother in HS, and he is mercilessly ridiculed. Constantly. Anti-semitic shit is flung at him constantly. Kids leave messages in his locker, throw his backpack in the garbage, one kid even pissed on his shoe in the boys restroom. All of this is being done while kids are calling him Jew and kyke and other shit like that. Mind you, he’s a sweet kid, which makes him an easy target. He got punched in the head once to the point of bleeding, and still walked away, even though he’s a decent-sized guy that can handle himself.
Finally, after my mom fighting with the school to make it stop, and thus making it worse, she took him out of physical school and had him do online schooling, which still went through his “home school.” He just had to go in once a week to check with his teachers.
He missed a lot of interaction with other kids, but he also missed a lot of self-esteem deterioration. Now he’s got a decent group of friends that treat him well. I don’t think it could have been handled any other way.
Honestly, I agree that complete homeschooling from the beginning is hard on social skills, etc. Doing it for faith-based reasons seems like a form of control over what your child is allowed to absorb.
I was homeschooled K-8th. I was good at math and bad at English so by 5th grade my mom was teaching me math a few levels higher than my grade but also ignored the fact that I was a few years below my grade in most other subjects. REALLY fucked me up when I got to high school and didn’t get enough grades to go to college because of that. Not to mention I had a hard time making friends for the first few years
It totally depends on the parents imo. I’m so glad I was homeschooled and got the opportunity to learn more things that school doesn’t teach in an environment i’m more comfortable in. If your parents give a crap. and they are learned enough to teach. It can be a lot better than the uniform, one size fits all format that takes place when teaching over twenty people at a time.
It’s not so much the home schooling as it’s the human interaction they learn in school. Share , be nice , take turns, help out , make mistakes and deal with it etc. so they don’t grow up to be little trumpers.