A Big Ticket Issue: Homeschooling

I chose to address homeschooling in today's blog post.

Just to clear things up, homeschooling (by definition) is the education of children at home, typically by parents but sometimes by tutors, rather than in other formal settings of public or private school.  There is much debate as to whether or not homeschooling is indeed beneficial in more respects than public or private school, with homeschooling parents driving the support for homeschooling and the National Education Association etc. driving the criticism.  So let's chat about homeschooling...

1. I will look at what prompts parents to homeschool their children.  In this report, we can see that the highest reasons for homeschooling is the parent's belief in instructing their child better or for religious and moral reasons.  This accommodates 87.3% of households, and frankly, I find this reason to be absolutely ridiculous.

I can understand that parenting is a tough world that I have no experience in, but I'm sure that holding your child back from the social and ethnic diversity of public and private school is detrimental to their character, not their education.  In my mind, peer-to-peer social skills is as important as academic skills.  Interacting in a classroom is what makes public school and private school so crucial to our general public.  Homeschooling tends to present information in a one-sided, filtered way through parents, and trying to maintain a child's religion by shunning them from public school is among the most overprotective things I can think of.

2. I will look at a comparison of standardized test scores between homeschooled children and public school children.  However, we can almost immediately strike this off the record because hoomeschooled children are not subject to the same testing requirements as per the No Child Left Behind Act.  In addition, scores are compared between volunteer homeschoolers and mandatory public schoolers.  It also should be noted that overall, homeschooled students scored better on the national ACT, yet their math scores were slightly under the national average. 


Just with these few points can I see that homeschooling is not worth risking a child's much needed interaction with peers.  We may see videos of homeschooled child prodigies, yet this does not automatically determine which schooling system is better.  Should this issue be ignored and politicians such as Ron Paul continue to support the issue, we may see a huge flux of students switching to homeschooling and avoiding the social interaction that characterizes public schooling.  Ultimately, parents are the stakeholders here, and making the wrong decision will heavily influence the outcome of this nation.  With megacountries like China and North Korea beating us in education, we cannot afford to lag behind because of some moral agenda against public schooling.