BTW, NajaNivea, if you ever get seriously interested in this in the future, there are lots of message boards for homeschoolers, and quite a few non-homeschoolers participate as well, doing research, hoping for a future opportunity, or whatever. So feel free to pop into them and observe and ask questions.
Thanks, I think I’d like to do exactly that–would you be willing to PM me with some links for secular or inclusive boards you might recommend?
Agree, that’s just the two ends that tend to squick people out - and the socialization thing, but I’ve never met a homeschool kid that didn’t get socialization - sometimes it was socialization within a rather narrow group - but that’s part of the overprotectedness.
Also, in my experience, what non-homeschoolers imagine when they hear about “overprotectiveness” (and I should say protectiveness - as over is a judgement that I’m not equiped to make) is not necessarily “keep my kids away from ideas like evolution” - its often “I got picked on in school as a bright sensitive kid and I don’t want my bright sensitive child exposed to that.” Or one woman I met who said “I can’t believe I’m doing this - its going to be a huge burden on us - but my daughter has an absolute gift for picking the worst kids in her class to be her friends and she is easily led…she’s getting to the age where its going to be sex and drugs soon - so I’m homeschooling.” Or former Doper Primaflora (?) who homeschooled because she had a special needs kid whose needs weren’t getting met in her public school.
I live in New Orleans. The quality of public education in the state of Louisiana is among the worst in the United States, and the New Orleans public schools are the worst in Louisiana.
We also have friends who as young idealistic people took jobs teaching in New Orleans with the hopes of improving the system. They burned out, for the most part, and their horror stories (bring your own toilet paper; high school valedictorians needing four tries to pass the exit exam) confirmed our conclusions.
I don’t buy it. I am a scout leader and have some really awkward kids who attend regular schools. I don’t think hours spent in school necessarily correlates with better socializing. In fact, if you look at the longer stretch of human history, putting 20 - 50 kids of the same age in a room with one or two adults for 6 - 8 hours a day (except lunch period and recess, of course) is a relatively new experiment, and one could argue that it’s very artificial. How many hours a day do you spend with people only your own age? Many homeschoolers are exposed to people of varying ages, be they their siblings, parents or friends and people they meet at sports, scouts, church, or other venues. I think she protests too much.
We’ve never run the numbers, but it’s probably around $1,000.00 a year for supplies - - paper, pencils, pens, books, etc. - - for the three boys. It’s $50.00 per kid for our co-op, but when my wife teaches it’s free for us AND she makes $50.00/week. Our play days are free. Our field trips are price of admission. If it’s a tight month, we might not make the extra trip to the aquarium. We don’t grudge the money because we think our kids are worth it, and it’s a very small price to pay to prepare them for their futures.
Just through the luck of the draw our daughter wound up with a classful of kids who didn’t like her when she was in K-3 at parochial school until we decided to homeschool. The teachers were good and she learned the age appropriate things, but we had 3.5 years with at least 1 incident per month where she was in tears over the treatment she received from her classmates. Conversely, our oldest son, at the same school for kindergarten, was the leader of his class and set the tone for the other kids.
This to say that not only are kids different, but that not all regular school experiences (even homeschool ones, I might add) are beneficial to all children. Some thrive were others struggle. I think each parent should have the right to make the education decision that they feel is in the best interest of their children without being second-guessed by people, however well-intentioned, who think their judgement is superior to the parents’ own.
Spring is full swing in New Awlins at present, along with my annual stuffiness and headache while the yellow dust from live oaks, water oaks, loblolly pines, yaupon hollies, and myriad other plants and trees fills the air and coats the cars.
I didn’t and don’t mean to sound snarky in any of today’s posts. If I do, please trust me it’s the pollen, or rather my reaction to it. You all have raised good points. It’s a great thread. Thanks.
I’m late finding this thread (as usual) but wanted to chime in as another enthusiastic and, so far, very happy homeschooler.
My elder is nearly 8 and our decision to homeschool wasn’t born necessarily of any dissatisfaction with public schools, or desire to protect our kids, and certainly not for religious reasons. The germ really started to grow when I ran into an old schoolmate of mine soon after our first child was born, and I’m prompted to post mostly because of the dominant theme regarding socialization in this and most other discussions regarding homeschooling.
My schoolmate had been the class punching bag for nearly all the 18 years I knew her. Not for any discernable reason – she was always pretty normal in early elementary grades as far as I can remember. Perhaps a little eccentric and not as quick to form friendships as other kids, but nothing extraordinarily odd about her. However, by the end of the second grade she had cooties and no one with any intentions of having a social life of their own would have anything to do with her.
Her social situation never improved and by junior high and throughout high school she kept entirely to herself, only attaching to a few teachers who would tolerate her, by then, totally inappropriate clinginess to anyone who didn’t kick her aside.
Sad story, blah, blah, kids are cruel, blah, blah.
When I ran into her adult self 20 years later, she was, as before, a little eccentric, sort of socially clingly and just a bit “off”, but not in a way that prevented her from having a career, getting married and having a normal life in the real world. I have to wonder how much of her adult social ineptitude is a direct result of 18 years of aggressive torment.
But that’s not the point of this post. Our meeting forced me to examine something horrible about my own ‘socialization’ in a school institution. You see, I was never mean to her. I didn’t throw worms at her on the playground after a rainstorm, I never called her names or actively participated in any of the ‘cruel’ things that kids do to one another. What I did was worse, in my grown-up opinion: I never protested. I didn’t smile at her in the hall. I never once invited her to sit beside me at the lunch table or pick her for a team in gym class. And I was in a good position to do just that. I wasn’t entrenched in a social pecking order which would have been jeopardized by being kind to a pariah, but had always been that marginally popular kid who felt comfortable hanging out with jocks, dorks, cheerleaders and the AV crowd. So why didn’t I ever do something to reach out and make her existence a little less awful?
I realized that it was social apathy. I had been so socially overstimulated that I was immune to the plight of others and just didn’t care enough to really give a shit about people who found interaction elusive or complicated. That was when I started to examine alternatives to institutionalized socialization.
We talk about socialization as if it’s something we need to apply to our children — as if it’s this thing they won’t experience if we don’t thrust it upon them in a prescribed way. On the contrary, I now believe that kids do much better when we let them explore interpersonal relationships naturally, out in the wild. Shy kids will still be shy and gregarious kids will still be gregarious, but I think they have a better chance of finding a healthy social identity outside the walls of forced institutionalized socialization schemes we insist on concocting for them. Frankly, I find the socialization question (put to every homeschool parent ad nauseum) to be ignorant – in the sense of ‘no knowledge’ – since for many of us it is the very reason we have decided to keep our kids out of schools in the first place. It’s a bit like, when finding out that we’re trying to grow the bulk of our veggies and meat on property, a person asks, “But aren’t you concerned that your family won’t get a healthful, contaminant-free food source?”
I discussed the situation in CA with my son the other day and he was visibly concerned. At 8, with friends who go to school in the building, go to school at the table, and some who don’t go to school at all (unschoolers), he totally gets the advantage he has over his public schooled friends in free-time, choice, and constant contact with grown-ups who enjoy sharing time with kids. He started to check off all the things that would be different if we weren’t allowed to do school at home anymore:
“I’d have to stay up ‘til midnight just to get everything done.”
“I wouldn’t be able to go to New York City as often.”
And my personal favorite: “I’d hardly know my little brother at all!”
Thanks for this thread, dangermom.
We have also based our study loosely on ‘The Well-Trained Mind’ and I feel my sons are getting a superior academic AND social education at home.
Hey, thanks, Farmwoman, for your perspective! I do agree with you about the forced artificiality of schoolrooms. And about the S-word question, but hey, that’s what this thread is for, spreading some knowledge! 
It is sort of interesting to me that “socialization” is always the first question. Do people assume that we have the academics down? Is that the first purpose of public school, to socialize children? (The teachers always said it wasn’t the purpose at all.) What exactly do they mean by socialization anyway, since it’s never defined?
Oh well. I always figure Laura Ingalls Wilder hardly ever saw a person outside her own family until she was 9 or so, and she turned out great! 
Farmwoman, I’m directing my husband to your post–it’s the best answer to the socialization question I’ve ever heard.
Dangermom, I think people do assume you have the academics down, at least those with whom I’ve discussed the topic. What I can say is that people never seem to question that homeschooled kids are better educated or have wider educational opportunities, even the teachers I’ve talked to. The sticking point is always socialization.
I suppose that’s partly because of the stereotype of homeschoolers as pale, timid creatures who never venture beyond the front door for fear of the scary world. People don’t realize that many people homeschool in order to be more involved with the real world (and even the sheltery ones have many friends). And we’re so trained to think that children belong in a group, in a school, that it scares people to think of acting any other way.
At the same time, we are constantly hearing criticism of the social climate in schools. Dopers love to talk about their tortured school years! (Actually I think my daughter would do better than I did–she’s much less awkward than I was–but we’re doing fine as we are.) There’s a ton of talk about the incredibly inappropriate stuff that goes on in schools, but the mention of doing something else still freaks people out.
BTW, in other homeschooling news, it’s been interesting for me to hear that college scouts are now looking at homeschooled kids for recruitment into sports programs. Another stereotype is that homeschoolers are all suspiciously bookish kids who never play sports, but that one’s going to have to go too.
As an educator in a charter school, I perhaps see more kids who had previously been homeschooled than one would in a typical public school. In my state (PA) at least, charter schools are often described as being in between a public and private school. We are public in the sense that we have to accept any student who wants to come - within space limitations. And we are private in the sense that students have to consciously choose to attend.
Students choose us over the public schools in the area for a variety of reasons. One of the most common reasons is the accepting nature of our school environment. We have students at every possible point on the social skills scale ranging from upper end well-socialized kids to the lower end pretty severe autistic kids. All are accepted (for the most part) by other students. Quirks that would probably get a kid beat up in a traditional school setting are embraced here. I was amazed by this when I first started teaching here and will probably not teach anywhere else so long as it continues here.
Because of our accepting nature, my school tends to see a broader range of students that one might see in a typical public school setting. We get a lot of students who were previously homeschooled. Many of them make the transition just fine. Others are woefully lacking in the social skills I mentioned above, academically, or both. Social skills can be addressed fairly easily through field trips, homeschooling groups, etc. The part that really gets me though, is the enormous gaps I often see in the academic abilities of some students who were previously homeschooled, even if only for a few years. Most of the problems I see occur with students who had attended online schools. IMNSHO, their parents had either gotten lazy or maxed out on their ability to teach the subject and decided to use the computer as the sole teacher. Parental supervision was minimal at best and the students were left on their own. This is less a homeschooling problem and more of a parenting skills problem.
I am currently teaching a high school geometry class. One of my students was previously enrolled in an online charter school. Parental support was very limited and often consisted of Dad yelling at her to simply “work harder”. :rolleyes: As a result, the student never mastered essential math concepts that are normally introduced in 6th-9th grades (through algebra 1 in her case). She has actually taken to saying that she skipped those grades for math entirely because her comprehension rate was so low. I am working with her as best I can within the confines of the course and time limitations. At the moment, we are creating a summer course for her to help her catch up. In the meantime, she is woefully unprepared and frustrated to no end by what we are trying to learn.
Another case occurred during last year’s geometry class. The student in this case was taught primarily by his mother, supplementing with online courses for subjects she could no longer teach him. He struggled with math (one of his online courses) but was able to fine tune his skills enough so that he did just fine in my class. His writing skills, however were atrocious. He asked his English teacher one day “How do you learn how to spell?”. Apparently, his mother had never formally taught him much if anything about spelling. The same was probably true about grammar based on what samples I saw of his work.
So to sum this all up – yes I did have a point to all this – please please PLEASE defer to qualified educators when you have maxed out your abilities to teach a subject. Many parents may have no trouble at all learning along with their children appropriately enough to also teach them the material. But if this is not the case, the results can be disastrous down the line.
Speaking as a former public school teacher, I have to say such yawning gaps in knowledge aren’t unique to homeschooled children. Imagine the parents’ dismay when this is the case after they have deferred to th qualified teacher.
DoperChicI believe PA has some of the country’s most invasive homeschooling legislation with near draconian oversight of the families who make the legal choice to educate their own. I’m completely committed to homeschooling philosophy, but if faced with the choice of sending my kid to school or submitting to quarterly domestic searches I think my children would be on the bus every morning…no, wait. I’d probably leave the state. I think PA has effectively smoked out the middle-ground, average homeschooling family and is left to oversight of the religious fringe who chant, “You can have my kids when you pry them from my cold, dead hands!” Is it possible that, while you may see many formerly homeschooled children, you’re not coming into contact with a cross-section of the general population?
Regarding academics and gaps therein: My proximity to Ithaca, NY puts me in contact with many hippie unschoolers, and while I get the shakes whenever I consider doing this myself, I have to say I take great solace from them. Their academic philosophy hinges on the fact that humans are hard-wired to figure stuff out and actually enjoy learning, and they don’t just say it, they live it. They believe that forced education and constant teaching at kids drives these natural tendencies underground and that the best way for a kid to reach his potential is through independent exploration with parent/facilitator to provide access and materials along the way. As dangermom pointed out, this is extremely time-consuming and when done right seems to yield excellent results. I know a handful of adults who were unschooled children (can’t really call them graduates since the process never ends) and while not all of them are in Ivy League schools (two of them are) they all seem to be content and contributing.
The unschooling methodology will seem haphazard and random to one who doesn’t share the philosophy. Kids will have huge gaps in knowledge at any given time about any given subject, but the nature of the style insists that the parent be patient and trust that the child will fill in the gaps when he’s ready.
Thanks again for this thread. I’m a little surprised homeschooling isn’t discussed more at the dope.
Actually, that is why I asked the above question about standards. I know two families who homeschool. In family A, the parents are both intellectually curious people who are homeschooling a child who is following in their footsteps. Kid A is doing wonderfully in this environment.
The parents in family B are very nice people, but they don’t read or think or use libraries or explore the world around them or anything. Plus, they barely have the basics down themselves. I have no idea how they’re going to manage to successfully teach the very little they do seem to know to their kid. I’m sure the kid will be nice and socialized, I just see huge academic gaps in her future. And I wonder what can be done to catch kids in that type of situation before it gets too late.
amarinth your question and observations about standards and variety of quality in home education are spot on. I think the answer, while not exactly a satisfying one, is the same answer families have to accept about the various degrees of quality offered in public schools. The states and feds can try to ensure that every kid in every neighborhood is getting access to a standard quality of free and public education, but we all know this is not the reality and probably never will be: regardless of how many 10’s of thousands of dollars we throw at each kid forced to attend a failing inner city school, they are not likely to get the same quality of education as their ps peers a few miles away in the nicer neighborhoods. Kids born into families with the money to pay private tuition have an educational advantage over poor kids. Kids whose working class families are willing to sacrifice everything and shell out for quality education when the state isn’t providing one have an academic advantage over their friends born into families who don’t make education a priority.
The only difference for me is pretty clear and isn’t kind to the schooling establishment: Parents get to make choices about how they will raise their kids and what their priorities will be regarding education. But when the State takes on the job, it is required to offer equal access and standard quality to all. Public schools must, parents aren’t required to. As in teaching: I have a certificate from the State of New York which qualifies me to teach the kids of others in large groups and get paid for it. I don’t need any such qualifications to teach my own kids in the privacy of my own home for free.
One thing I have noticed over the years and I think other teachers (and real data) would agree, is that the factor which most greatly impacts a child’s academic success is parental involvement in his education. In that light, I might argue that a lackluster homeschooling parent may be providing his kids an academic edge over the kids in a decent public school whose parents take no interest in education at all.
As far as actual oversight, each state has its own set of hoops for homeschoolers to jump through and the spectrum is wiiiiiide, from virtually no oversight at all to the quarterly home inspections I mentioned earlier. NY is considered by some to be on the difficult end of the spectrum because of how often we are required to report and test. However, I find my state’s regulations to be very easy to follow, the standards far less rigid than those we set for ourselves, and the law itself to be written in a way that actually protects us from cranky individuals in the school bureaucracy who may be aggressively hostile to homeschooling families.
I’ve got more but the kids and their friends have just tumbled into the house.
You know, that could apply to family as easily as to a class of children. Not meant to be snarky- I think time spent with people we don’t choose ourselves is a great thing, and I’m glad we don’t get to pick our families. That statement could also apply to homeschoolers either through family, church group, dance class, etc.
Farmwoman, your post was wonderful. Thank you.
I don’t know if I’m alone, but I have found that it’s taken years to get over being very concious of age when interacting. In my public school, you didn’t talk to younger or older kids, and I think I was twenty-five or so before I really started to relax about speaking to people only a few years older than I am. That’s ridiculous. I can’t imagine a homeschooled kid ending up with that particular neurosis. It’s a possible bad side effect of interacting only with those of your immediate age group.
Well, I was going to post something along the lines of what Farmwoman said. So, um, I agree with her.
That’s interesting, Lissla. And so far I haven’t noticed any of that with my kids. Sometimes we wind up at a park picnic for lunch with a whole lot of 4 and 5 yo’s, plus my 7yo daughter. I sit there expecting her to get bored and complain that there are no kids her age to play with, but she doesn’t. She just plays with the K kids (who have already gotten out of school) and is happy. And she doesn’t seem to be intimidated by girls a year or two older, either. It’s very nice.
I’ve also been to large gatherings, like the homeschool skate parties–you get huge 11yo boys and toddlers on the same rink. By and large it seems to work just fine.
I think in the long run, it works better, especially in today’s day and age of small families. Perhaps, once upon a time when you were one of 12 children and had to deal with/learn from/teach kids of varying ages at home it wasn’t a hardship to age segregate for the teacher’s sake at school. You still got your “socialization with other ages” schooling at home. But now kids are likely to have only one sibling, and so they don’t have a lot of experience with older and younger kids, and we’re not making up for that at school, either. What I see as a possible result is a lot more intolerance and impatience - we don’t know how to work with people who don’t “get it” or are at a different developmental level than we are. We don’t have early object lessons in caring for those younger than us, or learning from those who have only recently mastered the skills we’re working on. And yeah, I think that’s a loss.
I wrote a rather treacley post once about the things my daughter’s learned from the kid older than her that I babysit (how to hold a crayon, how to throw a ball, etc.) and the things she’s learned from the ones younger than her (how to nurture, how to be compassionate and patient) and how very important both of those things are. I have no idea where that post is now, nor was there anything terribly distinctive to search for, but I still believe it.
I remember that post. It was very nice. 
If you want treacly, take a look at the current Sonlight catalog, which has a 17-yo boy doing his biology while holding his baby brother. Awww…
Anyway, you make a good point. I guess this is a similar idea as a well-known homeschooling essay, “The baby is the lesson.” (That is, how can I homeschool my 6yo, I have a new baby! Answer, part of your schooling is the baby.) I only have the two kids, and I do feel that we’re missing out on some things I got–I took care of baby brothers and stuff, which they can’t do.
I was going to ask you, if you’re thinking of homeschooling, what would you like to do with it? My bet is that you would do something very different from what I do, so I’m curious. 