So what do you all think? Is home schooling in general a good thing or is it bad.
Why do you think it is good or bad.
Have read anything about it.
Have you ever talked to some who has home-schooled???
Did you mean for this to be in the Pit? 
Or did you want a serious debate?
This is more of a Great Debate than a Pit rant. And I’m sure it’s been re-hashed a thousand times over in GD. However, since you asked…
Home schooling, IMHO, is simply one of the alternatives to public education in the US. It is not the be-all-end-all option for those who don’t want their kids in public school.
I have mixed feelings about it, honestly. I think that learning socialization skills (you know, standing in line, waiting your turn, saying “please” and “thank you,” as well as interaction with your peers) are as important as the three R’s. However, I don’t buy into the arguement that a kid who is home-schooled is automatically shut out of socialization opportunities. Some communities have home-school associations where the kids get together at certain intervals to put on plays, go on field trips, etc.
Furthermore, I believe that a home-schooled kid is at a disadvantage as far as getting into college. I think that any college admissions counselor with a limited number of spots to fill is going to take a public- (or private-) school educated kid with transcripts over a home-schooled kid with a GED. YMMV
Yes, I’ve read all kinds of stuff about it. NONE of it was objective. It was either rabidly against it or rabidly for it.
No, but I’ve met two kids who were home-schooled. One was seven and couldn’t read, say his ABC’s, or count to ten. Another was fourteen and was as sharp as a tack and could hold her own in conversation about any topic. And, FWIW, she didn’t seem socially retarded at all. Again, YMMV.
(Yes, this is a GD topic)
The question could just as easily be, “Is public schooling good or bad?”
My thoughts:
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Home schooling can be great. 3/5 of five (IIRC) of the last National Spelling Bee Champions have been home-schooled kids. There are numerous examples of home-schooled kids who have been admitted to major colleges.
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Different states have different requirements for “home schools”. Some require that home schools use an approved curriculum, some just require that the parents notify the County Superintendent of Education that they will be home schooling their kids and that is why the are not attending public schools.
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I’ve seen a lot of kids whose “home school education” was poorly done.
Whistlepig, who deals with this question professionally, sometimes.
I’ve seen it done well.
A very good friend of mine homeschools her two girls. Both girls have ADHD. They both went through the public school rigamorale of guidance counselors and IEP’s and were unfortunately unable to come to any kind of happy conclusion. Her oldest daughter is very individual as well, and I don’t think would have done well in public school. Come to think of it, I’d probably have a lot more backbone and self-esteem had I home-schooled throughout my middle-school years. They are fantastically bright girls, and are very active in their homeschooling association. The kids meet like once a week and and do all kinds of activities. The girls do classes on the side (art and music and such), taught by professionals.
I’ve also talked to fundamentalists who homeschool their children in order to shield them from “secular humanists”. These are the kids I worry about.
My mom is a homemaker and homeschools my son. He’s 8 and his Reading is at a high school level, his math/science/social studies is at a 5th grade level and he’s a bit sheltered, but quite active in the Homeschool community. He does know how to stand in line, speak in turn, share, etc. But it’s readily apparent that he’s not exposed to alot of the normal run’o’the’mill kid stuff. I’ve never seen him try to kill a goldfish or start a fight and he’d rather play video games with his friends than soccer. I don’t know if this has anything to do with him being home schooled, but I imagine that it does. I don’t think he’d know what to do with himself if he got in a fight. But ya know… I was public schooled all the way through my Sophmore year of high school and I didn’t know what to do with myself in a fight either. All in all I’d say that it’s been a positive experience for us. It’s definitely time consuming though, if it weren’t for my mom having the means to stay home with him, there would be no way that I could pull it off.
FWIW, his friends from his homeschool group also seem very well educated and a bit sheltered, but quite sociable and very friendly.
I seriously think that this thread is better suited for IMHO. I clicked on the title expecting to see the shit hitting the fan and instead all I see is a bunch of people giving their serious opinions. What’s this world coming to?
Oh, like the Three Stooges.
I was homeschooled. Does that make me an authority? 
I was pulled out of elementary school in the summer before fourth grade…my mother was 90 hours into her teaching degree and said she “just didn’t like” the other people in her classes, and didn’t like the idea that people just like them were teaching her children. (My brother and I.)
So I was homeschooled from fourth grade through highschool.
It has its pros and cons…the most generic problem people have with it is The Great Socialization Question. I’ve heard this question so many times that, for a quarter a go, I’d be rich.
I don’t personally believe that a kid has to be immersed with his peers for eight hours a day to learn how to be a polite and social human being…when I was a kid, people always assumed I was older than I was, b/c of the way I spoke/carried myself. shrug Also because I’ve always been tall. (What’s the deal with that, anyway? I’d get hit on by 25 year old men at the gym when I was 14. Just b/c I was tall, they thought I was their age.)
The education I received was above-par overall, I think, but lacking in certain areas. Math was not my parents’ strong point, so it was never stressed the way it should have been. I got a 780 on the English half of the SAT’s, and a 500 on the math. I’m not bad at math…just not as well-versed as I could have been. I didn’t feel the lack then, but I do now…mainly because I could’ve gotten a scholarship that would have kept me in college.
As it was, I dropped out at the beginning of my junior year. (Long story, mainly having to do with money.)
But since I’m naturally more inclined towards English, who’s to say that I would’ve aced the math half of the SAT’s if I’d gone to public school? another shrug Who knows.
Without making this into a scrolling nightmare, I’d recommend homeschooling with reservations…those being that
A.) You’re not doing it just to keep The Evil People away from your kids. (People with other beliefs, “bad kids,” teachers with vendettas, etc., etc.)
B.) You have some clue as to what you’re doing. (You’re not just going on a wing and a prayer, thinking that you’ll “figure it out as you go along.” Time is crucial. If you think you can do a better job than public schools, make sure you take the time and make the effort to prove it.)
C.) You’re truly dedicated to it. You realize that this means that one of you will have to spend ALL DAY with your kids. Every day of the year. Until they graduate or you give up and send them back to public school.
In other words, sometimes it sounds a lot better in the brochure…and just because I turned out OK doesn’t mean that every homeschooled student will, too. A lot of parents do it for all the wrong reasons, and it shows. Some homeschooled kids have this idea that they live in Shangri-La, just because they’ve never met anyone who challenged who they are and what they believe.
Anyway, that’s my two cents…
The two main issues I have with homeschooling are:
1: Motivation - Most homeschoolers of 2002 are motivated by religion or social reasons. The “Kids Can Pray In My Home School” or “My Kid Is Always Honored In Our Home School” crowd are usually religious fundamentalists who could not care less if their child can perform long division as long as he knows all ten commandments.
2: Concentration - My dear wife works in the admissions office of a four-year private university and sees many examples of homeschooled applicants who obviously trained to take the SAT but learned nothing else. In other words, if a student studies for the SAT for 8 hours per day for an entire academic school year, his score will be off the charts but he won’t know Dick Cheney from Dick Gautier or how to find Canada on a map or the square root of 4. These students, for the most part, wash out of a real academic setting within two years. I said “for the most part.”
Overall, homeschooling is not a bad idea at all if its done for non-political reasons.
Home schooling gets inside your head and kicks its fucking ass back all the way to school.
And yes, go forth into GD little topic.
“O Moderator, thou hast brought up my thread from the grave: thou hast kept me alive, that I should not go down to the pit.”
Two good friends of mine home-schooled their daughter after some unpleasant experiences with public and private schools. The young woman is, like her parents, exceptionally bright and creative, and pretty much completely unconventional. One private school she went to which prided itself on “molding the leaders of the future” or some such rot told my friends that their daughter would never succeed, in part because she never did take well to being molded. She graduated from a Carnegie-Mellon University, a top engineering school, with Honors with a degree in engineering having jumped the fence from arts to engineering. The arts side of the school, by the way, produced most of the cast of Hill Street Blues, and is just as competitive as the engineering side.
I’ve got a book called Math By Kids which is a collection of math problems written by kids who are being home-schooled. Here are some of the questions:
By a 7 year old:
Mystery number: I am an odd number. If you add my two digits together, you will get 11. I am between 0 and 30. What am I?
By a 12 year old:
I deliver 39 newspapers. It takes me 4 1/2 minutes to get from one paper box to the next and 1/3 of a minute to put the paper in the box. I stop and talk for 9 2/3 minutes, and it takes me 6 minutes 45 seconds to get from the end of the paper route to home. How long does the paper route take? (Assume we’re counting from the first paper box.)
At least as far as math goes, based on the evidence sitting in front of me, these kids aren’t lagging behind.
Socialization’s tougher. I went to public schools all my life, and I’m very much in favor of them. On the other hand, the socialization I experienced left me with minimal social skills and little to negative self-esteem. My friends’ daughter is as unconventional as her parents, but from all I’ve seen of her, she’s much better socialized than I was. I’d guess that more conventional kids would be better socialized in public schools, but that’s purely a guess.
Anyway, that’s my two cents.
CJ
I’ve been doing quitea bit of reading lately, and am giving homeschooling serious thought. (FTR, my kid is 2; I have a few years to decide.) My main worry is my own laziness; between the way homeschooling is run around here, all the social things I can think of to do, and what I’ve seen of well-homeschooled kids, I’m not particularly worried about socialization. Like CJ up there, mr. genie and I both had a hard time in public school and did not get a lot of good socialization skills out of it. I’m 29 now and have spent the past few years finding out that I’m an outgoing, social person who just had that beaten out of me for a long time. But all that is not the reason I’m considering homeschooling.
I think that academics-wise, we could do better than the public schools in a lot of ways for a long time. I’m a librarian who specialized in children’s work; mr. genie is a software engineer who does physics problems for fun. I think we might be able to avoid the math-phobia that so many kids get, and get a lot more real reading, good history, etc. in. (We may just do extra at home and send our kids to public school, I dunno.)
It sounds fun and interesting. Not being chained to the public school system, being able to take interesting trips on our own schedule (I doubt we’d be able to head off to Europe or anything, am thinking more of this state), raising kids who aren’t afraid of people or new things and who are interested in their own learning would be some of my goals.
In a lot of the reading I’ve done, many families do seem to be interested mainly in general life skills, which translates to getting a GED and then going to junior college at 16. Other families go more academic, which would be our thing. You can get through requirements for graduation pretty fast–and then think of all the things you could really study before college! Or you could spend a year abroad as an exchange student. I worry about sending a kid away to college at 15 or 16; that’s far too young IMO unless you’re taking a class or two at the local JC. I want my kids to go to college, I loved it, but they should about be the same age as the other students, for a lot of reasons.
I’ve known some homeschooling families pretty well, and each of them had wonderful, intelligent, talented, self-possessed kids. I’m sure there are people who do it very badly and I just haven’t met them. But at least with homeschooling you generally have interested, motivated parents who are trying to do well. Public schools aren’t always that good.
I home schooled my son in his elementary years. My daughter went to public school. My daughter was mature enough to handle elementary school, my son was not. He just was not ready for school.
At the beginning of the year, I submitted all of my lesson plans for the year to our school. They approved the curriculum. Twice a year he took achievement tests to see if he was on task.
He participated with other home schoolers, took piano lessons, and worked hard with me, raising dairy goats for the milk my daughter needed.
He not only learned to work hard, he never gives up. I accredit never giving up to the farm work. It has to be done no matter what.
He is now 25 and a chef. He is also working on an advanced degree in accounting, so he can own his own business.
Home schooling was definitely positive for us.
I think you need to support this statement. (It might also help to define “social reasons”.) You’d be surprised how many homeschooling families there are on the liberal left. A lot of parents are pulling their kids out simply because either they see schools as unsafe or they see schools as failing to educate effectively.
I simply don’t think public school will provide either the safe environment or the academic foundation that we will be able to provide in our home.
I know firsthand just how bad it can get. I have talked to far too many teachers that give the same arguments that my teachers did for not interfereing when a child is being taunted and beaten by fellow students. Social skills are not learned by getting beaten on a daily basis. This also does not prepare one for the real world. As an adult if someone tries to beat me, I will call the law, and I sure as hell won’t show up the next day so they can do it again. I had no choice but to do so as a child in a public school. I tried to run away from my torturers and was told that running away never solved anything. That advice seems as bad now as it did then.
In first grade, I was told by my mother, “like it or not, you have to go to school for the next 12 years.” I counted the days until I would be released. I tried to tell her how bad it was and she never really listened or believed. After a while I gave up talking to her and that is one of the reasons I did not tell her when I was raped in third grade. I eventually changed schools, but a lot of the damage was done. I still can’t stand to be in crowds, I still have flashbacks when startled, and sometimes, I still have nightmares. I have an exaggerated startle response and other symptoms of post traumatic stress disorder. I suffered depression all through school. Fortunately it lifted for the most part once I had more control over my own life.
Home schooling seems infinetly better than the alternatives to me.
Some kids thrive in public school, some don’t. Mine didn’t. They’re very bright, but not so good at the “memorize and regurgitate” method being pushed in their particular school system. If your kids don’t thrive in public school, then you have to investigate your options. Home shcooling is one option. It’s not right for everyone. For some families, sadly enough, there is no “right” answer, only a choice that is least wrong. Fortunately for us, home schooling works. Socialization is absolutely not a problem. Manners are learned by watching their father and I interact with adults, and the both have plenty of friends, outside interest and activities to keep them occupied. Both are ADD, but with home schooling, we’ve been able to get them off of medication.
Is home schooling good? It is if it works for your family.
I know a few homeschooled folks. They tend to be very scholarly, but a little on the gullible side as well. I imagine that’s an effect of having such a supportive environment for learning with a motivated adult who “can do better” than the public institution.
There are afterschool activities and such to mingle with their peer groups, it’s not like being raised in cages or anything that.
Why do you object to this as a reason? It seems at least as legitimate a reason as “developing social skills”, which is often used (indeed in this thread) as a counterargument for homeschooling.