The socialization issue probably depends more on the reason for homeschooling and the child’s personality than the reason for homeschooling itself. Many, maybe most homeschooled kids are involved in other activities - sports, Scouts, church groups, etc. They probably have no problems socializing. The kids who are going to have difficulty socializing are the ones who would have had difficulty even if they went to a public or private school, and the ones whose parents are homeschooling to keep them from being exposed to the larger culture at all. They do exist - I once encountered a family which homeschooled specifically because they didn’t want their children to have contact with anyone outside the family. No sports, no scouts, no church groups, not even playing in the park with other kids. I’m sure those kids had a lot of problems when they finally had to function outside of the family circle.
There was a girl at my church who was home schooled, very bright, BA degree, insightful, considered briefly asking her out.
When I mentioned that I liked it when bands took another 16 bars for the solo sections and jammed, like Cream, I got a blank look. Eric Clapton’s first big band? Blank look. Very nice person, total sweetheart, but I don’t think I could put up with explaining the entire secular world all over again. She married a guy who couldn’t care less about that stuff. Good for her.
I knew a woman in Wisconsin who has homeschooled both her sons and they’re very bright, sucessful boys. The oldest is going to go to college to become a chemical engineer and the younger is stuck between veterinary science or environmental studies. She told me horror stories about the school system in her area and said that she’d vowed when her first was born that there was no way she was going to subject them to that.
I have a friend who was homeschooled, is about to turn 27 and still lives with his parents. He isn’t stupid though and has a college degree. His younger sister who I presume was also homeschooled is a Physician’s Assistant so they are definitely not dumb. I think it has hindered him in some ways though, such as the still living at home part.
The thing is, the studies will miss the loony fringe religous crowd, who won’t take part int he study. I also suspect if their kids think that Evolution is a lie, medicine doesn’t work and the Earth is only a few 1000 years old, they will do very poorly in the hard sciences. And if their daughters are brought up to be underaged sex-slaves of their close relatives, they won’t fit too well in society.
I have little doubt that non-loony-fundamentalist homeschooled kids do OK, that their deficiencies are offset by the pluses.
But if we are going to talk about all homeschooled kids, we have to include the fringies in the stats. And the fact that their parents can teach them crap like I mentioned above is the 'elephant in the corner" of homeschooling.
And your evidence to support that claim is what?
The nuttiness to which you refer is a function of nutty parents, and not home-schooling, per se. Parents can teach their children any sort of fringe beliefs and the parental take on the world is likely to over-ride what the public system is teaching. The difficulty in evaluating “home-schooling” is that it certainly selects for a sub-type of personality for parents, except in instances where the school system alternatives are abysmal.
There is nothing particularly strong or weak educationally about homeschooling itself. Past middle school its effectiveness becomes a function of a child’s ability to self-study and parents’ ability to apply rigor to the opportunity for learning. Few parents of any background have a broad enough scope to personally teach every discipline well at a high-school level.
Broad averages are not indicative of the strength of homeschooling as an educational approach, despite the fact that homeschooled children usually test better than national averages. This is because public systems must take all comers. Homeschooling may have a bias toward the slightly nutty and over-protective but it also selects out for bright and independent parents as well as parents willing to invest substantial personal time with their kids during formative years.
It is a misconception that some sort of public schooling is required for proper socialization. Home-schooled children are not living in closets, and where they are cloistered, it’s a function of parental constraints which would be applied regardless of where they attend classes.
More anecdotal evidence:
I’m mostly self-educated (not really homeschooled; my Mom just bought me lots of books and let me work it out by myself), did go to a month or two of each grade up to grade 9 (Mom wanted me to make friends - I just whined until she let me drop out), no school after that.
Went to a (very) good college and a (very) good grad school, now have a PhD, making a pittance as a postdoc but that’s my own choice.
The major problems that I had with not having the standard educational background are 1) no references or academic record, so it was a bi*ch getting into college (I had to take a year at a community college and transfer out), and 2) clueless on the pop-culture front. Other than that I think it’s a great idea and in fact recommend keeping kids out of school until they’re at least 12 if that’s possible under the family’s conditions.
JRB
On edit: I should point out that there is/was no religious component to staying out of school; I just didn’t like it (and yes, Mom is just a bit on the “nutty” side of the spectrum). I’m a card-carrying atheist and Mom wavers between agnostic and weakly theistic.
Actually, that’s the one thing I really wouldn’t worry about in this study; it was commissioned by the Homeschool Legal Defense Association, which is solidly fundamentalist–IMO the study is far more likely to ignore the large lefty hippie segment than the conservative right. However, I think you’re vastly overstating certain things; while the obsession with evolution/creationism in some groups is one of the few things I find really annoying about the homeschooling movement, the fact is that a belief in creationism isn’t really a bar to most careers. Even in the sciences, you will find creationists; perplexingly, one of the most popular homeschooling science curricula is produced by a nuclear chemist professor guy who preaches both creationism and rigorous math/science education with an eye to a career in the sciences. No, I don’t get it either. But I suspect that kids educated in such an environment who do go into science will eventually come to see that evolution isn’t Evil.
As above, I think that’s much more a function of parenting than of homeschooling. Parents will teach their children their beliefs, regardless of their educational choices; publicly schooled kids will just be told to ignore the teacher. There are lots of creationists in schools, as well as a whole boatload of other weird beliefs. (Heck, just look at that teacher thread in MPSIMS…) At least homeschoolers don’t generally go for 9/11 Truth, moon hoaxes, or aliens. And I sometimes wonder what effect the popularity of logic studies is going to have on the creationist crowd, not to mention the way they all teach their kids to read books all the time. Anyway, people are going to have nutty beliefs, and teach them to their children.
I’m clueless on the pop-culture front, and I’ve spent 26 years in various schools (the standard 12 primary and secondary, 4 years in college, 7 years in grad school, 3 years in law school).
And we all understand how common that is.
Read more about how the “mormon-like” sects practice their Polygyny. “Men” “marry” their own under-aged daughters, etc and the poor girls too often see that as normal.
And that occurs how often among homeschoolers?
And of what percentage of homeschoolers do you believe this is typical?
I see your arguments DrDeth, but I think they are an extreme. I’ve known many people who were taught at home- ranging from hippies who didn’t want their kids being controlled by capitalist pigs; to bible-thumpers who didn’t want their kids being controlled by capitalist pigs. I never saw anything of the sort. (Trust me…the few who were on that fringe were REALLY out there IMHO)
My education was far more “rounded” than that of the average kid in a traditional school. I volunteered with my local fire department and rescue squad. I got to work on a farm. I learned how to work on cars. I went hunting. I raised gardens. I tinkered with computers. I sat on porches and listened to old folks talk. I went to museums. Talked to countries around the world with my ham radio.
These are all things that many people get to do, just not in the volume that I did as a child. As a result, I can win a bar fight in Amarillo (then drink a few beers with some cowboys afterwards), but I can also debate Alan Greenspan’s fiscal policies at a restaurant in NYC. Once again, these are things that a lot of people taught in traditional school can do- which is the point.
The one drawback socially was women. I definitely had problems relating to the opposite sex which lasted well into my 20’s. I blame this partly on being a skinny kid who didn’t realize he had turned into the blue-eyed (with dimples) stud that I am. The rest I blame on being a man.
It should be noted that there are plenty of non-ideological homeschoolers (among them the dozen homeschoolers I’ve known) - those who feel that the local schools just don’t do a good job.
Yep. That was why I said they range from both extremes.
I was what you described. 
Dammit! I knew there was a flaw.
We did an internal study on homeschooled students. Because this is a single institution, and most students are not homeschooled, keep in mind that our sample size is small. The big headline for us in terms of adjustment to college was that homeschooled students tended to have difficulty earlier in their freshman year. Likewise, they tended to resolve those difficulties earlier. Their peers who were not homeschooled tended to experience adjustment issues later in the freshman year, again, with resolution later.
My gut feeling on this, not supported either way by anything in the study, is that college can be just as overwhelming to both homeschoolers and students who attended a school – but the homeschoolers notice it first.
There was no difference between the groups after the freshman year.
Yes, I agree they are one extreme, I even called them “loony fringe religous crowd”. “Fringe” means “far from mainstream” so they are the extreme, agreed.