DSeid: My oldest is schedule to start Kindergaarten next year, that’s why homeschooling seems important to consider now.
The public schools here aren’t terrible, but they aren’t great either. It seems the homeschooled children I’ve met are better behaved, more polite, and less likely to get involved in drugs or violence. In fact, they are less mature, which I see as a good thing, because school kids mature so fast.
I’m afraid I don’t have the patience or discipline to homeschool, but I havn’t ever tried, so I can’t be sure.
I have a B.A. in English, an M.A. in Linguistics, and my husband has a Ph.D. in Engineering. I was also a teacher for several years. So in theory at least, we’re qualified and experienced. But the things I fear have little to do with the academic side of teaching.
I’m afraid my sweet, gentle and kind son will turn snotty and obnoxious if I send him to school. I’m also afraid he’ll be too sheltered and insular if I home school.
There is also the issue of how to teach the oldest while watching a caring for the other little ones. And how to teach 3 different grade levels when they get older?
I’ve appreciated hearing all of your opinions and insights. It gives me someting to think about.
I have a niece and nephew that have been homeschooled (hs) for over a year and it has been an unmitigated disaster. The boy is extremely bright and naturally curious, but none of this is being channelled productively; his potential is very obviously untapped (that is, obvious to everyone except his mother/my sister-in-law). He is lazy, never excercises or leaves the house and has no friends to speak of. The girl is older, very sweet and devout (they were pulled from public school for religious reasons), but still immature for her age and spoiled. It is easy to blame this on the mother (which we do), but it also reinforces all the reasons why I’m wary of the concept of homeschooling: It’s genuinely hard and the repercussions for failure are so severe; it doesn’t encourage the kind of socialization that kids really need; it is often done with the best intentions but for the wrong reasons.
Now obviously, I am willing to assume that’s more of a worst-case scenario. But I used to run a college dormitory complex, exposing me to at least a thousand freshmen a year. My job would often involve overseeing roomate disputes, providing conflict mediation, etc. Usually, these things could be settled quickly, even if it was simply an “agree-to-disagree” model; however, once in a while, we’d run into a first-year student who just did not get the basic concept of “getting along”: They were unused to communicating in conflict situations, they were used to having problems solved for them, they were unreasonable in their expectations of others and surprisingly immature and sheltered for someone their age.
Oh, and they were almost always home-schooled.
Now, these kids were obviously bright in a “book-smarts” way, but you could tell that they had no experience dealing with people, especially peers, dramatically different then themselves. That’s why quotes like this (italics mine)
strike me as rather absurd. This is like keeping your kid in the wading pool for 12 years; public school is like getting thrown into the deep end. Life consists of millions of random interactions and keeping your child in these safe little circles consisting almost exclusively of like-minded kids of like-minded parents strikes me as doing them a grave disservice.
Also (back to my dorm experience), my colleagues and I found home-school kids were disproprotionately likely to have really bad homesick problems and more likely to have their parents fight their battles for them (instead of solving it themselves). They were undeniably smart but also undeniably different; they stood out socially and had a harder time making friends. Usually I’d hear about how they’d get an apartment the next year and sort-of disappear into their studies. Given how great college experiences can be, I always felt bad for them and wondered if, with such obviously motivated parents, they couldn’t have gotten the same level of education from a public/private school supplemented by special parental lessons/activities without suffering from the lack of exposure to people. Long before I had this niece and nephew, it was these first-hand experiences that turned me off of home schooling.
My sister and brother-in-law are planning on homeschooling their kids and I’m, quite frankly, terrified at the prospect. I know my sister and BIL love them very much, but I don’t think they’re up to the challenge, and the reasons I’m given are always these amorphous arguments that it would be “better”, since they could watch over them so much more and control what happens to them (vs. the “unsafe”, uncontrollable elements in schools nowadays). It reeks of over-protectiveness and seems catered to making themselves feel better rather than thinking about what’s best for the kid.
Like I said, I know there are plenty of success stories with hs and I’m glad that it’s really worked well for some. But being smart is different than knowing how to teach effectively; my wife and I have a satchel of degrees between us and we don’t feel confident that we would be able to homeschool a kid. The more you know, the more you realize how much you don’t. Which means if I’m going to resort to tutors and online resources and other kid’s parents, I’d rather simply have them* attend school with everyone else since I can’t really teach them how to make friends and avoid fights and deal with strange authority figures (how often do hs kids meet these, anyway?)–that’s something they’d have to learn on their own. Our public schools have failed in many ways, but I still believe parents can help just as much by being involved with their kids’ school lives as they can by simply assuming all the responsibility on themselves.
A bit of a ramble; just my $0.02.
[sub](*speaking as a current non-parent; my wife and I have talked extensively about hs but don’t yet have kids of our own, fwiw)[/sub]
Well, how about today’s news report: 57% of high school students aren’t at the 'basic level" in history and only 10% are at “grade level”. Maybe that argues for homeschooling, but not if these are the people who are doing the teaching.
Homeschooling elementary school children is one thing, but I think homeschooling a high school person is an entirely different proposition. I am a high school junior, and while my parents are quite intelligent (each of them a lawyer with postgraduate work), I just cannot imagine them teaching me what I’ve learned at school this year. It takes an amazing amount of versatility to go from teaching the properties of an ellipse to the assumptions for a 2-PropZTest to electromagnetism to Catherine de Medicis to Erich Maria Remarque to John Kesey to Catullus to Ovid to New Testament Greek to steatopygous figures from 20,000 BC that employed sympathetic magic to … you get the idea. At the high school I go to you will have a teacher who has a degree in the subject he’s teaching, who has devoted years of his life to its mastery, who has probably been teaching for years, and who knows exactly what he’s talking about. Very, very few ordinary people are able to master all or even most of the subjects you learn in high school to the degree that they would be comfortable teaching them.
If you honestly believe you can do that, well, good for you, but I think you shortchange your kid if you try to teach him a subject you don’t fully understand when a qualified teacher who has spent years studying that subject is available.
So you are wanting to protect your child from “untoward” influences. The academic issues are, well, academic.
It is a difficult decision. You really can’t use the method of looking at homeschooled kids and saying that they are X or Y. Clearly there is a substantial selection bias here. Most (okay, I have no study to back this up) of families homeschooling are doing it to protect their little ones from the influences of secular education, often on religious grounds. These families are going to produce children different from the mean in social characteristics even if in secular school. Your own milage may vary.
I can’t say that socialization in school is always a positive. Other kids can be vicious bastards. There are bullies. There are bad influences.
A modestly socially adept child with a strong base of values from their family will navigate these hazards, honing their skills as they go. All three of my kids have, even my youngest, now finishing first grade, who is an anxious kid who had lots of difficulties adapting to preschool. My eldest, now a sophmore, is still socially immature (a good thing), but has managed to gather a group of freinds at a similar social “maturity” level and yet in every other way of great diversity. He knows how to work in a group of peers, as part of a team, something essential for adult success, and something that homeschooling would not have taught him.
A child without social adroitness, especially one who otherwise does not “fit in” in some way, may have a very hard time. Perhaps they’ll learn the skills. Perhaps not. I was a bullied kid. I can’t say that the experience of being dragged around the playground by a jumprope tied to my legs was a great positive socialization experience. But I do not think that having my parents try to teach me at home would have done anything for my social skills. (No offense, Ma.) As for adaptability at college, I think my skill there was more a function of home, being the youngest of five and having to know how to share, rather than my having survived elementary school torments.
I thought I would chip in my own personal observation…
I was homeschooled, except for the first few years of elementary school. I was not homeschooled for religious reasons; I come from a progressive secular family. While homeschooling is not for everyone, I feel it worked out just fine for me. As for the academic angle, I feel I was quite well prepared for college. I graduated summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa last year, and will be attending a top 10 law school this fall. Socially, I don’t think I was hurt by it. I knew numerous other homeschooled kids that I interacted with, plus some public school kids I met in my neighborhood and elsewhere. I did run across a few public school kids who didn’t want to hang around me/be friends with me due to prejudice (anti-homeschool sentiment is not uncommon) but hey, it was their loss. Socially, the homeschooled kids I knew were a diverse lot, just like public school kids are – some liked to hang around lots of other kids, and others prefered to have a smaller number of closer friends. I don’t think either option is more valid than the other.
The only time I got a little burned out on homeschooling was during my senior year, mainly because I had reached the limits of what homeschooling could do for me and was eager to start college. Everyone thought I would have a rough time adapting to college – nonsense! My motivation, both personal and academic, made it a piece of cake.
Like I said, homeschooling is not for everyone, but it does work for some. Many I know feel that high school was the best experience of their lives, and would not trade it for anything. For others, it was pure HELL. They had to endure poor quality teachers (no offense to the many fine teachers out there, but there are a few rotten apples in every barrel…), insane administration (i.e. zero tolerance craziness), cliques, taunting, bullying, rampant homophobia, pep rallies ;), etc. Since I was not your typical kid (gay, kinda nerdy, a liberal atheist in a very conservative Christian region) I suspect that had I gone to high school, my experience would have been more like the latter. I am not sorry that I missed out on the crap that some of my public school peers had to go through.
I suspect that most of the sheltered, immature homeschoolers that people encounter are those who are/were homeschooled due to religious reasons. Naturally, if your parents are trying to shelter you from the “evil” influences of the outside world, you are going to grow up differently. Fortunately, my parents were not like that.
I was homeschooled for half of 8th grade through high school. My family had just moved to a new area, and the schools were horrible. I was extremely depressed because I was not learning anything, even though the schools had put me into their “accelerated” programs. Mom and Dad and I sat down and talked for a while and decided that we could do better, even with Dad working full-time and Mom part-time. I taught myself everything, with occasional conceptual help from the parentals. When I got too far for their knowledge, we called up the local community college. They were delighted to let me take calculus and some lab science courses. That was a few years ago … now, I’m getting ready to start grad school, on full fellowship, this fall. I probably would have been a high-school dropout had we not chosen the homeschooling route.
On the issue of socialization: I had a friend during that time who had been homeschooled for most of her life. We met while I was still in public school, and I would often tell her about our nutcase PE teacher, or what so-an-so said about something, etc … but she had no grasp of the idea that people would be deliberately hurtful to one another. When she went to college, she had to leave after one semester because of a severe depression. IANAD, but I do really think that her overly sheltered schildhood left her unable to deal with normal people. I see this as a drawback, or something to be cautious of. Parents that choose to homeschool are taking responsibility for everything that forms their children for several years. They need to make sure that the kids find out what the “real world” is. It’s not always a problem, but it can also really screw things up for their kids.
Overall, though, the ~25 homeschoolers that I was in contact with were not less socially adept than the numbnuts that I went to school with. They were certainly more considerate of other peoples’ feelings. If there were a large-scale study done over several years, I would expect the homeschoolers to come out about the same socially as public/private schooled children. In both groups, you’ll get kids that have problems. Homeschooling parents, however, just need to take a little extra effort in that area to make sure that their kids will be able to lead productive lives with other people.
My cousin started home schooling her brood when the school district decided that they were all going to separate schools. They felt that not having siblings around would help their individuality. She decided that she did not have 5 children just so that they could be all alone in the world. They seem happy.
Right, and they are a product of public education. Surely homeschoolers can do at least as well as that.
As far as your point that home-schooling being an elitist boast, I am sure that in at least some cases you are correct. It is, however, a bit like the counter-argument to “being gay is a choice”. Why would someone go thru all that if he/she did not have a choice?
Same with home-schooling. Why would anyone take on the daunting task of a full-time career tutoring a child, unless he or she honestly felt that it was the best alternative? Which means that you are almost automatically getting self-selection from those grimly determined that their children will get a better education than the parents did in the public system.
I think most of the problems with public education can be countered by parents who are involved with their child’s education. Certainly it would seem that home-schooling parents are that, if nothing else.
At least in my state, home-schooled students are tested regularly to be sure they are on track. Almost without fail, they beat the norms hands down.
thanks Shodan, you’ve made the argument I’ve been trying to make in a coherent fashion.
We’re currently applying for dispensation to homeschool on medical grounds and it’s bizarre the hoops I’m jumping through. The school district would prefer that my child remain in school where he is learning nothing as is demonstrated by their own testing. He’s socially a disaster area at the moment and is bitterly unhappy. No matter what happens with homeschooling, it’s got to be better than what is happening in the classroom. I live in a state where virtually all the homeschoolers are fundamentalist Christian. it makes socialisation a challenge for us but it was no better in school.
I figure that no matter what happens I can’t stuff things up any worse than the school was doing.
OK this is getting rambling and anecdotal
Golly, wouldn’t it seem that there would be some jury-reviewed scientific studies of the effects of homeschooling to counterbalance all of this anecdotal evidence and perhaps dubious interpretation? Most people may know someone who was homeschooled and every one of them has a story. How is it possible that homeschooling can be so good and so bad?
My unscientific guess is that it all depends. It depends on the hs parent, the non-hs parent, the kids, the community, the local hs community, etc., etc., etc. and that it is impossible to predict at an individual level how it’s going to turn out beforehand.
My older sister hs’s her seven children. Her kids seem very well rounded. She says that it’s so much work and sacrifice, she would not recommend it. She and her husband decided on day one that their kids would hs through sixth grade and attend Catholic school from seventh grade on. I thought this was a great compromise. They also go on hs field trips, play on all the park district sports teams, play in the grade school band, do Scouts, etc.
Does this mean anyone else should or should not hs their kids? No, of course not. What can we generalise from my sister’s example? Pretty much nothing. Hs’ing is a personal decision. Most moms simply cannot do it for various reasons. If you can do it and think and believe you can do better for your children by hs’ing, maybe you should give it a try. You may know right away whether or not it’s a mistake. You can always send your kids to public school if your hs’ing experience blows up.
