I’m not accepting. I spent too much time doing research as an undergrad and later with graduate work in Psychology to give credit to research that barely explores the issues.
Social sciences do have rigor, they just explore issues that are more abstract and have more variables to control for. Rigor is about the tools and methodology, not the subject.
The default is public school. If you can demonstrate you can do better, great. Otherwise, the kids get the resources of many different teachers, students, and educational tools a single private family is unlikely to be able to provide.
We don’t have to present a case for restricting homschooling. They have to demonstrate they can do the job and your random family is not equipped to do so.
The warm and fuzzies of a couple of researches that would love to get grants to study homeschooling don’t even hit my radar.
Some people seem to be saying that one of the advantages of home schooling is being able to avoid the often hostile atmosphere of the student peer group. It’s true that home schooling does avoid this but is it really an advantage?
The problem is that most social groups don’t become less hostile as its members become adults - they just get more subtle. So if you’re ever going to function is a social setting, you’re going to have to learn the skills. Most people start learning those skills in recess when they’re five years old. Home schoolers are going to be several years behind.
I deal with a lot of employees who have been homeschooled and I agree 100%. The people who are homeschooled are the ones that are always taking long breaks or showing up late and taking a lot of extra time on a project that doesn’t require it. I’ve also heard “My parents don’t want me working this shift” given as an excuse. Honestly, that’s just unacceptable.
But I think the biggest thing with homeschooled kids is that they just seem “off” in some way I can’t put my finger on.
I’d say many of the homeschooled kids I have known have been ahead of other kids in social skills, because they’ve had more experience dealing with adults outside “conventional” relationships.
I’m not sure that I have seen much of that in this thread; could you point me to it? I did say that I think my child has a bit of a social advantage over me since she hasn’t been unmercifully bullied since the age of 6, but I never said that she doesn’t face any social difficulties or ever hang out with other children. She just doesn’t do it in a public school setting. As I said, she’s more socially adept than I was at her age. I have a hard time believing that small children need to be bullied in order to grow into competent adults; IME it has the opposite effect, slowing social development because of fear.
Nobody needs to be bullied. But people are bullied. And that continues throughout a person’s life - it’s just that the form of bullying will change. So what people need to do in order to become competent adults is learn how to deal with bullies, whether it’s a fifth grader who wants your chocolate milk or a boss who’s pressuring you to work outside your contract.
I don’t know about that very much, but I do know that my kids are not afraid to interact with kids different than themselves. In particular, I’ve noticed that they have no reluctance in hanging out with kids with autism or other difficulties. In our group, we have some kids with varying levels of autism or Asperger’s, and one kid with a disorder that seems to be something like what Gary Coleman had; he’s 11 but smaller than my 7yo. They just hang out and play. From what I recall of my own school days, I’m not sure that would be the case at a public school.
Some people here have commented that Doper homeschoolers are probably of a higher quality than others. I’d just like to say that I don’t consider myself to be a particularly amazing homeschooling mom. I know many who are far better at it than I am, who do incredibly cool things. I hope to be more like them, but I’m distracted and selfish much of the time. And all of us are only human, doing our best for our kids with what we’ve got like all the other moms.
Let’s face facts, adults are not going to interact socially with a child the same way they would interact with another adult. Children get a sheltered version of interaction from adults. To get real social interaction you have to be in a peer group - which for children is a group of other children.
We’re all going to run into them; they don’t only live at public school. Personally I think that if you’re lucky enough to get bullied when you’re 10 or older and more equipped to deal with it–as I think my kid is–then it’s better than getting beaten down at 6 or 8.
I’m not sure why you seem to feel that groups of children only happen at public schools. They are all over the place.
This thread reminded me to call my Mom and thank her for home schooling me. I truly believe it was the best choice. As any parent does, I know she has sometimes wondered if they made the right decisions in raising us so she really appreciated that. Thanks all for the reminder to do that.
I never said that. But for most children, school is going to be a substantial portion, most likely a majority, of their social interchange with a large group of other children.
To be clear, my own experience with homeschooled kids began when I was near the end of my own high school time, and the kids I met then were at least 15 or 16.
But now I know parents who are homeschooling younger kids, and I have seen exactly the dynamic you describe with them.
That's right, we have no data on them and their children- which means we don't know how they are doing, we don't know how many of them there are and we don't know what proportion of the homeschooling population they make up. Which means we know absolutely nothing about the entire universe of homeschoolers and cannot make generalizations such as "Home schooled children perform at higher academic levels than non-home schooled children." We can perhaps say that homeschoolers who participated in a study , or took a specific test or used a specific curriculum perform better than non-homeschooled children, but that's it. Otherwise, it's like pretending that the average SAT score at my high school tells you anything about the approximately 90% of the students who didn't take the SAT. They may have been excellent students planning to go to colleges that didn't require the SAT, or they may have been illiterate - no way to know from the data given.
Now, that's not necessarily a reason to restrict homeschooling, but it is a reason to avoid making statements like this
because the data doesn’t show a positive effect of homeschooling on society. At most, it shows a positive effect for the group of participating home schooled students. Just because it would quite literally be impossible to obtain data from a random sample of home-schoolers doesn’t mean we should act as if a non-random sample gives us the same information.
You’re correct that a fair amount of research , especially polls , depend on self-selected participants. But they still use methods designed to eliminate sample bias- for example, ten years ago ,telephone pollsters did not make it a point to include cell phone lines. Now they do , because the demographics of cell phone households are not the same as those of households including a landline and leaving out those households will affect the results. Look up the Literary Digest poll in 1936 for a famous example of a incorrect result due to a biased sample.
I agree with a lot of the criticism in this thread. Many of the experiences kids get in schools just can’t be replicated in non-school situations. And these experiences form the basis for social interaction that makes up, well, society.
In the last homeschooling thread, which I linked to above, I mentioned some examples I’ve seen in the informal education classes I’ve taught. These classes, while really great at teaching the subject matter at hand, can’t also serve as socialization training for the participants too. I just don’t have time to say, “please keep your questions on topic, and share your stories with me at the end,” to the thirty homeschooled kids who keep telling me rambling anecdotes, and it’s not fair on the few kids who do know the boundaries.
I don’t think informal classes can give kids the social skills they need.
OK, but not for all. So in fact we’re pretty much in agreement? Homeschooling is always going to be a minority choice.
I’ve been thinking a little about this whole social/bullying/diversity thing. A lot of people claim that homeschooling robs children of the diversity and tolerance found at public schools (well some of them; certainly not this local one). And again, that homeschooling robs children of the social pressures they need to learn to deal with. Both of these things are assumed to exist only in public schools.
At the same time, I think we all know that IRL, school culture teaches conformity and social fear. There is a box of acceptable qualities (as a mom of girls, I’m going to talk about girls but it’s for boys too): one must be pretty, fashionable, slim, ‘nice,’ athletic, witty, gossipy, etc. and the rules have been getting progressively stricter and are being applied at younger ages. When I was in grade school, the rules existed of course, but they weren’t nearly as rigid or demanding.
I can actually go on and on about this, but I’ll try not to and just say that I think it’s interesting that the diversity of personality and thought that comes naturally to many homeschoolers seems to be unacceptable to so many Dopers who otherwise declaim the virtues of diversity, tolerance, and individual freedom.
Well, neither formal nor informal classes can give kids many of the social skills they need, but that doesn’t mean that there’s anything wrong with either kind of class in itself. It’s a matter of the total range of experiences. I expect an ideal socially healthy person will have experienced both kinds of classes, and a whole lot of other kinds of interactions as well. Certainly attending only formal classes can be a substantial handicap.
It sure was for me. I was intimidated by everyone older than me for a long time - my parents didn’t take me out much and were authoritarian, so I got little exposure to kids who weren’t my own age or my little sister’s age. And adults/people more than a few years older were only authority figures to me.
I wasn’t socially normal at all until I started working, got out on my own and started interacting with all kinds of people. I haven’t met any religious, isolationist homeschooled kids (I’ve heard some horror stories though) but I have met a lot of kids who were educated at home by progressive or secular parents, and all of them have been far more well-rounded in most ways than I was, as a public school kid, or than most of my public-school friends in fact (let’s face it, I’m not the best example - I’ve always been a little off). Most of them are highly successful in higher academics as well.