I just read a 10 page article on homeschooling that showed up in my Google Alerts today. It actually turned out to be dated Oct 5, 1998, but it came to my email box as new news. Still, there were several statements in this article about homeschooling that caught my eye. I will address them below.
“Americans are becoming fussy consumers rather than trusting captives of a state monopoly,” says Chester Finn, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, a Washington, D.C., think tank. “”They’ve declared their independence and are taking matters into their own hands.”
I don’t think that I have ever read a better assessment of how homeschoolers feel. We are picky about the house we buy, the car we drive, and the clothes we put on our backs. We would never be content being assigned to the mall closest to our homes and being assigned a wardrobe based on age and or any other status. Why would we be content with an assigned school and curriculum for our kids? We need to be able to evaluate our kids ourselves based on our personal knowledge of them and then make a choice that is best for our children. Schools don’t allow this. Homeschooling does.
“After all, if home schooling fails,” says Ronald Areglado of the National Association of Elementary School Principals, “”we pay the freight” when a person ends up on public assistance or in jail. Areglado has good reason for his concern; as a principal, he saw a home-schooled kid who got no instruction at all from his parents.
I understand that seeing one case of what a person interprets as bad homeschooling can put a sour taste in their mouth for the entire movement. I really do, but the problem is that many non-homeschoolers don’t look any further than that first example. I recently had a friend confess that she was concerned for my kids when I started homeschooling. She then told me a story of a family that she met who she felt were not teaching their kids. Then she described a scenario that I know to be typical of unschooling. So not only did she misinterpret the way the parents were “teaching” their kids, but she assumed that I would teach my kids the same way. She was relieved to see how quickly my kids had advanced after two years of homeschooling and it was now an option that she saw as valid. Furthermore, when schools fail children, it is the parents who pay the freight. The statement that society pays the freight for bad homeschooling should go both ways.
“Kids with special needs–gifted or learning disabled–are more likely than most to benefit from home schooling, researchers say, but only if their parents have the right training and resources.”
This is very true. This is because schools generally teach toward the kids in the middle ground leaving kids that need more attention on either spectrum wanting for more. Parents that end up being accidental homeschoolers often do so because they have at least one child who was not getting the service he or she needed from schools, so they take matters into their own hands. They quickly see great progress and realize that homeschooling can be a wonderful experience for their other kids as well.
Personally, I had two kids on opposite spectrum. After being told for years in other states (we moved a lot) that my son was gifted, we landed in as state we wanted to call home only to have the schools tell me that my kid was not gifted based in their criteria. Meanwhile, my son had not changed and was unhappy in school. Meanwhile, I had daughter with very high energy and a bit of an attention hog. The schools felt she should be medicated for the sake of the class. I quickly found the right training and resources. When kids need extra help, parents find a way to get it.
“Your kid is a good candidate for homeschooling if “He sees home schooling as a positive thing, not a punishment for academic or behavior problems.”
If there was one sure-fire reason why a person should not homeschool, it would be that it is being used to punish a child for academic failure or behavior problems. I have seen two instances of this in the five years that I have been homeschooling. One child homeschooled for one year and went back to school a year behind. The other child was at home for two years, and then left home to live with his other parents. (He had two sets of parents.) Homeschooling is not going to eliminate problems that aren’t addressed head on. Each child had issues that originated from a place that had nothing to do with the classroom. One needed counseling, and the other needed educational remediation. It was wrong to think that homeschooling alone would erase deep rooted problems. Unfortunately, when teachers complain that they have seen kids who homeschooling did not work for, these are the kids they see.
In all of the perceptions of homeschoolers that I have stated above, there is a bit of truth. The problem with truth and perceptions is that the entire story is not revealed. The next time you read an article about homeschooling, you need to see past the surface truth and look for the bigger picture. Homeschooling has grown steadily for the past two decades for a very good reason. It works.
Perceptions of Homeschooling: When others think you are doing a bad job
Perceptions of Homeschooling: The Weird Issue