I can’t help it, I have to post a rebuttal to this post or it will eat away at me. Here goes:
10. “You were totally home schooled” is an insult college kids use when mocking the geeky kid in the dorm (whether or not the offender was home schooled or not). And… say what you will… but it doesn’t feel nice to be considered an outsider, a natural outcropping of being homeschooled.
Wait, I should base my choice of education for my children upon whether a-hole frat boys will tease my kids? Damn, I knew I was going about this all wrong. From now on I need to enforce academic mediocrity and a penchant for baseball caps. Not to mention starting weekly beer-pong lessons.
9. Call me old-fashioned, but a students’ classroom shouldn’t also be where they eat Fruit Loops and meat loaf (not at the same time I hope). It also shouldn’t be where the family gathers to watch American Idol or to play Wii. Students–from little ones to teens–deserve a learning-focused place to study. In modern society, we call them schools.
Um, why? I really don’t understand why learning has to happen in isolation, separated by time and/or space from other activities. My kids learn at the dinner table, on the couch, on the floor, on the bus, in the playground, in shops…. should I go on? As long as they are learning, why does it matter where or when?
8. Homeschooling is selfish. According to this article in USA Today, students who get homeschooled are increasingly from wealthy and well-educated families. To take these (I’m assuming) high achieving students out of our schools is a disservice to our less fortunate public school kids. Poorer students with less literate parents are more reliant on peer support and motivation, and they greatly benefit from the focus and commitment of their richer and higher achieving classmates.
Well, yeah, I guess I’m selfish. I want the best for my kids. Guilty as charged. I do care about other children, and the rest of the world, and I hope to instill the values of compassion and service to others in my children. But I will not sacrifice their needs for the rest of the world.
By the way, my husband and I are well-educated (and proud of it), but wealthy? I wish.
7. God hates homeschooling. The study, done by the National Center for Education Statistics, notes that the most common reason parents gave as the most important was a desire to provide religious or moral instruction. To the homeschooling Believers out there, didn’t God say “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations”? Didn’t he command, “Ye shall be witnesses unto me”? From my side, to take your faithful children out of schools is to miss an opportunity to spread the grace, power and beauty of the Lord to the common people. (Personally I’m agnostic, but I’m just saying…)
I don’t even know how to respond to this, except to point out that only 36% of the families in that study cited religion as the most important reason they homeschooled. So 64% of homeschoolers are motivated most strongly by reasons other than religion. I’m one of them.
6. Homeschooling parent/teachers are arrogant to the point of lunacy. For real! My qualifications to teach English include a double major in English and education, two master’s degrees (education and journalism), a student teaching semester and multiple internship terms, real world experience as a writer, and years in the classroom dealing with different learning styles. So, first of all, homeschooling parent, you think you can teach English as well as me? Well, maybe you can. I’ll give you that. But there’s no way that you can teach English as well as me, and biology as well as a trained professional, and history… and Spanish… and art… and counsel for college as well as a school’s guidance counselor… and… and…
Proper grammar might be a good thing to use when claiming superior English skills. Anyway… if you’d done some research, you’d know that homeschoolers generally outperform public schoolers on standardized test scores, college acceptance rates, and college graduation rates. So yes, I do think that I can provide a better education through homeschooling than my children would receive at a pubic school.
I think you have a misperception that homeschooling consists of me, and only me, standing in front of a blackboard and lecturing my kids as they sit around the dining table. That’s not what homeschooling is. I don’t think there’s a single homeschooling family in which the children were taught all subjects, at all levels, by their parents. I’m certainly not planning on teaching my kids high school chemistry, for instance. Perhaps we’ll hire a tutor, perhaps they’ll take classes at the local community college, perhaps we’ll join a co-op and they’ll take a class with other homeschooled teens… in any case, we’ll handle it, just as countless other homeschooling parents handle subjects outside their areas of competence.
5. As a teacher, homeschooling kind of pisses me off. (That’s good enough for #5.)
5. As a human being, hating on others that make choices that are different from yours kind of pisses me off. I also can’t help but wonder why you’re so threatened by these different choices. To quote Deborah Markus of Secular Homeschooling Magazine, “We didn’t go through all the reading, learning, thinking, weighing of options, experimenting, and worrying that goes into homeschooling just to annoy you. Really. This was a deeply personal decision, tailored to the specifics of our family. Stop taking the bare fact of our being homeschoolers as either an affront or a judgment about your own educational decisions.”
4. Homeschooling could breed intolerance, and maybe even racism. Unless the student is being homeschooled at the MTV Real World house, there’s probably only one race/sexuality/background in the room. How can a young person learn to appreciate other cultures if he or she doesn’t live among them?
Homeschooling “could” breed intolerance, so we shouldn’t do it? Way to use logic there, buddy. Are you assuming that all homeschoolers are white, straight, and of the same ethnicity? Maybe you should worry about your own intolerance. Homeschoolers come in all races, ethnicities, sexual orientations, family structures, and religions. Are you really insinuating that the only place my kids would encounter cultures other than their own is in public school? That’s pretty disturbing and, dare I say it, seems to be based on some unconscious racial assumptions on your own part.
My children are themselves biracial. We are friends with people of various races, ethnicities, religions, backgrounds, income levels, and sexual orientations. Not to mention ages. My children don’t spend six hours a day in a room with 20-30 kids their own age and one adult. They have friends older and younger than themselves.
3. And don’t give me this “they still participate in activities with public school kids” garbage. Socialization in our grand multi-cultural experiment we call America is a process that takes more than an hour a day, a few times a week. Homeschooling, undoubtedly, leaves the child unprepared socially.
Socialization is a process that takes more than spending six hours a day with 20-30 people one’s own age (and usually of similar income level), being told not to talk to one another. Homeschoolers are out in the real world, not a classroom. They interact with children and adults of all ages, both in organized activities such as scouts, dance class, sports, etc., and in casual settings such as going to the playground or playing with neighborhood kids. Not to mention organized homeschooling groups and activities. To read your post, one might think you’re under the impression that we spend all day, every day, secluded at home!
2. Homeschooling parents are arrogant, Part 2. According to Henry Cate, who runs the Why Homeschool blog, many highly educated, high-income parents are “probably people who are a little bit more comfortable in taking risks” in choosing a college or line of work. “The attributes that facilitate that might also facilitate them being more comfortable with home-schooling.”
More comfortable taking risks with their child’s education? Gamble on, I don’t know, the Superbowl, not your child’s future.
You obviously misread that. He didn’t say that homeschooling parents take risks with their children’s educations. He hypothesized that the same attributes that make them risk-takers in other areas might make them more comfortable with homeschooling. It’s a huge leap from that statement to characterize homeschooling as “gambling.” As far as Cate’s hypothesis, I can understand that line of reasoning. Homeschooling is uncommon, outside of the mainstream. If you’re going to homeschool, you have to be comfortable with doing what’s best for your own family and not caring what everyone else does and what the mainstream says you should do. Homeschoolers generally put a lot of thought into their decision. In fact, I’d argue that homeschoolers, on average, put more thought into their children’s educations than public school parents. Not that there aren’t many very committed, involved parents in the public schools. But most public school parents don’t choose public school out of a wide range of options. Public school is the default, and they go along with it unless there is a striking reason not to do so. Homeschoolers, on the other hand, reject the default and make an active choice to homeschool. Then we go on to make choices about curricula, educational philosophy, and homeschooling style. Believe me, homeschoolers spend a lot of time thinking, researching, debating, talking, praying, trying, revising, and tweaking to give our children the best possible education. Doesn’t sound much like gambling to me!
1. And finally… have you met someone homeschooled? Not to hate, but they do tend to be pretty geeky***.
*** Please see the comments for thoughts on the word ‘geeky.’ But, in general, to be geeky connotes a certain inability to integrate and communicate in diverse social situations. Which, I would argue, is a likely result of being educated in an environment without peers. It’s hard to get by in such a diverse world as ours! And the more people you can hang out with the more likely you are to succeed, both in work life and real life.
Ok, are we back to the tired socialization argument again? That’s what you mean by “geeky”? If so, go re-read my answers to #3 and #4. But if you’re talking about the common definition of “geeky,” meaning that homeschoolers are a little weird, a little different from the mainstream, a little nerdy, not up on all the latest trends… I’d have to say, so what? I have known plenty of geeky kids in public schools… in fact, I was one. It took years for me to be happy with myself. Maybe if I were homeschooled, I’d have had more self-confidence in my teens and not worried about being “cool” so much. Who knows? Yes, there are a lot of geeky homeschooled kids. But it’s sort of a chicken-and-egg question: maybe they would have been geeky anyway, but they don’t spend so much time worrying about it and pretending to be something they’re not, because they are free from the cliques of public school. Anyway, is being a geek so bad? Most former geeks I know have turned out to be very interesting, cool people as adults. Not to mention that many of them are making great money as computer programmers.
Are you asking whether I give assignments to be done independently, outside of “school time,” as extra practice? Not really. But we don’t really have official school hours. We have assignments that need to be completed, and we get them done during the course of the day. Sometimes in the morning, sometimes in the afternoon. Sometimes I will read some of the material aloud at bedtime. If my kids need extra practice on something, such as math facts, they will get extra practice. But I don’t really think of it as homework.
