In completing this weeks discussion questions, I thought I would look more deeply into homeschooling. In researching this on the web, I found an interesting article related to homeschooling and is it as good as public school. The women who wrote the article, Barb Shelton, seems to be more one sided on this decision. In her article, she explains she has been a homeschooling mom for seventeen years. She thinks that homeschooling is best because it opens the doors to spending more time with your children and more freedom for high school aged students to explore their options to see what they want to do with their life. This woman also sells books on this idea.
Another article I came across was one about homeschoolers coming of age. One student who was homeschooled said he feels he did not miss a thing from homeschooling. Most people think that a child who is homeschooled misses out on socialization and activities associated with school. This student says he is happy he missed out on some of those things because some of those activities can include bullying and peer pressure, something he never had to succumb to. This article also speaks about homeschooled children being freer to explore their creativity and what their interests are.
Here’s another site I found on the subject of homeschooling. This one speaks more about the bad sides to homeschooling. This site, written by Greg, says that homeschooling is a way of cheating the system, provides children with less opportunities and resources, lower quality teaching, is ideologically driven, and oversight testing. In the end, the author agrees with most in that he is also undecided. He sees the good in homeschooling as well as the bad. He personally would pick public schooling over homeschooling.
As far as looking at these sites all together, none of them really produced much data or research on the topics. They were mostly opinions. Still, I found them to be very interesting and they did bring up some good points. In realizing this, I then decided to look to see if I could find any data or statistics on homeschooling. I did come across this article about academic statistics on homeschooling. This site explains studies conducted about homeschooling. At the end, it agrees that homeschooling is possible and works. It even explained how homeschooled students tend to outperform public schooled students by thirty to thirty-seven percentile points in all subjects. It gave many other facts and was very interesting.
After reading all of these articles, I still think public school is the way to go. I can see how homeschooling would work, especially because the pupil receives more one on one time than they would in a traditional classroom. Do you agree? After checking out some of these sites, did your opinion of homeschooling change?
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Home schooling your children is good; however you are depriving them of that aspect of experience that no one can teach a child except by interacting with the peers and learning from them. Children need to be in a school environment to associate and learn with peers. A mother that is home schooling will not be able to know all the courses to teach the child Also they do not go for classes like the teachers to improve on their learning and learn a new style. To me a mother can help the child at home, tutor the child after school hour but not home school the child.
ReplyDeleteese has touched on the one area that I would agree that homeschooling lags in when compared to public schools - social interaction.
ReplyDeleteTrue, the kids don't get to hang around with other kids but on the other hand, have you stood on the play ground and watched the way these kids treat each other? The social pressures are incredible. Bullying is a terrible problem and the girls are perhaps crueler than the boys. I'm not sure homeschooled kids are necessarily missing anything. We have had just a very small number of kids homeschooled in our district and the 2 reasons parents gave for keeping their kids home were 1) they wanted disipline and morality taught to their child or at least enforced and felt the public school did pretty much nothing in those regards and 2) their kids were picked on or made ot be social outcasts and they just couldn't take it anymore.
If public schools or the educational system wants to eliminate the need parenst feel to keep their kids home we should make sure their kids are safe and bring a sense or control and morality back to the public education setting.
Homeschooling is such a hot topic right now. It is incredible how passionate people are on both sides of this issue. I guess when you aren’t immediately drawn to one side or the other, and then you can weigh the options. There are major benefits to both sides. Homeschooling is a positive in that you have much more control over what your children are exposed to. The type of education is completely up to you and this can be a positive thing for parents who are concerned with their children being taught in a way they do not find acceptable. However, the flipside of homeschooling preaches loss of social interactions and students not learning to adapt. At the end of the day as a parent you need to decide what is right for you and your child. For them now and for their futures. As a teacher we need to be able to see both sides of this debate and try to understand the other point of view while the political system decides on our laws regarding homeschooling will be. I will keep educating myself on this issue, these were all very good points provided.
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