In 2013, it is estimated that in the US more than two million students are homeschooled and that number is growing at more than 10% per year.
Homeschooling is not a new idea, but many parents who choose to homeschool their children are still subject to intense scrutiny. Some parents are even made to feel that choosing to keep their children at home amounts to abuse. Others are ridiculed for not taking advantage of what the government gives them free of charge instead of taking on the sometimes expensive and always time-consuming task of educating their own children.
The first American laws making school compulsory were enacted in 1852. Before that, most children were homeschooled. People like Thomas Edison, Benjamin Franklin, and Alexander Graham Bell had little to no formal education, and yet we consider them national heroes, even as our society ridicules others who take the same path.
In the early days of public education, school often took a back seat to the needs of the family. If there were crops to plant or harvest, the children stayed home to do the work. Before child labor laws were enacted, many children were forced to work to help support their families instead of attending school. As time passed, school attendance laws were more strictly enforced, and most children attended public or private schools.
The 1960s and 1970s were times of turmoil in the United States. The youth demanded changes in the social structure of the nation. The Civil Rights movement grew and cities erupted with violence as whites fought against the changes demanded by the African American citizens of this country. Young people also marched and held sit-ins to protest what they saw as an unjust war. This is not the first time that the United States has been in a time of great change.
In the 1960s, people began to question the efficiency of our public school system. Books like How Children Fail, written in 1964 by John Holt, generated controversy and prompted citizens to question what was happening in the public school system. Holt and other educators wrote many books advocating a change in the way America raised its children. While these authors did not accomplish much in terms of changing the way our schools functioned, their books inspired many people to stop and think about the education of our children.
Some parents decided that they did not need the government to educate their children. They felt that they could do a better job themselves. As more parents regained control of their children’s education, the grassroots homeschooling movement emerged. At this time, homeschooling was out of the mainstream. While it was considered to be something only hippies and other counterculture movements practiced, devout Christians and members of other religious groups were also part of the early homeschooling movement.
As the decades have passed, homeschooling has gradually become more accepted. The reasons for keeping children at home have become more compelling and most people have started to accept it as a viable option for those who choose this path. But as with anything that does not conform to accepted standards, there are still people who do not approve of and question the rights of people to get off the beaten path.
Growing amounts of reliable research on the academic success of homeschooling support the claims of homeschooled families. On average, homeschooled children score more than 30 percentage points more than public school students on standardized tests. Today, even Ivy League universities like Harvard and Princeton are accepting home schooled students in record numbers.
You would think this information would be enough to give homeschooling families a break from all the questions, but this is not the case. The focus point now is socialization. Instead of asking questions about their children’s academic performance, homeschooling parents hear:
Not worried about your child’s socialization?
You know you can’t isolate them from the rest of the world forever!
What are you going to do when you have to go out into the world?
Are you going to have it at home forever?
These questions point to ongoing misconceptions about homeschooling. It’s as if people assume that since you don’t send your kids to public school, you keep them locked in a hidden basement from the scary big world. This is far from the truth in most cases. Almost all towns and cities have homeschooling cooperatives that meet for field trips, sports, choir, band, and many other events. Children socialize in these groups with children of all ages and it is common for there to be much less gender discrimination in activities than in public schools. Just as research supports the academic benefits of homeschooling for dedicated families, there is a wealth of research showing that homeschooled students are better socially adjusted than their traditionally educated peers.
Perhaps best for people who are quick to ask questions about homeschooling and socialization need to step back and consider the socialization their children are getting in public schools.
Children in public schools are socialized within very narrow parameters. The classrooms are full of students who were born in the same year, which is not a good criterion for organizing social groups.
In the past, there was a certain amount of time for traditionally schooled children to socialize. Not so much these days. Realizing that American students were lagging far behind their counterparts in other first world countries, many changes took place in our schools. Now there is little time for any interaction between the students. They spend their days trapped at desks given the information they need to pass important standardized tests.
Teachers have no time to interact with students and no time to allow them to interact with each other. Most classes consist of the teacher speaking and explaining with occasional questions from the students. Or you can find quiet classrooms with children painstakingly filling out a stack of worksheets while the teacher sits at her desk trying to keep up with the mountains of grades and other paperwork that make up her work.
My first year as a high school teacher was an eye-opening experience. I felt more like a traffic cop than a teacher. I constantly took my students from one class to another, to the dining room, to the library … and the main rule was silence. Without speaking, just walking, in silence.
As a new teacher, the principal visited me in the classrooms. One day he came while I was playing with my students. There were two teams lined up on either side of the classroom. Somehow, I had managed to capture their interest and get everyone excited about the discussion we were having. The students were interested and triggered original opinions and thoughts on the questions that were asked. While I don’t remember what it was all about now, I clearly remember my pride in the students and my subsequent horror at the principal’s assessment of their learning. Imagine my surprise when this excellent learning experience, enjoyed by both myself and the students, was classified as “loud and inappropriate.” Who knew that talking was loud or inappropriate in a classroom? I didn’t, but I learned.
For schools to be efficient, certain rules must be followed. One of the main rules is that children must be quiet. Quiet in the classrooms, quiet in the hallways, and quiet in the dining room.
What about recess and art and music classes? Students can speak in those places, right? Not much, and most schools no longer have these activities. There is no time for anything non-academic.
Which raises the next question we must ask: what is socialization? (Perhaps this should have been our first question.) Simply put, socialization is the process by which a person can adapt to a group and learns to behave in a way that allows them to fit into the group.
Public schools are populated by many different types of students. There are a lot of good kids there, but there are a lot that you wouldn’t want your child to “fit in and fit in.”
Our world is made up of people of many different moral values and, as parents, we seek to instill in our children the values that we consider important. When our children receive traditional education, this can be a difficult task.
Many studies have compared socialization between home schooled children and those in public schools. Through these studies, homeschooled children have been shown to be active, involved in their communities, and productive citizens to a much higher degree than their public school counterparts. Young adults who were homeschooled report being happy with their lives and a large percentage say they will homeschool their own children.
Perhaps the time has come for the questions to stop. Homeschooling is an option that is working for millions of people. It may not be your choice, but the time to deny that it is a viable option is over.