Home school vs public school?

ThriceBlessed

I homeschool my children, with the exception of the one special needs child, they are all above grade level academically, and the special needs child is doing better than he was expected to do according to public school services that evaluated him. Socially, my children are fine, we belong to a homeschool co-op where they get together with other homeschoolers for classes once a week. They also attend church and AWANA club.

I went to public school as a child, I was bullied, picked on, and socially awkward. Eventually the pain of school was so bad I just started skipping. I didn't graduate as a teen. Later, as an adult I returned to school (college), got my diploma and enough college credits to legally homeschool in my state (requirements differ from state to state, some states require nothing, others require a degree). I can tell you that in my adult life I have encountered nothing that remotely resembles public school. College was so different from public school. Everyone was there because they had goals, not because they had to be there. People were focused on their studies and what they were doing. No one was picked on. That was much more like adult life.

I know some children thrive in public school, some thrive in private school, some thrive in homeschool, ultimately each family needs to decide what is best for them. Your parents should feel free to give it a try and see how it works out, the public school will still be there a year or two from now if homeschooling turns out not to be for them.

Ultimately though, it is the parent's choice, not the siblings.

Hannah_Banana

I recently made the decision to home school (I was always against it as a child) because I didn't think it properly prepared them for the world. But as an adult, reading real historical literature and learning how economics really works, I'm terrified of the public school system indoctrinating my children. There is just so much propaganda and made up/severely distorted history in a public school curriculum. I have had to re-teach myself so much already, and every day I uncover yet another lie that was beat into my head as a primary school student.

My fiance is a chemist and a musician, whereas I am a hobby-historian and English major so between the two of us our children can get a fairly well rounded education free from the political and economic agendas of government run schooling. :flowerforyou:

That said, I think I would happily send my children to high school (a private high school) because I think that putting a 100% home schooled child in a college environment could be rather shocking. I would also consider foreign exchanges in place of high school though to increase my children's scope and appreciation for other cultures.

DarkNebula84

I school 2 of my 3 kids at home and next year it will be all of them because my little man will finally be old enough. I did not go to school for teaching, in fact I am going to school right now for Environmental Science and then will be going on to Physics/Astronomy......I follow a specific curriculum and I make sure that my kids are doing their school work for the state's required hours. They are not socially awkward or rude! They know their manners and they love to help others (including me). When I took my daughter out of public school she was in 3rd grade and barely reading at a 2nd grade level, same with her math. she was also in speech classes. I was working with her at home with all of this because nothing was being done at her school. When Christmas break rolled around I pulled her out of public school. By the end of the year she didn't need her speech classes anymore, her reading was up to a 3rd grade level and she was going to be able to go right into 4th grade math the next year like she should have without being confused! I do not regret what I did and it is the parents choice to do what they think is right for THEIR child.

_VoV

That said, I think I would happily send my children to high school (a private high school) because I think that putting a 100% home schooled child in a college environment could be rather shocking. I would also consider foreign exchanges in place of high school though to increase my children's scope and appreciation for other cultures.

As I said in an earlier posting, my children took community college courses in their tweens/teens and slowly adapted to college level coursework and socialization. This is fairly typical of home-schoolers here in CT. There were no less than 50 early college home-schoolers doing the same thing, and my kids had same-aged peers to hang with. My son successfully transferred to a huge state university as a Junior, and finished up in two years. He made friends with whom he still keeps in touch.

dreamingchild

Not much to say on this issue other than homeschool works very well if the parent's are committed to it...and dare I even say, sometimes it works well if they aren't but the child is very motivated and bright.

hikezilla

My son and daughter in law home school their four children, they do it mainly because the public school system around here is a shambles, and the cost of local private school for four kids is very prohibitive. These kids have no problems with social interaction. The neighborhood they live in is full of children, they play little league baseball, they are in scouting, the girls are in dance classes, they are in their church youth groups, they have memberships to the local zoo, local museums, and they participate in a regular meeting with other home schooled kids every couple of weeks. Mom and dad spend most of their waking moments hauling the kids to and from socially interactive things. These are my grandkids and they are brilliant, just ask me. All kidding aside, they seem to be learning things at a much faster pace than their peers in public school...I think a lot of that is because of their studies being a little more demanding and going deeper into a subject than what they would get elsewhere.

The classes they use are from a Catholic based home school association, but I can't remember what it is called.

Someone said kids education is greatly improved when there is parental involvement. If you don't have that, then no matter what training method you choose, the child will not be getting the full benefit of his coursework. Parents have to take the responsibility.

VegesaurusRex

I am the husband of Verging on Vegan, and I was an active participant in the homeschooling of our two kids. I was also the Homeschool Latin teacher for our homeschooling community. As my wife said, both our kids skipped high school and even grade school and took community college courses. Both earned Associate's degrees, my son at age 17, my daughter at age 16. My son has since graduated with honors from the University of Connecticut with a BA, and is finishing up his first year of Law School having just turned 20. My daughter at age 16 has been accepted as a junior transfer at UConn, and has also been accepted into the most competitive writing program for young adults in the world, the Iowa Young Writers' Studio.

I have also taken some courses at the community collge my kids attended. A HUGE number of the students there, who were paying tuition and clearly wanted to learn, could not do basic math or English. All that I knew were High School Grads. There were also between 20 and 40 homesschooled kids who were doing what we were doing at that community college. While results varied, I would consider all of them successful. Almost all went on to a four year college. Results among the population that graduated from high school were not so spectacular.

To be honest, I have never met a homeschooler who did not do better than he/she probably would have had he/she gone to public school regardless of the level of education of the parents or parent. The "S" word, socialization, was never an issue. There were a group of peers also homeschooling and also a group going through the community colllege route.

When the public schools fail a student, the teachers always blame "lack of parental involvement." Yet, at the same time, as seen on this board, when parental involvement is 100% as it is in homeschooling, the teachers claim that kids need a "professional." So which is it? If teachers do not want to be hypocrites, they should not blame the parents when the public schools fail a student, and they should not take credit for the successes if they believer that parental involvement is the key.

I agree with teachers that parental involvement is the key. The more parental involvement the better. Teachers also say that small classes are necessary. Well, they don't usually get any smaller than in homeschooling.

Teachers ought to be promoting home schooling as the best educational model,. because it optimizes the two factors they themselves consider crucial : parental involvement and small classes. Yet, I have found that teachers generally treat homeschoolers as the enemy. Worse yet, the fail to learn from the homeschooling model.

Some superintendents in Connecticut a few years ago wanted the legislature to pass a law regulationg homeschoolers. (Right now Connecticut has NO requirments for homeschooler other than some general educational guidelines, no monitoring, and no involvement of the public school system. That is just the way we like it. When the Bill came before the Education Committee, 3,000 to 5,000 homeschool families showed up and effectively shut down the legislature. We overloaded the legislative server, and that went down. Probably 100 of us testified before the committee before they threw in the towel. Some of the homeschool kids who testified had bachelors and masters degrees and were in their middle teens. The Chair of the committee finally said, that he wasn't going try to fix what wasn't broken, and that we should be telling the superintendents how to educate and not vice versa.. Since then, the superintendents have been very quiet.

CrazyTrackLady

4. Schools provide the opportunity for children to learn HOW to get along with others, even if the children are being bullied. Instead of retreating into a "safe" world, it is better to learn how to handle the bullying and work on developing self esteem. Running away from it doesn't build self confidence, it only pushes the real issues aside.

This is my number one concern with home schooling.

Think about your biggest fear. Maybe it's spiders. If you have a terrible fear of spiders, what would be the best way to get over it? Would it be to throw you into a tub of spiders every day, repeatedly? Or allow you to stay away from spiders, limiting your exposure somewhat, but gradually acclimating you to be around them? (Psychologists say it's the latter, in case you're wondering.)

Yet we throw kids with social anxiety, or kids who are being bullied, right into the spider pit day after day after day. A shy kid is not going to become less shy because you make him go to public school. He will, however, learn that he is weird, that he's defective, that there's something wrong with him because he doesn't feel that he's like everybody else. If you allow him to learn in a homeschooling environment, giving him one-on-one or small group social interactions, he's more likely to develop self-confidence, which will lead to the social skills he needs later in life. There's nothing wrong with introverts, yet our society likes to teach them that they're defective. Homeschooling can help prevent that.

In addition, statistics consistently show that homeschooled kids average higher test scores than their peers. They can learn at their own pace, so if something comes easily to them, they can race ahead, but if they get stuck on something like, say, fractions, they can take their time and work on it until they actually LEARN it. That way they're not failing because they're learning it too slowly, and it's not negatively impacting future skills which build on that one problematic one.

Bottom line, homeschooling isn't for everyone. But neither is public school. Homeschooling can be a wonderful thing, especially in this day and age when there are SO many resources available. OP, if your parents do decide to homeschool her, don't stress. It'll be fine. Worst case scenario, it doesn't work out, and she goes back to public school next year.

Actually, cognitive behavioral therapists working with patients with extreme anxiety do exactly that - they expose the patient to his/her worst fear in very small doses, so that person becomes less and less anxious, upset by it. It is called "immersion therapy" and is quite well known and often practiced. Ignoring the issue, or avoiding it, never works. Tackling it head on, in minor exposures, is very effective.

That's what I mean. SMALL doses. A group of 30 children for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, is NOT a small dose. It's quite a large one.

What do you plan to do when your child has to enter the work force?

impyimpyaj

4. Schools provide the opportunity for children to learn HOW to get along with others, even if the children are being bullied. Instead of retreating into a "safe" world, it is better to learn how to handle the bullying and work on developing self esteem. Running away from it doesn't build self confidence, it only pushes the real issues aside.

This is my number one concern with home schooling.

Think about your biggest fear. Maybe it's spiders. If you have a terrible fear of spiders, what would be the best way to get over it? Would it be to throw you into a tub of spiders every day, repeatedly? Or allow you to stay away from spiders, limiting your exposure somewhat, but gradually acclimating you to be around them? (Psychologists say it's the latter, in case you're wondering.)

Yet we throw kids with social anxiety, or kids who are being bullied, right into the spider pit day after day after day. A shy kid is not going to become less shy because you make him go to public school. He will, however, learn that he is weird, that he's defective, that there's something wrong with him because he doesn't feel that he's like everybody else. If you allow him to learn in a homeschooling environment, giving him one-on-one or small group social interactions, he's more likely to develop self-confidence, which will lead to the social skills he needs later in life. There's nothing wrong with introverts, yet our society likes to teach them that they're defective. Homeschooling can help prevent that.

In addition, statistics consistently show that homeschooled kids average higher test scores than their peers. They can learn at their own pace, so if something comes easily to them, they can race ahead, but if they get stuck on something like, say, fractions, they can take their time and work on it until they actually LEARN it. That way they're not failing because they're learning it too slowly, and it's not negatively impacting future skills which build on that one problematic one.

Bottom line, homeschooling isn't for everyone. But neither is public school. Homeschooling can be a wonderful thing, especially in this day and age when there are SO many resources available. OP, if your parents do decide to homeschool her, don't stress. It'll be fine. Worst case scenario, it doesn't work out, and she goes back to public school next year.

Actually, cognitive behavioral therapists working with patients with extreme anxiety do exactly that - they expose the patient to his/her worst fear in very small doses, so that person becomes less and less anxious, upset by it. It is called "immersion therapy" and is quite well known and often practiced. Ignoring the issue, or avoiding it, never works. Tackling it head on, in minor exposures, is very effective.

That's what I mean. SMALL doses. A group of 30 children for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, is NOT a small dose. It's quite a large one.

What do you plan to do when your child has to enter the work force?

You do realize there are jobs in which one doesn't have to deal with a group of 30 people at once, right?

Homeschooling families rarely spend all their time at home. They have friends. They do playgroup. They go to the library and the museum and the zoo. They do see people, and they learn social skills. They just don't do it in such a stressful environment. They are able to say, "Hey, this is too much for me to handle today," and they go home and get it together and try again another day. Learning is most effective in a comfortable, safe environment. A child who has social anxiety does not feel safe at school. How can you learn to function in society if you're TERRIFIED?

impyimpyaj

The bottom line is this: if you don't suffer from social anxiety, you don't understand it. And that's ok. But if you don't understand it, don't presume to know how to fix it. Throwing someone into the lion's den is not helpful. Look at the statistics, do some research, and you'll see that for MANY children, homeschooling is the better solution, both from an academic standpoint and from a social one.

_VoV

The point made about extroversion being the societal ideal is so true. I know because I am an extreme introvert by nature, who was made to feel there was something wrong with my personality when I was attending school.

The school model too often seeks to create the 'well-rounded' person--one versed in many subjects, athletic, and socially outgoing. I understand the desire to create citizens of that mold, but some people march to a different drum, and can only go so far in modifying their true nature.

tquig

Again, I want to re-iterate that the most important part of a home school program is the parent's ability to keep their child on track and focused. Also, it's important to note that curriculums change all the time as well as state standards. To choose a program that is outdated and assume it's okay can be destructive. I teach language arts and science. I am only licensed to teach 4-9 grade. I would never be able to step into a high school biology classroom and assume I know what I'm doing. The same with algebra, calculus, physics, etc. To think that a parent without much of a college background can "teach" their child concepts that they themselves are not familiar enough with, is ridiculous. That's why teaching is a professional job requiring extensive training and retraining just to get and keep a license. It is far more complicated than what many parents think. Personally, I couldn't homeschool my own kids -- they'd drive me nuts.

Look at it this way - would you want someone without a medical license examining your child? Would you claim to know how to diagnose and treat your child's illness "at home"? A big risk, huh? Would you want your child's education to be put at risk?

This ^^^^

I think many times parents are trying to do the right thing for their children but don't truely understand how difficult of a task it can be to actually conduct a successfull home-schooling program. It isn't just as simple as reading from a couple of books each day. Yes, there are many success stories but a lot more failures.

impyimpyaj

Again, I want to re-iterate that the most important part of a home school program is the parent's ability to keep their child on track and focused. Also, it's important to note that curriculums change all the time as well as state standards. To choose a program that is outdated and assume it's okay can be destructive. I teach language arts and science. I am only licensed to teach 4-9 grade. I would never be able to step into a high school biology classroom and assume I know what I'm doing. The same with algebra, calculus, physics, etc. To think that a parent without much of a college background can "teach" their child concepts that they themselves are not familiar enough with, is ridiculous. That's why teaching is a professional job requiring extensive training and retraining just to get and keep a license. It is far more complicated than what many parents think. Personally, I couldn't homeschool my own kids -- they'd drive me nuts.

Look at it this way - would you want someone without a medical license examining your child? Would you claim to know how to diagnose and treat your child's illness "at home"? A big risk, huh? Would you want your child's education to be put at risk?

This ^^^^

I think many times parents are trying to do the right thing for their children but don't truely understand how difficult of a task it can be to actually conduct a successfull home-schooling program. It isn't just as simple as reading from a couple of books each day. Yes, there are many success stories but a lot more failures.

Really? There are a lot more failures? What are you basing this assumption on? Because national statistics would disagree with you.

impyimpyaj

And I just want to point out, I do not homeschool my children, for various reasons. But none of them are because I believe that homeschooling is inferior. It's not. I think homeschooling is AWESOME, and for many kids, it's a lifesaver.

_VoV

Again, I want to re-iterate that the most important part of a home school program is the parent's ability to keep their child on track and focused. Also, it's important to note that curriculums change all the time as well as state standards. To choose a program that is outdated and assume it's okay can be destructive. I teach language arts and science. I am only licensed to teach 4-9 grade. I would never be able to step into a high school biology classroom and assume I know what I'm doing. The same with algebra, calculus, physics, etc. To think that a parent without much of a college background can "teach" their child concepts that they themselves are not familiar enough with, is ridiculous. That's why teaching is a professional job requiring extensive training and retraining just to get and keep a license. It is far more complicated than what many parents think. Personally, I couldn't homeschool my own kids -- they'd drive me nuts.

Look at it this way - would you want someone without a medical license examining your child? Would you claim to know how to diagnose and treat your child's illness "at home"? A big risk, huh? Would you want your child's education to be put at risk?

This ^^^^

I think many times parents are trying to do the right thing for their children but don't truely understand how difficult of a task it can be to actually conduct a successfull home-schooling program. It isn't just as simple as reading from a couple of books each day. Yes, there are many success stories but a lot more failures.

How would you even know how many successes and failures there are? This baffles me, since no one tracks this sort of data statistically. If you are a teacher who has seen former home-schoolers enter the school system ill-prepared, then you are seeing a select group of children who were likely struggling at home. I have seen this happen. But judging the home-schooling model based on the people who drop-out of home-schooling isn't a valid judgment.

impyimpyaj

How would you even know how many successes and failures there are? This baffles me, since no one tracks this sort of data statistically. If you are a teacher who has seen former home-schoolers enter the school system ill-prepared, then you are seeing a select group of children who were likely struggling at home. I have seen this happen. But judging the home-schooling model based on the people who drop-out of home-schooling isn't a valid judgment.

They do track it statistically! I've seen the reports. Homeschooled kids on average score higher on college entry exams and other competency tests than their public and private school peers.

carolann_22

Some kids do well with it, some don't. And some parents are suited for it, and some aren't. You do need a network in place and alternatives for interaction, and it's especially helpful if they can find a co-op for the specialty areas (like the sciences) when they get to high school. Home school co-ops have small class sizes and only meet a couple times a week. There is one that meets at my dad's church, and they have a math expert and a science experts who both teach and are there for a resource for parents twice a week for 2-3 hours.

VegesaurusRex

I too would like to have a citation for this "high failure rate of home schooled students." Absolutely nothing I have ever read supports this. In fact, EVERYTHING I read supports the contrary, i.e., that home schooling is the BEST educational model.

steadk

My friend homeschools her three children, and they are the most socially adapted kids that are homeschooled that i know. They do have a co-op that they attend each week through out the normal "school year". Her kids are a grade ahead of where they would be in public school. I think if your parents can swing it, it would definitely be an awesome thing

mes1119

As a certified, licensed school teacher, I am always concerned when parents pull their children out of regular school and say they will be "homeschooling" their child from that point forward. I will share my reasons below:

4. Schools provide the opportunity for children to learn HOW to get along with others, even if the children are being bullied. Instead of retreating into a "safe" world, it is better to learn how to handle the bullying and work on developing self esteem. Running away from it doesn't build self confidence, it only pushes the real issues aside.

your post had a ton of very good points in it. I am not an educator or have experience with homeschooling but this is the one question that I have always wondered. I have always been under the impression that school does more than just teach academics. You learn critical social skills that are necessary for adult life in college/careers. I cannot see how successful these children will be if lacking such a critical skill.