Salon: Home-schooled and illiterate - for some kids it means isolation with little education

[jhasp]

10. There are good and bad homeschoolers, private schools, public schools, etc.

I am a homeschool parent. Using one incident to paint a picture of homeschooling is extremely inaccurate. I know many homeschool families and at least one family that shouldn't homeschool (an unschooling family where neither of the parents have a college education).

I also know many families for which homeschooling works out great. We have a 4-Club that is made up of homeschoolers. The kids work together and run everything. Kids of all age groups elect the club leaders and everyone has responsibilities.

One family that I know has four homeschooled daughters. Mom was a business professional and decided that she wanted to stay home and teach her daughters. They are all very outgoing and well-educated and the girls all are active volunteers in the community. My wife tutored them in Biology two years ago.

Another family that we know has an adopted daughter that has some learning and anxiety problems. Homeschooling works out very well for them too. They are able to give her a comfortable and supportive environment to work in.

Homeschooling works out great for my family. It's Friday, I'm off for spring break (college professor) and my son and I are going on a long bike ride this morning followed by some origami and Lego building this afternoon. The schools here have spring break a different week than the colleges, so we wouldn't be able to do this otherwise. My wife (also college educated) developed a learning plan using a curriculum that we researched and other learning activities. They've finished their curriculum work for the week and so we have a free day today.

My wife and kids are often confronted by people during the day when they are out who either don't understand homeschooling or have a bias against it. A few weeks ago, they were at the grocery store and the cashier started off with some innocent questions that led to confrontational questioning about how my wife handled teaching them music, art, and how they were socialized. The cashier then told my wife that she (the cashier) was a public school teacher (I assume she had been laid off as she was cashiering in the middle of the day).

The most ardent anti-homeschooling group that we run into are school teachers. And I get it. They get the kids for which homeschooling has failed. They don't see the majority of homeschoolers because most don't have a need to go to school. But I see a lot of homeschoolers for which public schools have failed and, taken out of that environment, they prosper. It would be easy to paint public schools with the same broad brush that anti-homeschoolers use, but it would also be just as inaccurate. There are good public schools and there are public schools that are failing. There are good public school teachers and there are bad ones.