Top Reasons for Homeschooling, from 1999 NCES report
Many parents after a tiring year in traditional school start to wonder if home school is an option for them. Home school is a wonderful opportunity for parents and kids, but it is not for everyone. Here are the ten top reasons to home school your children.
1) No one has more interest in your child’s success than you do. Raising children involves teaching them on a daily basis.
2) You are qualified to teach your child. If there is a subject that you are unfamiliar with, that is what curriculum is for.
3) Homeschooled children consistently outperform their traditionally schooled peers on standardized tests. This superior test performance is across all socio-economic and ethnic lines.
4) Children who are home schooled have superior social skills to their traditionally schooled peers. Traditional school children learn gang mentality and bully tactics on unsupervised or poorly supervised playgrounds. Homeschooled children are supervised. Anti-social behaviors are quickly corrected. Homeschooled children interact better with adults than traditionally schooled children do.
5) With individualized attention home school children accomplish more in a day than most traditional public schools do in a week.
6) According to the US Department of Education, 1.5 million US families home school their children. The numbers are growing as more and more families are tired of a broken public school system that is barely able to teach.
7) Special needs children receive superior support services at home. This includes needs such as speech, vision, occupational therapy, gifted, autism and other support services. I have had 4 children with various needs in the public school system in 3 different states. Not one of them ever received the services promised in their IEP or those mandated by the Federal Disabilities Act.
8) The number of affluent Americans homeschooling their children is rising. This is due to frustrations over classroom behaviors, lack of learning and the desire to teach their children as they see fit.
9) Home school offers superior educational experiences to traditional schools. Field trips and travel are just a few of the things homeschoolers offer their kids.
10) Children who are homeschooled work at their own pace. They are not bound to state mandated curriculums and can advance to higher level work when ready. The same holds true for children who need more work in some areas. Home school children work on mastery of a subject, not just passing grades.
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Comments
What a great list! I would add a #11...because it is great to be together as a family!
I had a very long list, these were just my top 10. Another good reason is that the "morning craziness" of trying to get kids off to school is eliminated.
Great article! Given the state of our public schools today, if I were starting a family now I would seriously consider home-schooling my chldren.
No, absolutely not.
Are you kidding? Every home schooled kid I've ever met has terrible social skills and is remarkably awkward. Good job making things up, though. I'm sure your argument is really strong if you have to fabricate information to support it.
Point 2 is patently absurd. You are not "qualified to teach your child," as a side effect of sharing DNA with him/her. If you happen to be qualified anyway, great, but that has everything to do with your education, and nothing to do with parenthood.
Great list! I'm floored by the couple of negative comments about parents' qualifications & homeschoolers' social skills. I'll never understand those who don't get it - Homeschooling is the way to go!
4) Children who are home schooled have superior social skills to their traditionally schooled peers. Traditional school children learn gang mentality and bully tactics on unsupervised or poorly supervised playgrounds. Homeschooled children are supervised. Anti-social behaviors are quickly corrected. Homeschooled children interact better with adults than traditionally schooled children do.
www youtube com/watch?v=m3_tn4qcSNw
If this kid isn't socially inept due to homeschooling then I'm Miles Davis.
Hey, Miles Davis, how many youngsters would NOT be nervous on National TV? It's impossible to look at a few minutes of a tv news broadcast and determine how socially capable a person is, especially a child.
As for intelligence, the spelling bee winner is obviously extremely smart. He may be the one who finds the cure to cancer and birth defects. Personally, I wouldn't care if he can't hold a conversation. But, you can learn social skills. You can't learn intelligence.
S-C-R-O-M-B-R-I-D-A-E, the kid not only knew it was Latin, but that it was PLURAL, and he probably had never even heard the word. THAT's not spelling skill, that's deep language skill.
Another good reason to homeschool: Homeschooled kids are typically happier, far less stressed, and more independent and self-confident than schooled children. Children who are less stressed grow up to be more well-adjusted adults, and are far less likely, statistically, to turn to crime, violence, or drugs than schooled kids.
Jay, Bill, d, and Ryan -- I wish you could meet our four kids, who have been homeschooled all along. They're not perfect, but we're proud of them, and we enjoy their company. Our oldest daughter started as an intern in NYC, received 4 promotions and doubled her salary in less than 4 years in a cut-throat industry. Our second daughter has received 4 promotions in 15 months. Both of them have been asked several times where they got their work ethic. "From my dad." Our third daughter received the highest academic scholarship her private college offers. We still have one in high schooler here at home who is our right-hand man in many ways. All of our kids are well-spoken and well-liked. And they're not unusual -- we've known hundreds of homeschooled kids in the 21 years we've been homeschooling. They're not all alike, but then neither are public schooled kids. If I had it to do all over again, there's no question in my mind that we would homeschool. Don't judge by what you see on Youtube!
Parents are already teaching their children before traditional schooling begins. What would it take to keep a toddler from learning to walk and talk? We think it's a joke and normal that kids hate school; it's no joke. Schooling & education are not one & the same. Check out www.johntaylorgatto.com and click on his Harper's Magazine article "Against School." Read more of Gatto's work & you'll see our school system isn't broken, it's doing what it was created (in Prussia in mid-1800's) to do: create good factory workers & soldiers who don't think to much & who will follow orders. There are decades of research that support how well home educated kids do socially & why & how damaging large classes of same age kids are to developing self-esteem, independent thinking & how it creates ageism. Watch the Ken Burns' Civil War series & listen to the eloquent letters home from farmboys who learned in the previous educational system: 1 room, multi-age schools. There's more - much more.
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