This discussion of homeschooling or not to homeschool (or unschool, there are many titles) has within itself a wide range of topics and styles of schooling, for which there is not enough room or time to address. Parents do have a legal right to decide for themselves what education best suites their family's lifestyle and children's needs. Granted, not all parents are best suited to this area, but you still don't take away the rights of the others. Just because some doctors are not suited to be doctors doesn't mean you take away the right of others to decide that's what they want to study and become. Unfortunately, our society has to live with the less than desirable decisions other members of our society make. This is in all areas: drugs, guns, job competancies, child raising, religious and political views, and the list could go on.
The point is that if a parent carefully researches all the areas of different schooling, and if the husband and wife are in agreement about the schooling, and the parents -one or more- attend a homeschool support group, there is not as much reason to expect these parents to do a poor job of educating their child.
There will always be exceptions, I have heard of a very few in my area. Parents whose children get kicked out of school or are in trouble at school, so the parent pulls the child, throws some books at him or her, and then ignores the child. Trouble here whether the child stays in school or not.
Both my husband and I have a little college but are also registered technologists in our field. I am still homeschooling my daughter, who just tested at 27 on her ACT, has a job in gymnastics, is on a gymnastics team, has played softball for 11+ years, and is taking college classes and performing with the college chamber choir. She is doing well enough in her studies, although I wish she wouldn't have become quite so busy. We can adjust her schedule to meet all these demands and interests. The public school cannot and will not. They couldn't possibly.
My first born son fell through the cracks of the school system. He started off as an A -B student in elementary, but as he became more "socialized" schooling became less important and friends more so. His grades slid. In Jr. high and middle school he barely had C's in most classes, and in high school was almost an F student. Hated his classes, his teachers, the dog-eat-dog, bigger meaner kids, the rich preps, and so on. Teachers handed out attention and better grades to students who gave them backrubs, etc. Now some of this was his fault.
But one thing I have noticed is that when a child is around children all day (and I include highschoolers) there is MORE of a tendancy for the child to imitate or emulate the thinking and behavior of his/her peers. There is much less influence of the parent on the thinking or behavior of the child. This is ONE of the several reasons why I chose to homeschool not just my daughter but also my youngest son.
My youngest was having problems in elementary school. He was suspended as a 1st grader for doing a foolish and immature thing. The first grade teacher wouldn't do the things that the kindergarden teacher did that made working with my youngest much easier. He wasn't mean or rude or disrespectful, but he couldn't sit still and be silent for long periods, and other nuisance problems. So I took him out of school, tried homeschooling just two subjects over the summer to see how he and his sister would handle it, and how I could handle it. It succeeded well enough.
That is when I discovered in the next year of tutoring him that he had ADHD. He still had a great many problems even with medication. But he was done with his school work in 4 hours, and had a lot of play time. He really enjoyed schooling in some areas because we'd do experiments, make going to the dentiest and eye doctor a field trip with learning, and do hands-on building projects for history. However as he got older he got angrier and harder to teach. He needed a more varied invironment with different activities going on. So I got him enfolled in a school of the arts, where after just two weeks he wanted a violin. He went from knowing nothing of violin in January of his 5th grade year, to being 1st chair in his school's symphony, and on the city's youth symphony with in 1 year.
You may think this is a succes for a public school however bear this in mind. He was just slightly ahead of his peers in math when he started the school of the arts. In homeschool, I had to work with him on math and hold him strictly accountable for his school work, and math corrections which I tried to oversee each day. Those days when he did not understand a math concept after several tries I would switch to some different math concepts for a month or so, then go back to the trouble spot. Usually with a little work he would then pick up the concept and we'd forge onward.
However, by the time he was in 8th grade in the school of the arts, he was defending his friends from the teachers and being rude to teachers, more interested in goofing off with his friends, his grades were mostly C's with maybe an A or two and certainly some near F's in the core curriculum. After a major serious talk with him and threatening him with homeschooling instead of high school with his friends, he straigtened up enough to get mostly all B's and an A or two. However the damage was still done. He missed most of the salient points in Algebra. He never brought home work so I had no idea how he was doing, and he wouldn't talk to me about much of anything unless there was something he wanted from me.
Now he is in public high school, and while his grades are ok for the most part, he is still flunking algebra, and is more concerned with hiding from us, or staying at his friend's houses. I am concidering taking him back into homeschooling so I would know what he is doing. I know he is smart enough to handle algebra but he has do it at his pace, and also be held accountable, and the public school can't do that.
Although it would strip us bare financially there are many things I could do to address his fields of interest that the public school cannot. But because he is at school all day, he refuses to do more when he comes home.
Kids at school all day, don't want to do more school with mom and dad when they get home. They don't want to talk to mom and dad when they get home. They only want to do things with their peers, and think like their peers, and behave like their peers. I have certainly seen this in my daughter's friends who go to public school. Believe it or not the public school parents trust my daughter with their daughters when the girls go out.
So, public schools aren't the sole and final answer for every parent, but you have really got to know what you're getting into when you decide to unschool. And once you decide to unschool, you really have to make a committment to it.
Parents want the best for their children, but what’s the best way to educate them? Dr. Phil’s guests face off in a debate about whether to school, homeschool or unschool. Dana and her husband, Joe, call themselves radical unschoolers. They say education happens as a side effect of life, and they don’t believe in tests, curriculums or grades. Are their three kids learning what they need to know? Then, RaeAnn says public schools are death traps and wants to homeschool her children. Her husband, Steve, says their kids are safer at school than they are at home. Can this couple reach a compromise? Plus, Nicole feels like an outcast at 26. She says she hated being homeschooled, and couldn’t relate to other kids. Share your thoughts here.
