What are you thoughts about home schooling?

No, because I’m in no way well-educated enough myself. I doubt I’d be able to teach anything past about eighth grade. I’m not even sure it’s legal to homeschool in the UK if you’re not a qualified teacher anyway.

I’m particularly opposed to homeschooling when the purpose is to indoctrinate the children with the religious beliefs of the parents.

I personally think that they would miss out in important social skills gained from being educated at a school if they were taught at home, for them to experience the highs and lows of interacting with other children i think it is a very important lesson for their adult years ahead.

So No i wouldn’t do it.

This is a more complex topic than that. I feel it can be a good idea if you approach it intelligently, after researching resources in your area. I homeschooled my daughter for 3rd grade. I researched various curricula, then purchased the one that I felt was the most comprehensive. We joined a homeschool group and went on field trips and did activities with them, somewhat satisfying the “socializing” needs. There was freedom to explore topics much more extensively than a formal school setting provides, and my daughter could proceed at an accelerated pace. The state was required to allow her to have use of some school resources such as the school library. We made our own hours, took advantage of community resources, etc. This was 13 years ago, and there is so much more available, now, for homeschoolers.

At the end of the year, my daughter was required to take a state mandated test, and I had to keep a log of lesson plans and what we covered. Every state had different requirements.

The only downside was that we were together all the time and could have used a break from each other.

My bottom line on home schooling is this: If you are willing and able to do it, more power to you. But if you need or request even one percent of one cent from me as a taxpayer to homeschool your children then you answer to me. I am absolutely not willing to pay for anyone to home school their children and teach them nonsense. Not saying that people who home school their children necessarily do teach them nonsense but that is my standard. Anyone can teach their children anything they want. I am not necessarily happy with that, but that is their right. Expecting me to help pay for it is a different story entirely.

And on the greater social issue? i don’t know. It seems, intuitively, that kids who are home would generally be exposed to other people who are very much like then which is probably not good but I don’t know the statistics on this one.

@lillycoyote, I’m curious as to where you get the idea that home schoolers want tax payer support?

Jillthetooth, great answer. my neighbor is homeschooling her fifteen year old daughter. she and i can understand “too much time together”. her daughters social skills are really good. she makes straight A’s and has two boyfriends. she is a well-rounded teenager. sounds like you did an excellent job with your daughter. way to go.

@john65pennington : Thanks! I can’t take all the credit, it was only for that one year, due to local school issues and the fact that we were moving out of state in the spring. I have, because of that, known a number of seriously homeschooled kids (all the way through) that do very well, have no problem socializing in the world, and have stellar college careers. It’s all in the approach. The parents who have the “Life is our classroom” attitude and eschew the basics are the ones that give homeschooling a bad name by inadequately preparing their children.

I think it is a great opportunity to provide an excellent education provided the parent is up to the task. Some of my brightest and most well adjusted scouts have been home schoolers.

I love home schooling. In the area I live in, schools are horrible in their academics. I go to Keystone National High School, and even though it’s a home schooling program, their standards are much higher. I don’t lack social skills because I still go out and do things with other people regularly, and I went to public school for nine years, and I’m just home schooling for high school. I don’t need my mother to teach me, and it teaches kids how to be responsible for their own work.

I do home school. We started after a horrible 3 years in public school. The kids had shut down and weren’t learning anything, or hardly anything.

We have a very large home schooling community in our city so the kids get to see other kids almost daily. They are learning math, chemistry, physics, history, cooking, fencing, swimming, they read…and on and on.

I’ve met enough adults who were home schooled to know that the vast majority do very well in life.

@tranquilsea ; Good on you! It takes a special kind of dedication. I asked Katawagrey when we moved if she wanted to continue it, but it really wasn’t for us on a long term basis. The good news was that I picked the community we came to and the schools were very good, at the time. They’ve since gone to hell, but she’s out!

@JilltheTooth Thank you. I look back and I don’t know why I kept them in for as long as I did. It did more harm than good. It was definitely more stressful having then in school.

@Frenchfry ; How about you? Are you considering this? This would be a good place to start, to get info.

Due to international relocation, I ended up needing to catch up on about 3 years of education before returning the U.S.

With home schooling materials, I cleared through much of the 8th, 9th, and 10th grade materials in about 6 months, allowing for no less than a 98% score on all tests. I had to memorize the Gettysburg Address, read all kinds of historic literature, calculate compound interest, collect specimens… mostly stuff you’d expect.

When back in the States, I placed into many of the advanced-level courses for 11th grade Math, Science, and English. Unfortunately, high school was based on credits earned. There was no mechanism at the time to test for those credits; you had to physically attend the classes. To graduate high school, I needed 20 credits and could only earn 6 per regular school year.

So… to sum up, I skipped two grades of school but graduated a year late since I had to start high school as a sophomore, pass all classes, plus take two summers of school to get the 20 credits required (6+6+6+1+1).

—

From my perspective, home school curricula were fine. It definitely offers material that can be supplementary to regular education in an at-your-own pace package.

I know too that many home schoolers in a community will band together for some of the more challenging educational topics – like chemistry – that an individual might find difficult to acquire all of the necessary components. And also that many private schools will welcome home schooled kids into their physical education/sports programs.

I might I am thinking about it. She is only four. LOL.. I would not know where to start . I hear the school in the area are not the best.

@Frenchfry Then you might want to try the K-12 program, and in middle school, you could start her on a different one.

I really don’t know much about it. Most of all I wonder if home-schooled kids are adequately socialized and how. I’ve definitely heard from people online who know home-schooled kids say that they’re “weird”, but I personally have never known any, so I wouldn’t know what to say about that. The only home-schooling I’ve seen on TV always depicts an overbearing super-religious mother indoctrinating her children about the “evils” of the world. But a lot of people seem to think that socializing isn’t important, but it really is. School isn’t just about academics, a significant part of it is about socialization.

The other question I have is in regard to what happens if your parents aren’t an expert in every subject? My dad knows everything there is to know about calculus and physics and I’m sure he could’ve taught those subjects to me. But he doesn’t know anything about Latin and neither does my mom, yet that was my favorite subject in school.

@Frenchfry The early years are easy to home school. Teach them to read, get them started with numeracy and pretty much let them explore and learn what ever they’d like to. There are many home school lists (check out Yahoo! Groups) that you can reach out to for resource recommendations and support.

If you would ever like to discuss home schooling more in depth just PM me and I’d be happy to chat about it and let you know what I’ve done.

@JilltheTooth @Aesthetic_Mess @tranquilsea Thanks for all the information. It is something to look into and see what the husband says.. He, I am sure has concerns about , Socializing like @DominicX says. It true I don’t know all about every subject. The last thing is I don’t want my kid to be known as “weird”.

Socialization is one of the biggest and, imho, misunderstood aspects of home schooling. In many areas you can be more social home schooling than you would be in school. We are out in the community frequently and the kids talk to people in every area of society. My kids have many good friends and they seem them frequently. The one big difference is that they socialize with all age groups. It is not uncommon to see 12 year olds playing and helping 6, 7 and 8 years olds.

When I first started home schooling I was afraid of the socialization aspect more than me teaching them the academics. One mom told me that she was concerned about socialization too so she made sure that once a week she body checked her son in the fridge and demanded his lunch money.

That being said, you have to make an effort to get out and socialize. If you don’t then your kids would lack friends. But isn’t that how real life is? Friends don’t just come a knockin’ on your door. You have to get out there and find them sometimes and often you find them as you are travelling around your life.

As to being “weird”. I know many more school educated weird people than I do weird home schoolers.

Ever since Columbine home schooling has increased magnificently. There are many more communtiy groups you can join for phys ed and field trips and general “kids together” activities. There will always be a mix of kids in any group, good guys, bullies, more or less intelligent; the mix won’t be much different than in a school, just better monitored. (Not a bad thing, IMO). As far as the education of the parent, there is quite a variety of good curricula available that will address the homeschooler’s ability as well as the children’s needs. As for the “weird” thing, everyone gets called weird at one time or another. If you don’t feel weird, neither will your child.
Different parents in the group will have different skills to share as well.

@tranquilsea That’s true. Ok , She can go to preschool because she turns four in November. She has one year before Kindergarden. Could I start her now? If it does not work out try regular school?Or do I wait till she is five?

@tranquilsea

Yes, I know you can’t expect friends to come to you, it’s just the majority of my friends have been found through school/college, because it’s such an easy way to find friends.

@BarnacleBill Actually, I don’t know what got into me last night on that one. I don’t believe that I have ever come across anything that would indicate that home schoolers want or expect taxpayer support. I apologize for giving that impression. I guess I was just saying I don’t really care if people home school their children, it’s their business as long as it never becomes something that I in any way have to provide support for as a taxpayer.

@Frenchfry you’ve been home schooling her from birth. Just continue. You always have the option of putting her in school if you and your husband feel it’s for the best.

I taught my kids to read when they were were 3 and 4 before I put them in school.

Read to her often, which I’m sure you already do. I used hooked on phonics to teach my kids how to read but there are other programmes out there that will do the same job. We used, Making Words, Making Big Words and Making More Words to supplement a more formal curriculum.

For math we used Singapore Math before we moved onto Thinkwell Math.

An excellent resource for older grades is The Teaching Company. In particular The Joy of Thinking and The Joy of Mathematics.

@lillycoyote Then you would hate living where I live because the Province funds home schoolers to the tune of $700 per child. It’s cheaper to educate these kids because they have to pay $2500 per child if that child attended a brick and mortar school.

Our Province is responsible for funding the education of children no matter where they are educated.

@tranquilsea I don’t know. I think I’m going to bail on this question. I really have no idea what I’m talking about here and I’m just going to admit that and be done with it. I actually know so little about what is involved in home schooling, who does it and what they do that I really have no business entering into a debate or discussion about it. Sorry.

@lillycoyote Don’t bail. Ask questions. I would love to answer if you are curious.

Honestly, most parents are just doing the best they can with the resources they have. I am truly thankful that my province funds me. It allows me to buy curriculum that my kids need. My kids would have been in a horrible situation if I had had to keep them in school.

@lillycoyote ; A refreshing statement, rarely seen. @tranquilsea is the best authority on this I’ve ever come in contact with, she’s taught me something here and I kind of thought I knew it all. Well, not really, but i didn’t expect to be educated here.

@tranquilsea I have been teaching her. Yes. I read to her every night. I have to get off fluther now . I have to cook and pick up toys. and do family stuff. I will be back on tomorrow. Pick up where I left off ,if you don’t mind. It is so cool you and so many know so much about the subject.

@JilltheTooth

”‘Tis better to remain silent and be thought a fool, than open one’s mouth and remove all doubt.”

- Samuel Johnson

:-)

I homes schooled both of my sons off and on, and all of my grandsons, so far. When my oldest son started school, I took him in and explained to the teacher he already knew the basics of arithmetic and showed her some of his other work, and he already knew how to read. I expected the school to take up where I left off, but the teacher looked at him, and said “Pretend you don’t know”.

They had no way to teach him at his level, so I kept him home. I had a similar situation with my younger son, with the same results. When we moved into a new neighborhood, the other neighborhood children assured him that their teachers were wonderful, and he would love school, so he tried it out for a couple of months, but he hated it.

The school’s idea of teaching about the different species of trees was to show them pictures of the bark and leaves. As a homeschooler I took him to the Sacramento Capitol tree arboretum, we collected leaves and pressed them into a notebook and took tracings of the barks. At the school, they taught the history of the California Missions by having the parents buy a model to put together. In homeschooling, we visited as many of the actual Missions as we could, and took part in a couple of living history demonstrations.

One of our favorite excursions was following the Pony Express Trail in our van for a week. He learned Biological classification by visiting zoos, animal rescue sites such as PAWS and aquariums. Subjects were not divided into history, math, ecology, biology and such, but learned all together, just like the real world.

While homeschooling works for one family it might not work for another. The best way to go with education is the way that best fits each individual family as a whole. I think a good place for a family to start is to ask themselves: “What is school for and can we make the answer happen in our home?” There are as many approaches to schooling a child as there are answers to this question.

The website A-Z Homeschool has a clumsy design but a wealth of information and most likely has a listing of your local associations.

Here is a book that I find to be a good introduction to the ‘why’ of homeschooling: http://www.amazon.com/Homeschooling-Voyage-Self-Discovery-David-Albert/dp/1567512321 I would recommend discernment when reading it, the amazon reviews are helpful towards this end (the author can be off balanced in his criticisms and judgements. I personally think he undervalues teachers and blames them for things that are actually systemic problems). Yet, I still find it to be good primer for helping parents decide if homeschooling is a good fit for their family.

We homeschool our two ten-year olds. This year we started having them attend, part-time, an alternative school that is mostly made up of homeschoolers. We see it primarily as a place for them to safely develop some autonomy. Even if our children were in a more traditional school we would still consider ourselves homeschoolers because life never stops teaching!

Brain Pop is another great site for younger kids.

Khan Academy is a wonderful site too.

i have not read the other answers so this may have been said before. I think that kids who are home schooled miss out on socialization with peers. i think that kids that are home schooled are at risk of hearing only one view on life or religion (usually the parents’ opinions and views since parents are usually the teachers), as opposed to going out to school and hearing other views and opinions. I think that kids that are home schooled and may be abused at home are not seen by the community (in other words, not seen by school, teachers, administrators, etc). i also feel that kids that are home schooled miss out on conflicts, conflicts that students in regular school may have with teachers, administrators, etc., and conflicts and learning how to deal with them are a part of life. kids that are home schooled miss out on that, and they are missing out on opportunities to learn from those conflicts and conflict resolution.

@jca : You really need to go back and read the entire thread.

@jca Wow. Do you even know any home schoolers?

@tranquilsea and @JilltheTooth I have already acknowledged my relative ignorance regarding home schooling. You have both asked and encouraged me to ask questions and to learn and I would ask you offer the same welcome and openness on this thread to @jca. I have already acknowledged my ignorance and now I will confess to my prejudices and they are very much the same as @jca.‘s When I think of home schooling the first thing that comes to my mind is Fundamentalist Christian and that is one of the reasons that my initial comments on this thread were kind of knee-jerk, I don’t want my tax dollars used to fund home schooling because… well, the unspoken reason was that I don’t want my tax dollars to be spent funding religious indoctrination. I am never happy when I have to admit to my prejudices and my ignorance but I am, well maybe not always, but sometimes, willing to do it. Please educate us if we don’t understand.

I wasn’t being snarky, honest. @jca said she hadn’t read the thread and I didn’t think I could do justice in a short summary.

@JilltheTooth Maybe it was kind of the one-two punch of your comment and then @tranquilsea.‘s I’ve taken a deep breath and everything is o.k. now. :-)

When I did it, in ‘97—‘98 most of the curricula were Christian based, so I had to search prety hard for a reasonable one, then design my own around it. (There was an interesting passage on snakes in the science section that had both of us laughing). Nowadays, though, most homeschooling isn’t Christian based, so the options are more reasonable.

@JilltheTooth @liminal looks like she is weighing in now and she was the first one here to start to make me understand a little bit more about the people who home school their children and… sometimes it’s the little things that change people’s minds like… the fact that on another thread you said “I’ve got a pretty honkin’ rack” :-) LOL. That was more than enough to knock me down a peg or two regarding who exactly I think it is who are home schooling their children!

i do know homeschoolers. i work for a government agency and i used to do CPS, so i did have some as “clients”, and i stand by my opinion. it’s my opinion. (and i still have not read the entire thread, but i want to and i will, when i have time, which won’t be tonight).

@lillycoyote certainly some families fall into such a demographic and I worry for their children. When we decided to homeschool it was funny to see certain people respond to our family because we were the one’s they were trying to get away from (we are a liberal, two mommy, inter-racial home with children who have special needs). Yet, the majority of the people in my homeschooling group are educated and reasonable people who are simply frustrated with a system that limits teachers and sometimes our children. I know you to be an open-minded  and intelligent person and I actually appreciate you and @jca weighing in with your concerns because I think there is legitimacy to them. I also think the face of homeschooling in changing, particluarly with the advent of ‘unschooling’ traditions.

@jca I agree with you that homeschooling could be a perfect cover-up for abuse and negligence. Yet, as I am sure you know, even publicly schooled families can travel under the radar and never be discovered. I wonder if you have had the opportunity to meet home schooling families that don’t isolate and harm their children? In our group of peers we wouldn’t hesitate to notice and report abuse. We encourage and help each other towards the best for our children, which includes raising them with diversity as a way of life.

@liminal I’m starting to get that now. To be honest, you were a real revelation to me when I first encountered you here. I had to throw all sorts of preconceptions that I had about home schooling out the window but I had kind of forgotten all of that when I started out on this thread. Even the most intelligent and open minded of us can sometimes get a little knee-jerk. What the hell? It’s easier than thinking. And I started my contributions to this thread in kind of a knee-jerk way. It happens to the best of us sometimes :-)

This whole socialization thing drives me nuts. I had zero friends in school and I was teased unmercifully through out every one of the 12 years I was in school. I hurt so much I tried to commit suicide when I was 18 to punish my family for not noticing how badly I felt.

I doubt I have ever really gotten over the feeling that something was very wrong with me because of it.

My sons and grandsons have a lot a outside activities with their friends they meet in places like the YMCA, Boys and Girls Club, Little League, and now, RPG online.

Of the home schoolers that I know a good portion of them are religious. A small number of them are home schooling to teach a purely Christian curriculum. But most of them are doing so to give their kids a good education.

What was surprising to me were the number who weren’t religious. Most of the gang I hang around with are home schooling high IQ kids whose educational and emotional needs were not being met within the school system. The other group that surprised me were the number of moms who were teachers within the school system and chose from the outset to home school.

Some months back a mom here in my city published a book on discipline. She is an active member on most of the home schooling lists that I’m on. When moms from this list finished reading her book most were horrified to learn that she didn’t rule out corporate punishment. It was quite a fire storm and they vociferously told her she should have unequivocally ruled it out. My experience has been that these moms are doing the best they can with their kids and abuse just doesn’t enter into it.

The home school group is very tight knit. If a family was abusing their kids many of the moms would be right on top of that. They would try to provide support to the mom and if that failed they would step in.

@jca Please correct me if I’m wrong, but you may have been seeing the bad cases within the home schooling community. I’m not denying that they exist. What I’m saying is that they are the exception and not the norm from my experience.

@YARNLADY I had a fairly good experience in elementary school but junior and senior high were horrible. I had moved to a new school and got to experience mass shunning. It baffled me. Three years into junior high I started wondering if there was something wrong with me. Though that time I dropped all of my advanced classes hoping to fit in. That didn’t work.

I couldn’t wait to graduate and get in the real world.

@tranquilsea and @YARNLADY I guess the only thing I really have to add to the “socialization” issue is that, I went to a private school growing up and I was teased and bullied unmercifully there but it was also a little bit weird for me because all the kids in the neighborhood I grew up all knew each other because they went to school together and I didn’t know any of them as well as they knew each other, so I felt out of place and marginalized both in the school that I attended and in my own neighborhood growing up. But all that has pretty much made me what I am, for better or worse. My parents tried to do the very best they could in terms of raising me and educating me and some of their decisions damaged me, some of them made me stronger and some of them were things that they dropped right down in my goddam fucking lap and I didn’t see them for the opportunities that they were. So… how does anyone one ever know that they have made the best choices for their children? I don’t know. I have only ever been a child. Never a parent so I suppose the rest of you will have to tell me.

I’m not proofreading or editing this comment and I may very well regret that tomorrow. Just giving you all and my future self a heads up here

@lillycoyote I can see where you are coming from. I had to deal with a ton of crap as well. Did it make me a better person? Perhaps. But perhaps I would have been a good person without all the crap.

I don’t subscribe to notion that kids need to be “toughened up”. Life is plenty tough enough without that added drama.

I made the decision to home school after my oldest son spent grades 3, 4, and 5 with kid after kid jumping him in the hallways and outside on the play ground. He came home one day and he looked like some one had tried to garrote him. Some kid had grabbed his necklace from behind him and yanked with all his might. Another day he came home and he was bloody from his wrist to nearly his elbow where a kid raked a open pair of scissors up his arm. Fist fights in the classroom…I could go on and on. As the summer wore down and he was due to head back into school for grade 5 he started having panic attacks just before he went to bed. After 5 nights of that we took him to emergency because he was mess. This was all off of the stress of school. The school was given marching orders to clean up the mess by the doctors. After a year of blaming my son for causing these boys to single him out I had had enough. On the last day of school he was jumped by 4 boys in the field during lunch hour. One after another they pounded him down. That was it. None of my kids went back to that school.

My son went from a sensitive bright kid to one who had shut down. I had to de-school him for 7 months to even get a glimmer of hope that he could start learning again.

He is a changed child now. At 15 he has his confidence back, he’s learning well and he has a great group of friends around him. I don’t think this would have happened had we left him in the school system.

Different communities have different bases of homeschooling support groups. Some communities have cottage schools, where parents will join together and hire teachers to teach high school level courses that they don’t feel they can teach themselves, like chemistry and calculus.

We looked into homeschooling our oldest child because asynchronistic development. Looking back, there are times that I regret not doing it. I knew people who homeschooled because their children because the kids were ice skating and they drove 2 hours each day to skating practice in another city. Conventional school didn’t fit their lifestyle. Another couple I met inherited a nice sum of money, and took two years off to travel with their children.

When I looked into the material, the majority of it was faith based, which diminished some of value because it weakened the academic content for some subjects.

@BarnacleBill There is a lot of faith based curriculum out there but, thankfully, there is a lot of non-faith curriculum out there now too. Because home schooling started with Christian home schoolers it took a bit of time for the secular home schoolers to reach a critical mass where curriculum makers started to create curriculum for them.

We actually don’t use much in the way of canned curriculum. We’re very eclectic.

We used a curriculum called Enki when our children were your age. The originator of the program is availible and does weekly community call in sessions.

@BarnacleBill People who buy a curriculum from someone else aren’t my kind of homeschoolers. We printed out the California Educational Requirements, and based our studies and activities on that.

Our method was based more on the Unschooling
techniques of John Holt, sometimes called the real world method.

@tranquilsea: I have seen some bad cases thru my job, but my opinion also came from reading about the fundamentalist Christians that homeschool. For those kids, i feel that at least in a regular school they would get a break from the constant religion and they would probably get 7 hours a day of other subjects, gym, music, art, reading, writing, ‘rithmetic, etc. I can see that you are very informed about the home schooling you do, and you seem to try hard to research and probably do a great job, exposing your children to other experiences and using various methods that may be hard for a school teacher with 30 children under her watch. However, not all homeschooling parents do so with the zeal, gusto and subjectivity that you use, and those children are limited in their community involvement, and socialize only with their siblings, under the religious guidelines that the parents want to teach.

@jca : As in all such things, there will be those that excel and those who barely try. As I’ve said in numerous threads, it’s all about the parenting. I imagine in your work you’ve seen some horrible abuses of the concept. I remember (I think) something about signing a contract with the state of Colorado to the effect that they have the right to do unannounced spot checks and visits to make sure I was following the basic rules and not just encouraging truancy. (I may be mistaken about that, it was along time ago, but it sort of sticks in my head.)

@YARNLADY ”People who buy a curriculum from someone else aren’t my kind of homeschoolers.”
I’m not clear on why you used that phrasing. Do you feel that people who purchase curricula are inadequately homeschooling their children?

@jca In our province you have to register with a home school board. There are faith based boards and a couple non-faith based ones. Even at a basic level facilitators from the school board are required to make home visits.

I understand what you are saying about the fanatical religious fundamentalists. I belong to one of the religious boards (no, I’m not religious) and they have their own on-line group that parents and kids are encouraged to participate in. Three or four years ago someone posted to the group asking whether we, as parents, let our kids visit with the facilitator or whether we basically hid our kids away. Happily most of the parents responded that absolutely they let their kids visit with the facilitator. One or two though said they didn’t. I found that strange. I mean this is a Christian home school board; their facilitators are Christian.

But that being said, most hard core Christians who don’t home school do sent their kids to a Christian School. Plus we fund, as a province, the Catholic School Board.

I abhor abuse in all its forms but especially when it is propagated against kids. But I don’t think you would stamp out child abuse by outlawing home schooling.

As I said before in all the home schoolers I know, and I know a lot, the vast majority of them are wonderful parents and conscientious home schoolers. Even the Christian ones.

home schooling is legal, so i understand why people do it and it’s within their legal rights to do it, so neither I nor anyone else can say people should not do it.

@JilltheTooth No, buying a curriculum from someone else is simply exchanging one school system for another one, and I am not in that group. As I explained I use the unschooling method.

There are homeschooling parents who abuse their children just as their are many children who go to public or private schools who are abused. I was homeschooled through eighth grade and needless to say met a lot of “weird” home-schoolers (in fact we used to play a game where we would try to guess from pictures who was homeschooled and who wasn’t, we werent the nicest kids ) but I have also seen many just as “weird” kids when I went to public high school. The truth about homeschooling is, if a kid wants too he has the opprotunity to be way more social than any kid going to a traditional school, especially in high school. Instead of your main social interaction being sitting in class all day with a bunch of half-asleep kids and have homework after school, you can get you work done before noon and hang out the rest of the day. That really is what homeschooling is about: opprotunity, the opprotunity to become an anti-social nerd, a competitive ice skater, or party animal. when the majority of your day isn’t taken up with teachers trying to get a class in order you can do so much more with your time. Those who focus on the small minority who abuse these opprotunities forget that parents manage just fine to indoctrinate,under educate, and abuse children who go to traditional schools. It’s all about what works best for the family. If you are thinking about homeschooling, the bigger concern really is wether you are ready to spend the majority of your day around your kid, how much work you are willing to put in to it,what kind of options there are for foreign language, music and P.E. instruction, and whether you have the financial means to take it on. best of luck! and google the Rainbow Resource catalog, yes its as big as a dictionary, adn yes it will help.

Why can’t kids have the best of both worlds? Why not send them to school, and then supplement their education at home?

I hate to buy into a stereotype, but I have to admit, every family that I’ve met that home schools has been either kooky-weird or scary-religious. I’m sure that many folks do a fine job, I just haven’t met them yet.