Who does home schooling?

Hmmmm - just a few random thoughts, bearing in mind that I come from a different culture and experience.

Phoenix - I am not sure what - given the horrors of which humanity is capable - shocks you so much about a parent having to explain themselves for a bruise, or why the parent's profession is relevant. I guess my view is coloured by a constant struggle to get child welfare authorities to act on ANYTHING ( they just normally say, if anything, well you guys are involved - all we would do is send them to you anyway). Parent friends of mine have been made very happy by the vigilant attitude of hospitals etc when they have taken injured children in. I would rthe rover-vigilance than under - though, as I said, I accept my view may be coloured by the constant struggle here to get abuse dealt with.

Home schooling is not anywhere near so prevalent here as in the US - we are not, I think, so concerned about religious rights and individual rights, en masse, as the US is - though the right wing/religious right thing is spreading here, I think - sadly in my view.

I have always shared the sorts of concerns Craven has raised about it - frankly, as a general thing, it raises real alarm bells for me - while I have no doubt that many cases are absolutely benign.

I would add some concerns to those raised by Craven and others.

Here, one of the commonest reasons for home-schooling (here it is also provided by the education department - with special teachers) is anxiety - ie kids who school refuse for various reasons. Sometimes, I think it is quite justified - often I think it offers an opportunity for kids not to deal with their problems and sometimes for the schools not to deal with theirs - eg bullying.

Often, where kids manifest such anxiety, there is an underlying parental issue - sometimes domestic violence, sometimes parental mental health problems, sometimes undealt with attachment problems etc.

Sometimes it is more sinister - like Munchausens by proxy - I have been aware of cases where it HAS been cult related - bloody hard to prove, sadly - and, in our setting, extremely hard to get the authorities to act on - even in one case where an el bizarro cult family had fifteen children, each of whom left the family when they got older, and who told the welfare what was going on, and what was being done to their siblings. This was a family who acted prophylactically - routinely getting themselves into the media as an "ideal" family, for instance - the number of kids acting as a draw.

At least here, the kids are generally in contact with the education system, so alarm bells are sometimes raised when things are really bad - but the system is so over-burdened that many kids in bad situations fall through the cracks.

I am aware that cults are sometimes operating in enclaves in rural communities - especially in the hinterland of the east coast, and concerns have been raised about kids falling through the net there. Sounds as though we may well have invisible kids in the cities, too.

Are you sure? From what I can find on the WWW approx 1.7% of children are homeschooled in the US and estimates by your government put the number somewhere between 1% and 2% in Australia (NZ comes in right around the same numbers too).

Mebbe the US just seems like a lot more because the raw numbers that makes up the percentages are so different but there seems to be a pretty constant 1-2% across all of the countries that allow homeschooling.

Hmmm - interesting. Maybe people don't talk about it as much?

Fishin', I'm still looking, but I think the percentage in the U.S. is higher than that -- I found 1.7 % for 1999, and I seem to remember that there was a large and very recent jump (like between 2000 and 2003).

What great responses!

I cannot read them all now, because as somebody pointed out, I have to use the library computers -- one of the costs of being poor.

There was an article in one of the Boston papers about a boy whose first school experience was Harvard. He did very well on the SATs and other indicators.

I would assume the family I met Sunday to have resorted to home schooling because of quality issues. When we were looking for houses 20 years ago, the realtor stirred us away from the town where these people live. I should say it is the home of Brandeis, Bentley and that other business college that begins with a B, so I had thought a city with three colleges would have had great public schools. My realtor insisted the profs lived in other towns.

The price of domicile in Massachusetts is outrageous and while a few years ago, I swore that if you selected three common house styles -- the six room cape, the seven room split and the eight room colonial -- and tracked them through the various towns, you could tell by the price which town had the best schools. The death of rent control pushed people out of Boston and Cambridge and excellerated the rise of home prices beyond belief and broke down that indicator.

Socialization, as many of you pointed out, is key. Something I saw or read not too long ago -- not more than three years, I think -- defended homeschoolers, saying that many of these kids are involved in town sponsored athletic teams that are independent of the schools, dance, martial arts programs, theatre, etc., and actually have more and more varied social contacts than many public school attendees.

And, yes, the Creation Science people are big component among home schoolers and have done a lot to sully the reputation of the movement.

Most of you are familiar with abuzz's jesusgirl who removed her younger son from the public school after the school did nothing about bullies. Frankly, when I hear of jesusgirl's level of activity -- work, schooling her son, taking classes herself -- I'm exhausted.

Craven, you have great inner strength. I have always admired you. I am in awe of you now.

That may be. I used 1999 numbers because that seemed to be the latest year that solid numbers were available.

One other interesting tidbit I found - the US seems to be the only country I've found so far that has a systematic reporting/monitoring program in place for homeschooling. Other countries allow homeschooling but apparently haven't built a centralized reporting/monitoring system to go with it.

Grr, I hate messageboard hugs. Way too touchy-feely.

There are a handfull of ex-cult members on these boards. Go hug them!

One thing I'd like to add in defense of home schooling is that when I went to school I didn't want anyone else I knew to go through that.

I enjoyed it immensely but I sure didn't want my brother to go to school.

I'd always looked out for my brother, it's a bit of a parenting instinct more so than a brotherly one (for complicated reasons) and I can really understand why people want to keep their kids out of American Public schools.

My qualm is with the use of home schooling as a method of isolating a child from society (and this is far more common that most think). When it is done to improve the child's education my reservations are far different and usually center on a reasonable difference of opinion on what constitutes said improvement.

bookmarking

I'm glad you added that last response Craven.

Thank you.

(((((Hug))))) LOL! ;-)

GRRRRR! No hugs!

Yeah, when soz said something similar I'd thought to say it. Then today I was thinking about how forcefully stated opinions on general topics can be a downer for people involved in said topic so I wanted to clarify.

I have reservations about home schooling but some of my reservations are about social isolation and not home schooling. In that case home scholling is a tool used for a goal I disagree with and not the evil itself.

Well, I do appreciate you saying that and I understand where you're coming from. I have been reluctant to respond here for obvious reason, but I will tell my story at some point, just not today. I have been feeling overwhelmed these days, so I will add to this thread when I'm ready.

If I can't hug you, can I give you a smooch? Ok, I'll stop torturing you now :-D

I do want to say that I did not decide to home school my son for religious reasons and my reasons were strictly because I wanted him to get a better education than he was getting in the public schools. The school bullies were also an issue. My son is not living a sheltered life by any means, as he has friends and a girlfriend.

I will explain more at another time.

The reason I've chosen to participate on this thread is that my wife and I are currently considering home schooling our son. He's in the third grade, and they are teaching down to the lowest common denominator. He's bright, and bored to tears by the situation.

This problem is a result of many factors, but two stand out. First is state mandated testing. They teach to get as many students to pass the tests as possible, and that's it. Thus, the curiculum, if you can call it that, sucks. The second thing is something I've mentioned before, and that is the Bush administrations "leave no child behind" policy.

While I agree that every child should be given an education as best as possible, that doesn't meet that just because someone passed the 2nd grade state tests automatically should be promoted to the third grade. My son has a developmentally challenged kid in his class who craps his pants every day. This is a travesty.

From what I've been able to glean from a lot of WWW sites this is a fairly common situation. A LOT of parents feel their kids are being held back by slower learning classmates. Their kids are bored and usually manage to get themselves into trouble by horsing around out of boredom and eventually they get labeled as troublemakers.

Some see the need to pull their kids out of the public school system as soon as that starts but others wait until it's pretty much to late.

If iI remember correctly this is what was happening with a lot of kids that ended up labeled as "ADD" (or ADHD). There wasn't anything wrong with them other than being bored every day.

Fishin
You're right on. My son was one of those children labeled as ADHD and he's one very smart kid.

The truth is, he came to his mom and told her school was boring him. Pretty cool for an 8-year old, huh?

My son told me school bored him from day one. I always understood because it bored me too. I did have a few teachers that knew how to keep my interest though.

I have to admit, this was partially our fault. The best teacher in the school, also a friend of ours, also teaches 3rd grade, but we felt she was a bad fit for our son (she had both of our girls). Hindsight is always 20:20.

No extension programs?

Sorry, I'm just a touchy-feely kinda gal!

But I take them all back.

Feel better now? Or do I have to say something caustic?

dlowan, It has been my experience, and perhaps it is unique, that the monies for extension programs in the public school system are spent either for sports of for enrichment program for the "challenged" students. In eighth grade my son placed above the 99th percentile on a mandated state wide test.., When we enquired what the school system was doing to enrich his experience we were told that he was smart enough and could do it on his own. When I suggested that the school could at least create a club for those students that place above the 95 percentile I was told "Oh, they'll find each other on their own". The hysteria over mandated testing has tuned the public education system, at least in my state, on it's head.