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Home Schooling Delivers Superior Academic Performance

The following is anecdotal, but it does not mischaracterize:

Students in my high school—Dwight D. Eisenhower Senior High in Washington, Michigan—were required to take a class in American History during their junior year. Since the class was mandatory, the class was a cross-section of the student body: Mostly average kids, with a leavening of burnouts, jocks, brains, rich kids, etc.

From time to time the instructor would have students read from the text, and here a startling contrast became apparent: While most people can read aloud from a document as quickly as they can utter normal speech, some of my fellow students could not. Furthermore, their reading was nothing more than the mere pronunciation of each word as they came to it; there was no change to intonation that accompanies a grasp of the larger meaning of the text. To simply pronounce each word as they came to it was the best they could do.

Although this touches on the debate between the various methods of instruction, there's another question: Why were marginally literate kids admitted to the eleventh grade?

As creative as I am, I can imagine only the following answers to this question:

• The school didn't know that they are letting marginally literate children into the eleventh grade;
• The school doesn't think that marginal literacy should be a bar to entry into that grade;
• The school's efforts to institute a standard have been stymied by politics.

In truth, not one of these reasons reflects creditably on the administration: They have a duty to know, a duty to care, and a duty to resign, if need be, rather than support an institution that has abandoned its raison d'etre. When one considers the advantages enjoyed by the government schools—including over $5000 more funding per child—the failure of the government schools to deliver consistently superior results indicates that its disadvantages are systemic. The government schools should be blowing the homeschools completely out of the water. They're not.

Home Schooling Delivers Superior Socialization

The most shamelessly false charge put forth by government school establishment is that home-schooled children are not properly socialized. Aside from being a confession that they have no hope of winning the issue of academic merit, it implies that the allegedly superior socialization of government schooling atones for its faults; this in turn is a confession that academic achievement has taken a back seat to other concerns.

If we examine the purpose of socialization, we are all in consensus that at the very least, nobody is properly socialized until treating others as equals is habitual. The government schools have yet to demonstrate any capacity in this regard; the children who treat others as objects in the first grade continue to do so, with no improvement in their behavior, for the duration of their enrollment.

The government school establishment's argument proceeds on the premises that exposure of a child to other children is necessary for the child to develop the proper social mindset, and that the homeschooling environment is some kind of monastic cloister that insulates its charges from the world without. The first premise is profoundly free of supporting evidence, and the second premise is laughably false. The government school establishment would have us believe that a home-schooled child will not learn how to interact as an adult in a social environment, that insulated from society by the parents, they will never leave the house, never play with other children, and learn nothing of the outside world until that day when they are shooed out to make their own way in the world. Conveniently forgotten are the brothers, the sisters, the other children in the neighborhood, the children of whatever friends the parents have, those adult friends themselves, and the other public activities of every community known to man. Conveniently forgotten, too, is the gross disparity between the government school experience and life as an adult; how many adults spend a significant portion of their lives in the company of age peers, with on-and-off supervision of older (and, presumably, wiser) heads? The military is vaguely like this, but only in boot camp.

Conveniently forgotten, too, are the public school children who are just as insulated from the real world by virtue of exposure to nothing but popular media and their equally-ignorant peers. In all honesty, the government school environment is far and away more insulated from the adult world than is any home. For the government school's apologists to characterize the homeschool as a cloister is worse than the pot calling the kettle black: It is the pot calling the eggs black.

It is no exaggeration to state that when it comes to socialization in the government schools, the inmates are in charge of the asylum; for many children, the government school experience consists of various pressures to emulate and/or appease other people's immaturity. Bullying is a frequent and totally unnecessary part of the public schooling experience, and, again, no reason for the continued presence of such children in the school environment reflects creditably on the administration: They have a duty to know when a child is making life miserable for others, a duty to remove such children, and a duty to resign, if need be, rather than work in an institution that frustrates the removal of bullies. "Zero-tolerance" policies for trivial offenses, which seem to be all the rage, are transparently an effort to appear tough while doing nothing substantive, and are even more revolting than the lack of discipline that preceded them.

The few studies that have been done indicate that far from providing an inferior socialization, home schooling is in fact better.

Home Schooling Delivers Superior Moral Standards

Those who bow to the idol of moral relativism are rolling their eyes at this. "Who are you to say that your morals are superior?" they will charge, in the form of a question. To this I answer: "Everyone has a moral code. Everyone thinks their own is superior, or else they would not practice it." To get closer to home, those who declare all moral systems to be equal do so because they believe it is wrong to declare otherwise. Hence they believe that moral relativism is superior to other viewpoints.

So when I say that home schooling delivers superior moral standards, I mean that if you home school your children, they will receive the moral values that you consider to be superior: The ones that you teach.

Home Schooling is Run by Someone Who Really Cares

Or, as some home schoolers put it, "If my 25-year-old son doesn't have marketable skills, he won't be moving in with his incompetent math teacher."

While it is very true that many government school teachers are highly dedicated to inculcating useful knowledge, there are many to whom it is merely a job, and some who are more interested in pushing the politics of the day. When was the last time in your district that a teacher was fired for the simple failure to teach? The last news story I read that touched on this issue ran quite the opposite: A teacher resigned under the pressure to pass students who had cheated on their papers.

The root of the chasm between government schooling and home schooling is that in home schooling, every decision is made by the person who cares the most about the outcome. No government school employee cares more about my daughter's education than I do, and any who claim otherwise are either suffering delusions of grandeur, or are lying outright; in neither case should such a person be trusted with a child's education.