Learn About The Benefits of Home Schooling
You have to go back in time several decades to find a time when homeschooling was genuinely controversial. The evidence in support of homeschooling as a legitimate and perhaps even a superior alternative to a traditional school continues to mount.
Religion, as cited by 33 percent of parents, is the main reason they choose to educate their children at home. Public schools, in their opinion, simply cannot provide the spiritual guidance they want their children to receive at home on a daily basis.
The second most common reason parents are homeschooling is the overall environment of the public school where they live. Many parents believe it is easier to isolate their children in a learning environment at home and in the world around them without the moral decay they see in many public school environments.
Homeschooling has come a long way since the early days of history when the only schooling was homeschooling. Now—thanks in large part to the Internet—homeschooling is always just a click away.
Many of the early critics of the modern homeschooling movement attacked homeschoolers on two fronts. They believed students receiving homeschooling were going to come up short academically and in the area of socialization.
Let’s examine both arguments. The academic argument may have merit in isolated cases where a parent attempting homeschooling is simply overmatched by the task at hand. Certainly plausible, no doubt, but in reality, this would be the rare exception, not the rule.
The truth is that homeschooling has achieved some pretty amazing results. Many homeschoolers are scoring extremely high on standardized tests, like the SAT, and gaining entrance to prestigious and highly selective universities like Harvard and Stanford.
If you break it down to its essence, it is only logical that homeschooling should be able to achieve superior results, particularly with a highly competent teacher. Think about it. School is always in session, the teacher is always there, and resources are never a problem. Plus you never miss a field trip because you forgot the permission slip.
The other major issue, of course, is socialization. Homeschooling, the critics will tell you, will result in your child becoming so socially underdeveloped that he will be scarred for life.
Veterans of homeschooling find this argument less than compelling. They counter that their children actually spend more time interacting with real people in the real world and that, while public school students are punished for socializing in the classroom, communication is alive and well in their home classroom.
But the homeschoolers aren’t content to leave the argument there. They will tell you that traditional schools teach passiveness and compliance while they breed self-confidence and self-esteem. Self-esteem, they will say, is built in a public school not by accomplishing something, but being told you are good when you accomplish nothing.
The poster boy for homeschooling is Tim Tebow, currently a quarterback for the Denver Broncos. He was homeschooled and went on to star at the University of Florida. He embodies what many homeschoolers see as the result of being homeschooled. He is a leader, grounded, moral, intelligent, confident, and a man of deep faith. If this is the result of homeschooling, score one for homeschooling.
When it comes right down to it, local scholarships are the lifeblood of all scholarships.
