Jcecil has written a essay about why he is against homeschooling. He admits he only knows two homeschooled kids. He lists his objections about homeschooling and this one stands out.
First, I think it is unfair to a child when they become an adult that they suddenly face a world where almost everyone around them has a completely different experience of life than them – a shared experience that is different.
I imagine that the transition from homeschool to either university or the work-force is something like being thrust into a foreign nation with a radically different culture.
Having seen my own children blend into many different community settings at church, on sports teams, in the community, and watching my oldest ref soccer teams and attend his first year at a public digital academy two days a week, I am not in the least little bit worried about them “transitioning” into the community. THEY ALREADY ARE in the community. I think they will probably adjust easier than I did when I first attended college with students who were NOT my age, some of them 20 years or more older! For me it was a challenge to befriend them and then later work with them. It won’t be for my children. They’re use to adults. They are also use to being around younger kids, something that just wasn’t very cool when I was in school.
I found two articles on line to address JCecil’s concern.
Home schoolers are making favorable impressions in other ways too. “We are looking for kids who think,” said Jon Reider, senior associate director of admissions at Stanford, in a 1998 article for Insight on the News written by home schooler Aimee Howd. “Home-schooled kids have had wonderful opportunities to think, have had to seek out knowledge in unique ways,” Reider said. “That’s what professors want . . . a high level of intellectual independence.”
Howd herself is a good example. After finishing high school at age 17, she spent four years traveling overseas, studying independently and working in apprenticeships. She taught English in Russian public high schools and returned to the United States to work as a technical writer and illustrator and then as the coordinator for a political campaign. In 1997 she decided it was time to hunt for a college, and she visited Iowa Wesleyan as a prospective student.
You might say the visit went well: Although Howd was the first home-schooled student to apply there, her ACT score and her resume earned her a scholarship on the spot.
It’s just another example of how home schoolers spell academic achievement.
Mr. Ray said critics “have claimed that adults who are home-schooled would be social isolates, disengaged from civic life and perhaps uncaring about the world around them. The findings of this study, however, indicate just the opposite in terms of these adults’ behaviors.”
Among the study’s findings:
•About half (49 percent) of home-schoolers ages 18 to 24 were full-time students. In that age group, 50.2 percent had “some college but no degree,” compared with 34 percent of the same age group in the general population. In that group, 8.7 percent of home-schoolers had two-year associate degrees (compared with 4.1 percent in the general population) and 11.8 percent had bachelor’s degrees (compared with 7.6 percent in the general population).
•Among various measures of community activity, home-educated adults were more likely than their peers to have read a book in the past six months (98.5 percent compared with 69 percent), participated in community service such as volunteering or coaching youth sports teams (71.1 percent compared with 37 percent), and attended religious services at least once a month (93.3 percent compared with 41 percent).
•Asked whether they agreed with the statement that “politics and government are too complicated to understand,” 4.2 percent of home-schooled adults agreed, compared with 35 percent of the general population.
•In six measures of civic involvement, home-schooled adults consistently ranked higher than the general U.S. population.
•Home-schoolers also ranked higher on measures of personal satisfaction and psychological health, reporting more contentment on the job and with their families’ financial situations. Asked about happiness, 58.9 percent of home-schoolers reported they were “very happy,” compared with 27.6 percent of the general public.
•Home-schoolers differed significantly in their responses to the question: “Some people say that people get ahead by their own hard work; others say lucky breaks or help from people are more important. Which do you think is most important?” More than 85 percent of home-schoolers said “hard work,” compared with 68 percent of the general population.
•About 74 percent of the home-schooled adults with children said they were home schooling their own children.
The thousands of home-schooled adults who participated in the survey were found through “a highly connected network of home-schooling organizations,” Mr. Ray said. Their responses were compared with data for the general U.S. population from the Census Bureau, the Department of Education and the National Opinion Research Center.
The study did not compare incomes of adults who had been home-schooled with the general population, Mr. Ray said, because of a shortage of age-based income data plus the fact that the average age of the home-schooling alumni in the survey was 21 and nearly half were full-time students.
“If we can come back to a substantial portion of this sample in five to 10 years, we’ll get a much better idea of comparative data regarding occupation, income and completed level of education,” he said.
The study rebuts one of the most persistent criticisms of home schooling, Mr. Washburne said.
“Home-schooling parents have known for years that home schooling works,” he said. “What we always knew to be a myth regarding socialization has turned out to be just that, a myth. Home-schoolers appear to be active, engaged, happy adults.”
Any other homeschoolers have examples or stories if transitioning into college or work are more than welcome to post them here.
