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One advantage to home schooling is the small class size. Others might say that in extreme situations that small size is a disadvantage.

But I digress -- I still don't think that the studies measure enough to really make a convincing argument.

IMHO, people who want to home school may have a valid reason -- if the school curriculum is truly repugnant to someone, then I can see WHY a parent might wish to not have their children in that environment. For elementary schooling, I can get the assertion that minor hits in the quality of education are balanced out by moral / ethics concerns. But I still feel that the best solution for a repugnant school curriculum is parents teaching their kids their values, morals and ethics during the huge amount of time they have the kids out of school-- the kids will have to face challenges to their parents' beliefs sometime, they might as well start sooner rather than later.

 

The vast majority of studies do indicate that. The problem I have is that most (and that is to say all that I have seen) are from pro-home schooling organizations. It is similar to the way in which liberal leaning media sources cliam there is a conservative bias in the media, whereas conservative leaning media sources claim there is a liberal bias.

The difference here, IMO, is that there is a small, vocal minority of pro-home schooling advocates, and virtually no anti-home schooling advocates, so naturally you'll see more studies from the pro side. There reason there are so few anti-home school advocates is because if you like having your child being taught by others, you're in the vast majority, and you don't need a study to show that most people agree with you.

That having been said, it is probably not fair to compare the abilities of the population at large to instruct their children to those that actually do home-school their children. Presumably, people who home school their children are taking an active interest in it, and work to do as good a job as is possible. Conversely, people that don't think they'd do a good job at it, probably don't home school their kids. So it does not seem unreasonable to assume that the small sub-set of parents who home school their children may be more adept at home schooling than the general population.

In a perfect world, the small percentage of people who home-school their children would be the same small percentage of people that actually could do a good job at it. Unfortunately, I have so some serious doubts as to how true that statement is. Most people cannot - and thus do not. No problems there. Some people can - and do so. No problem there either. But inevitably, there are some who cannot, even though they think they can - and do. There's the problem.

 

Just to weigh in on the home schooling issue a bit, my wife is home schooled, and it worked out pretty damn well for her. She finished her associates degree when she was 18 -- graduating before she even finished her high school diploma. This is not to say that home schooling is a good idea for everyone -- or even for most people. My wife is one smart cookie, and the public school system simply wouldn't have been able to keep up with her. On the flip side, social skills have never been her strong suit. At all. She only ended up dating me because I've got a thing for shy chicks that look like librarians*.

I'm not against home schooling, but it isn't without its caveats and flaws. Some parents home school because they have confused science and secularism with satanism. To ensure that parents like this aren't teaching their children that the earth is 10,000 years old and that evolution is a lie, and also to ensure that children are kept on the right educational track, parents who home school should be required to teach from approved materials. Their children should be subjected to the same standardized testing as other children in their age group. If a home schooled student fails to perform at a certain minimum level, the state should have an obligation to intervene, possibly even to require re-enrollment in public school.

* Librarians are hot, sue me.

 

Except in this case I haven't heard any anti-homeschooling groups (or even neutral groups) publishing any studies contradicting them. Just a bunch of people saying 'I can't imagine' or 'it's insulting'. I'd like to see some numbers, and I'm surprised this hasn't been studied by any neutral groups (your point about there not really being many anti-homeschooling groups is well taken).

This is quite true. The study may be 100% correct, but it may be a self-selecting population.

And the solution isn't banning any who try, but rather regulating the practice to make sure that those who try actually can.

Most states in the US do something like this. Not all, but most. I don't know about other countries.

 

The Economist had an article about home schooling some while ago (I've long since thrown it out and the online version is premium content). They seemed to take it as fact that home schooled kids had better learning outcomes than school going kids. They didn't think this was necessarily because of home schooling however. Kids whose parents take an interest in their child's education and who devote time to helping them with it do a lot better than kids whose parents have little interest in education. Parents who home school are pretty much by definition devoted to education. For a study to be meaningful it would have to compare homeschoolers to a sample of school going kids whose parents take an equal amount of interest as do the homeschoolers.

Oh, most of the article is reproduced here. I think it's been cropped a bit but it has most of it.

 

Yes! And a high school English teacher spent his summer vaction writing a short novel about this issue, which he observed first-hand, only the "segregated herd" was social rather than aged-based. It turned out to be his first published novel. The writer was Steven King, and the novel was Carrie.

 

Oh, I wasn't suggesting banning it. I was merely pointing out that I think the number of people who actually can do a good job at home schooling their kids is smaller than the number of people who are homeschooling their kids. Heck, my wife has co-workers who are poor teachers, even though those teachers do not think they are poor teachers. I imagine there are parents who are similarly deluded.

That seems like a reasonable conclusion, and while purely anecdotal, it is true from my experience. When I was in school, generally the people who did the best in school were from families where education was a high priority.