The biggest obstacles we faced when we decided to homeschool our children were doubts sowed by trusted friends and relatives. Never having homeschooled nor read the plethora of scholarly literature on the subject, some still expressed strong opinions about the inefficacy of homeschooling, the damage wrought by removing children from the socializing influence of the public school system, and the difficulty of maintaining the level of discipline and interest to do it well. Those of us who have been homeschooling a couple of years and have enjoyed it, often forget the strength of those negative influences in our own beginnings. I plan to write about our own experiences and information gathered from several scholarly studies that helped us overcome those influences to get started and continue in our homeschooling efforts.
These posts will be written for people who are just getting started in homeschooling. To those who have been doing it for awhile, the reasons are readily apparent. I am more comfortable in dealing with most objections about homeschooling than when we started a couple of years ago. People who are around our children know that, while they are not perfect, they are much better off educationally and socially than while they were in the public school system. I think that is the reason we seem to get many fewer objections than when we were just starting. We still get occasional disparaging remarks. It works best for us just not to respond.
There are a good number of scholarly studies of things like socialization, performance on standardized tests, and other criteria by which children can be measured in different academic settings. Many of these measures can be helpful when deciding whether or not to homeschool. For example, there is a lot that is known about the influence of class size on student performance. It is not what many people believe it to be, but it is pretty cut and dried with a variety of studies that do a pretty good job of measuring the correlations. A typical homeschool has four or fewer students. Does such a class perform better than classes of fifteen, twenty, thirty, or forty? Does the level of education of a public school teacher matter when it comes to the performance of their students? How about homeschool teachers? There are answers to these and other similar questions based on studies using solid scientific methods.
While these studies were not the only, nor even the primary reason why we choose to homeschool, they helped us make a reasoned decision about getting started and give us confidence that we can continue to make it work for us and our children.