Those of you who get the Homeschool Legal Defense Association e-mails and those who read Amy’s Humble Musings will probably have already seen this, but for any of you who missed it, here’s a great op-ed piece J. Michael Smith of HSLDA wrote for the Washington Times on Homeschoolers and Socialization, covering two different studies of homeschoolers who have grown up. Apparently, we homeshoolers don’t grow up to be as anti-social as some people were afraid. I was especially interested in the results of a Canadian study:
When measured against the average Canadians ages 15 to 34 years old, home-educated Canadian adults ages 15 to 34 were more socially engaged (69 percent participated in organized activities at least once per week, compared with 48 percent of the comparable population). Average income for homeschoolers also was higher, but perhaps more significantly, while 11 percent of Canadians ages 15 to 34 rely on welfare, there were no cases of government support as the primary source of income for homeschoolers. Homeschoolers also were happier; 67.3 percent described themselves as very happy, compared with 43.8 percent of the comparable population.
You can read the rest here.
December 22nd, 2009 at 4:12 pm
Oh,that’s good information. Finally there are statistics for something as fuzzy as socialization. I could have told you that all of the homeschooled adults are far more with it than the rest of us.
Hey, I thought you HAD to know this. Yesterday it was really cold, so I threw on a skirt OVER my workout clothes, and a guy opened the door for me. No doubt I was treated more like a lady from my outfit.
December 23rd, 2009 at 2:56 am
Alas — the Canadian questionnaire surveyed only 226 families. [I am an avid proponent of homeschooling even though I decided not to do it myself, and I have seen it work very well for some families.] I would really like to see homeschooling encouraged and supported, so I think broader surveys are needed, as well as surveys done by objective education researchers unaffiliated with homeschooling groups.
There are some exceptions out there, giving homeschooling a bad name. There was a family at my kids’ Catholic school — four very sweet kids. But their parents were a mess: authoratative father, mother who never said a word. The Archdiocese worked hard to come up with funding for any Catholic family who couldn’t afford school, but the father claimed his family didn’t need “welfare” and refused to fill out the financial aid forms — and then he kept bouncing his tuition checks. The principal let the kids stay in school, anyway.
But one day, the kids didn’t show up — the father was laid off, and he said he was going to “homeschool” them. It turned out this meant they were going to stay home and take care of their new baby brother, while the parents went out all day, looking for work. He insisted he was teaching them, whenever he ran into anyone from our school community — he said he was “teaching them about real life.” The kids, and the mother, didn’t say a word, they just stared at the ground. Our community was able to get food to the kids through the grandmother. I wonder if the little ones in that family will ever learn to read — so sad.
I remain 100% in favor of homeschooling, and it is wonderful for the vast majority of the families I know who choose to do it. But the case above made me understand why some people are against it. People like that dad can really give it a bad reputation.
December 26th, 2009 at 10:57 pm
The article is spot on. Home school kids are completely socialized in a way most parents would want. One hears so much profanity in school today, so much raw talk about sexuality, so much harrassment speech that there is no question that school socialization is actively harming kids.
http://johnmcgeough.wordpress.com
December 26th, 2009 at 11:07 pm
L.,
I think you’re absolutely right. It’s tragic stories like the one you just told that make many people uncomfortable with homeschooling. The problem with tragic stories, though, is that they are little “studies” with sample sizes of one, even worse than the 226 families in the small Canadian study. The solution is exactly what you said, broader surveys, done by less biased people (of course, less biased people are often very hard to find since people in the education profession are often highly opposed to homeschooling and people in the homeschool community are, naturally, highly in favor of it). We are, at least getting some broader studies being done on academic achievement, such as this study of over 11,000 homeschool students, reported on here. But until recently, no one was doing anything at all on socialization. Maybe these smaller studies will provoke some larger scale research.