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.

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.

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.