by James Kronefield
Home schooling is not as crazy as some teachers and other education professionals would have you believe. Our society has trained the general public to think that only crazy people and right wing militant radical religious zealots would teach their student at home. By building their argument on this foundation, they go on to lay other arguments based on the assumption that home schooling is a way for parents to isolate their young student from the rest of society.

With this argument in firmly in place the detractors of home schooling can then go on to argue why a parent would make for a poor teacher. These so called experts can then argue among other things that home schooling is a poor choice because the child will miss out on socialization. Now that is the silliest argument I’ve ever heard. I went to public school from kindergarten all the way to twelfth grade and I can guarantee you that I got in trouble more often for “socializing” than anything else.

But this single argument is the one my wife and I encounter the most when people find out that we home school our daughter and that we are considering home schooling our first grade son as well. In order to deconstruct this argument, we must first question the premise upon which it is founded. That is the question of whether or not home schooling is an act of isolation.

In our case, home schooling is a vehicle to open up a larger world for our children. I’ll give you an example of opening up the world where home schooling versus public school.

When our daughter was in third grade in a public school, we had an opportunity to go to Mexico for two weeks for an incredibly low price. The problem was that although one of the weeks coincided with Spring break, the other week was the week before Spring break. We asked the teacher how much material our student would miss and would it hurt her in any course if we went out of the country that week. The teacher informed us that they would not be covering any new material that week and if our daughter wanted to turn in her homework assignments before leaving, she would miss out on nothing that week except a perfect attendance score.

For two weeks in Mexico our little student put to use the contents of her Spanish language course and learned more about the history and culture of Mexico than she ever would have in a public school in the USA.

Since we started home schooling them, our children have been on more field trips than they ever could have gone on in public school. My daughter’s standardized test scores have sky rocketed and unlike public school, my children have not had to under go a single bomb threat evacuation (they had three the year before we pulled them from public school).

In our experience children that are home schooled participate in more social activities than they did when the were in public school. Soccer, chess clubs, Kung Fu, meeting friends and other home schooling students at the park, public pool and museums are just some of the activities that we have been able to add since shucking the harness of the public school schedule.

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