Homeschool Advantage Protection

Homeschool advantage protection

The rise of homeschooling reflects broadening dissatisfaction with formal education worldwide. Discontent is high for two reasons.

• First, public schools are turning out a poor product--illiterate and unprepared graduates.
• Equally troubling, public schools have become crime scenes where drugs are sold, teachers are robbed, and homemade bombs are found in lockers.

Isabel Lyman, wrote an insightful article in analyzing the reasons for the growth of the homeschooling movement. In this article she refers to a 1996 study of the Florida Department of Education that surveyed 2,245 homeschoolers. She writes:

Of that group, 42% said that dissatisfaction with the public school environment (safety, drugs, adverse peer pressure) was their reason for establishing a home education program.

She (Isabel Lyman) then also refers to an analysis of 300 newspaper and magazine articles that reveal that the top four reasons for the establishment of homeschools were dissatisfaction with the public schools, the desire to impart religious values freely, academic excellence, and the building of stronger family bonds.(See: USA Today - Society for the Advancement of Education - Sept, 1998).

The negative influences of public schooling have been publicized ad infinitum. Any well read and thinking person has in recent years heard of how smoking, drug taking and dealing, gangsterism, etc. have become endemic to the life of formal schooling. Students who are enrolled in public schools are, more often than not, either the perpetrators or victims of one or more of these characteristics.

John Holt, one of the most famous of homeschooling proponents tells the following story to illustrate the reigning values of high schools of his time (the early 1970's):

A friend of mine, in his early thirties, is a journalist, generally liberal, and sympathetic to the young. Not long ago, he visited a number of high schools in the affluent suburbs of Los Angeles where he grew up, talking to the students, trying to find out what they seemed most interested in and cared most about. I asked eagerly what he had found. After a silence, he said,

"They seem to be mostly interested in money, sex, and drugs."

He was clearly as unhappy to say it as I was to hear it. We would both like to have found out that these favored young people wanted to do something to make a better world, as many did fifteen years ago. But we should not be surprised that young people should be most interested in the things that most interest their elders. (Originally published as Chapter 2, Teach Your Own: A Hopeful Path for Education. New York: Delacorte Press, 1981.

If this was the scene in the 1970's how much worse is it today!

In the light of the reigning situation in public schools it makes good sense that concerned parents are willing to sacrifice time and money to accept responsibility for the teaching of their own children. In stead of sending their children to schools where they will daily be exposed to the unacceptable lifestyle and values of society at large, parents rather keep them at home and school them in the values that are dear to that particular family! In doing this, they benefit from homeschool advantage protection.

Hop, skip and jump from "Homeschool Advantage Protection" to "Homeschool Advantage Independent Thinking"

Slide back from from "Homeschool Advantage Protection" to "Homeschool Advantage Flexibility"