Homeschooling Critique #2 - Quality of Education

Critique number two is often a question of whether the adults involved have the education and skills necessary to educate their children as well or better than an institutional setting. I suspect that if you were to suddenly disband the institutional education setting over night and ask all parents to home educate it would be an impossible disaster. Home schooling is not for everyone. It wouldn't work financially, it wouldn't work with people's priorities and values and time, it wouldn't work with people's attitudes towards their own education. For these and so many other reasons, home educating is only ever going to be a viable option for some.

The sad thing is that not every parent who wants to home educate, or tries to home educate is successful. Now, this is a very unusual statement to read on any homeschooling blog/website/book, but I think its a very valuable statement. My conversations with teachers on the subject of homeschooling often goes along something like this: "I had a child come back to school after being homeschooled for several years, and it was very difficult - they were behind in so many things, really far ahead in others, they couldn't wait their turn, they always wanted to be right on top of me when I was doing the demonstration, etc."

Not all home schooled children are better off at home -- but unfortunately the only homeschooled children that my teaching friends have had the opportunity to encounter were those for whom everyone had obviously agreed homeschooling wasn't working out for. They had not had the opportunity to see those for whom homeschooling was a success.

I don't think there can be any hard and fast proof for this one, but the increased value top Universities such as Harvard, Yale, MIT, etc., are putting on actively recruiting (and frequently giving full-ride scholarships to) home educated young people says something to me about the success of a large number of homeschooling families to adequately and effectively educate their children -- not just to be "average" but to shine in the midst of the brightest of company.