I have actually known several families who did it, from the Baptist church I attended for a couple of years. I had a fair amount of contact with a few families, because I taught their kids piano. There was some talk of hiring me to teach French, but that never panned out. I did participate in their choir group for a while.
Here's what I found out.
a) Socialization - most of them socialized really well with adults, and not well at all with kids of any age. If school promoted anti-social behaviour, homeschooling promoted hermit-like behaviour. I see your point about socializing with your own age group, which is why I didn't list it as necessarily being a drawback. There are pluses and minuses to that.
b) behaviour - these kids were generally really poor at following directions from anyone except their parents. They didn't have a lot of adult role models other than immediate family, and tended to talk to adults the way their parents did - which would make for problems when they eventually went to high school or tried to get a job. Those whose parents weren't good at getting compliance were raising absolute holy terrors, and no one could do anything with these kids ever.
c) academics - some were great. Some were awful. Most, not surprisingly, were in between. There were some who were going to be in dire straits in the future due to their lack of skills, and their parents didn't realize how far behind they were because there was no one to compare them to. If there were learning disabilities there, they went undiagnosed due to lack of experience on the part of the parents - they didn't know what normal looked like outside of their own family.
I think you're right - well-educated parents who access a variety of special resources for their kids will be able to raise well-educated kids. However, that's at least two qualifiers that are going to be judged by the parents themselves. Remember the truism that seventy percent of people define themselves as above-average in terms of intelligence? What does it say about homeschoolers?
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Date: 2006-08-16 10:23 pm (UTC)Here's what I found out.
a) Socialization - most of them socialized really well with adults, and not well at all with kids of any age. If school promoted anti-social behaviour, homeschooling promoted hermit-like behaviour. I see your point about socializing with your own age group, which is why I didn't list it as necessarily being a drawback. There are pluses and minuses to that.
b) behaviour - these kids were generally really poor at following directions from anyone except their parents. They didn't have a lot of adult role models other than immediate family, and tended to talk to adults the way their parents did - which would make for problems when they eventually went to high school or tried to get a job. Those whose parents weren't good at getting compliance were raising absolute holy terrors, and no one could do anything with these kids ever.
c) academics - some were great. Some were awful. Most, not surprisingly, were in between. There were some who were going to be in dire straits in the future due to their lack of skills, and their parents didn't realize how far behind they were because there was no one to compare them to. If there were learning disabilities there, they went undiagnosed due to lack of experience on the part of the parents - they didn't know what normal looked like outside of their own family.
I think you're right - well-educated parents who access a variety of special resources for their kids will be able to raise well-educated kids. However, that's at least two qualifiers that are going to be judged by the parents themselves. Remember the truism that seventy percent of people define themselves as above-average in terms of intelligence? What does it say about homeschoolers?