Homeschooling officially began in 1970 when a man named John Holt began urging parents to bring learning to the home rather than a classroom, starting a method known then as “unschooling”. This argument inspired Raymond Moore to add his argument that sending your children to school too early was harmful, and that they should be taught at home until they reached the age of eight or nine to set a base for their education. Since then, homeschooling has grown immensely and has become a very popular. It started as a something that parents used for special needs children or families who were isolated from the local schools. It became an easier way to lead a different lifestyle of helping the children find their interests and acting on them rather than keeping them in a formal classroom. People today use homeschooling to open a child’s mind to different experiences outside of the classroom and focusing on the subjects that may need to be highlighted in the child’s education but is also used as a protection mechanism from unfavorable social interactions. Public schools have a set curriculum and may not favor each parent longing for a constant connection with their child. Although homeschooling has shown a structured, direct, and more focused education due to the parental involvement and flexibility, public schools also have many advantages including a more structured social pattern and more affordable tuition.
There are multiple reasons listed about the reasoning for homeschooling rather than sending a child to a public school. Out of the many, the most common ones start with the fact that it involves more parental involvement. Parents have a big part in a child’s success and the way a child is raised has a big impact on their academic achievements which supports the fact that parental involvement is very important in a child’s education. Lily Eskelsen Garcia and Ortha Thornton explain in their article titled The Enduring Importance of Parental Involvement that “the most significant type of involvement is what parents do at home. By monitoring, supporting and advocating, parents can be engaged in ways that ensure that their children have every opportunity for success.” The time spent with parents is the most precious time to parents but also the most learning time that a child can get. There are multiple skills besides the book learning that children can learn at home including things like: learning how to cook and garden. There are many positives to the parental involvement in a child’s education, however, parental involvement can still exist as a child is experiencing their education in a different educational facility.
A structured education, especially in early childhood, can be very crucial to how a child performs academically. That structure is another reason why homeschooling has become so popular. It is a lot easier to be sure of the child’s learning structure if the parent is the one building it. The way a classroom is set up and taught can determine how the child learns throughout the year, whether it is in the familiarity of the home or in a cozy classroom. Although parents can provide a structural and more direct role in a child’s daily learning, there comes the responsibility of having to handle the authoritative part of being a teacher making it hard to separate school and family association (Calvert Education). Not being able to separate those two can be hard to set an affective format for the development of the child’s learning. Public school allows for the parents and children to be separated for a good amount of the day and come together at the end of the day to tell what they learned and what made them excited to go back. This can also separate school and family life, making it easier for a more positive relationship between parent and child. Robin L. West explains in The Harms of Homeschooling “A child is regarded and respected at school not because she is her parent's child, but because she is a student: she is valued for traits and for a status, in other words, that are independent of her status as the parent's genetic or adoptive offspring.”
In early childhood, parents get to know their child and know how they learn and what they might need help on or what they excel in. This is why homeschooling makes it much easier for parents to control what the child works on more to get better at. Shelley Cheeks quoted “Homeschooling makes it very easy to change our schedule as needed, we can be as flexible as we need to be. If we are in the middle of a lesson and everything is going great and everyone is engaged, we can stay on that lesson longer instead of having to switch gears. If everyone is frustrated and we are not making progress, we take a break and go to something else”. The sequence of the learning day is affected directly by how the child learns the material, being able to pace appropriately for the child can make it easier for them to master the topic before needed to move on. The flexibility of homeschooling leaves an open door to how slow or fast a child goes through a subject and opens the schedule up to be changed as needed for the family. Having that flexibility allows a change in the order of the class and to suit the other activities planned during the day which can make it easier for a child to keep open mind and not get bored. Having a loose curriculum can allow for classes to be held anywhere from a room in the house, to taking a walk in nature, to a family vacation. It can be made very easier for families who love to travel and don’t spend a lot of time around where they reside.
One of the major things that people think of when they think of homeschooling is the social aspect of it. Being at home only constantly surrounded by your family and school can make it difficult for a child to develop socially as they would in a school with other children their age. For children who are homeschooled, they are not exposed to the social aspect of being around children their age every day and experiencing the people around them who are not their parents or siblings. It can be hard for a child to conform to a social or friend group and that can make it difficult. With sending a child to public school comes risks including things like substances, and poor friends. The friends and choices that are made by a child are a demonstration of how they were raised. Keeping a child at home and depriving them of risk and exploration doesn’t do much of anything if a parent hasn’t raised them to know about what is right and wrong. Along with not letting them make choices on their own, children have a very unrealistic view on how the world works without experience of social interaction. Children learn and grow up understanding how the world works by choosing and learning from mistakes rather than being scolded for making a wrong choice or being held back from any danger that is thrown in the pathway. Letting a child explore what it’s like the make friends and sometimes not fit in can build their character and help them find who they are without their parents.
Parental involvement and the child’s interaction with other students contribute to a child’s academic success but another important thing that can affect a child’s academic performance is the materials that he or she can use around the classroom. Being in a public-school setting, those materials are provided and used daily by the children for their learning, but they cannot get that same learning experience if a parent does not have those materials around the house to help them out. Getting ahold of those materials can cost out of pocket money that the family may not have just lying around. Having a classroom that has only one or two children in it can make it easier for children to learn more effectively and it can make it a lot easier on the parents to teach if it’s only the one or two children to teach. The small class also opens up the ability to learn by focusing on the students’ individual needs and sets them up for a more positive and educational college experience, knowing the information well and beign able to continue their education with that same motivation. Cynthia K. Drenovsky and Isaiah Cohen quote in their journal The Impact of Homeschooling on the Adjustment of College Students that their research “reveals that homeschooled students report that they achieve higher academic success in college and view their entire college experience more positively than traditionally educated students.” Focusing on those individual needs means focusing directly on a certain part of the curriculum that each child is learning. Being able to work as needed on each subject, leads to a stronger understanding of everything that the child learns throughout each year and growing even more through high school and college.
To conclude, people have entirely different opinions on whether homeschooling is socially or realistically good for a child or if public school really is teaching a child what they need to know. Homeschooling has a direct curriculum that focuses on what needs to be gone over more for each student to master each subject but doesn’t have a very positive social outcome. Public schools have multiple materials that can be used for a student to learn more effectively and a superior social pattern but does not go at the speed that each student may need to go. It all comes down to the student and how they learn. If they need extra help or have a problem with bullying maybe homeschooling might be the answer. Parents noticing and acting on how their child learns can help them and their child in the long run, prepare for future education.