Decision To Home School Students Comes With Responsibility
The thought of learning at home instead of going to a structure school may seem like a dream for many students, but the reality is home school often offers some of the same rigidity of public and private schools. The decision to teach their children at home is usually not made with the conveniences of the students or parents in mind, rather it is a belief that the distractions in a public or private school are detrimental to the students' learning environment.
When a parent decides to home school their children, they are accepting the responsibility to insure their child receives a quality education without distractions. They may believe that such things as peer pressure, bullying and the social inequality will hinder their child's progress, but at the same time, they may have different distractions to the learning process at home. While discipline in a traditional school setting may be uneven or seemingly non-existent, there can be no misplaced blame for someone when in a home school setting.
Parents may hope to continue bonding with their children while they are still young instead of sending them into a setting with strangers to be taught by someone whose views and family values may not be the same. The process to establish a home school varies by state and the requirements for home schooling also offer variations within the same state.
Findings Vary On Effects Of Home School Education
Every child learns at a different pace and while they may learn one subject faster the others, they could be behind the others in a different subject. Public and provate schools attempt to average out the learning curve with students finding different levels of challenge in different classes. When a child attends home school they can learn each subject at their own pave and intermingle life's experience into the classroom setting.
Some of the disadvantage of the home school setting most often pointed out is the students lack of exposure to other children, cultures and beliefs. While differences may be talked about during home school classes, without the interaction of different people with different ideas, the students only learn the same theories as those taught by their home instructor.
There is also little opportunity to learn competitiveness through school sports and competitions, which is one reason cited by parents leading to the decision to home school their kids. They want their children in school to learn what will be important later in their life and not what the school district thinks they should know.
