We home school. I'm not aware of anybody my kids have killed, I may have to look a bit more into that however. Anyways, here are some of the fruits of our homeschooling project:
-The kids are at least a couple of class level equivalents beyond their public school counterparts.
I would not diminish their accomplishments in the least, but this is pretty common among homeschoolers. When children enjoy learning, are unleashed to pursue things that interest them, get individual instruction, are allowed to learn at their pace rather than being tied to the slowest students in a class of 20-30, and don't have the time overhead of roll call, class-changing, and government-mandated PC @#$%, it's amazing what they accomplish!
-The 4 year old is able to count off even numbers and knows the difference between evens and odds
Our son is ~2 1/2 years younger than his older sister, and we started homeschooling her at age 5. To encourage her and to use as teaching tools, we had number charts and addition/subtraction posters in our dining area and living room. At age 4 our son was driving us nuts with questions, until it got through our thick skulls (mine especially) that he was genuinely interested, and he was understanding it. On the flip side, he and his older sister did not start reading with confidence until age 9 or 10. But when they did, it was like rockets taking off. Their younger sister learned to read with confidence at age 5. "One size fits all" really does not.
-The 6 year old is digging into electricity and engineering projects that some adults would have a hard time understanding.
The flexibility and freedom homeschooling enables are wonderful! Our older daughter was reading Jane Austen's and the Bronte sisters' books at age 12 or 13. Her younger sister was reading Shakespeare and Dostoyevsky at the same ages (one of her counselors at basketball and volleyball camp was amused that she was reading Dostoyevsky's
The Idiot at age 12). Their brother, in Jr. High and high school, earned Eagle rank in a very demanding Boy Scout troop, learned to play drums (well enough to be a drummer in our church's worship teams), was concurrently enrolled in our local JC, and was learning karate. He also had a job at a KFC, becoming an assistant manager at age 17. Our kids weren't prodigies, just unleashed.
-They have a massive social structure. The county we live in has one of the most active libraries in the state, and a very large home schooling presence with a vast array of economic and social tiers represented.
County and city libraries here in Silicon Valley are also heavily used by homeschoolers. We used to carry our load of returned and checked out books in and out using a laundry basket.
One of the stereotypes of homeschooling families is that they are all white, and avoiding contact with ethnic minorities. I'm sure that there are towns
somewhere in the US where the homeschoolers all happen to be ethnic European
(As an aside, how did it become "true" that ethnic Europeans are culturally homogeneous? Try peddling that narrative in France, Germany, England, Spain, and Italy!). And of course there are a few racist idiots like the
Prussian Blue girls' mother who homeschool to isolate their children from minorities. But if one observes the General Sessions or Exhibit Halls, or wanders about the hallways at a homeschooling convention, one will see people of many ethnic origins. I've volunteered at many such conventions, local and statewide, so BTDT, got several drawersful of T-shirts! Mrs. SVPete, another couple, and I started and co-directed a homeschooling support group that grew to 120 families in the 4 years we led the group (
it's still around, 22 years later; you can blame me for the group's acronymic name). At various times we had black, Hispanic and Asian families in the group and in leadership positions in the group (we sub-divided the main group into small groups for practical reasons, so there were lots of people with leadership responsibilities). I apologize for the length of this explanation, but a stereotype can be parroted in 1 or 2 sentences. Showing it to be ludicrous is not amenable to brevity.
-When the county decided to restructure the number of schools and classrooms (for the worst according to most people) we were unaffected
4 or 5 decades ago, unification of small school districts into one mega-district was sold as a way to gain economies of scale: the administration of the one district would be smaller that than administrations of the multiple districts; administrative facilities would be fewer; the mega-district would have better purchasing power than the many smaller districts. It didn't work out that way. Administration did not shrink (in fact it grew, though due to other causes, e.g. Federal- and state-mandated monitoring and reporting). The larger structures were much less flexible. School boards became less answerable to district residents, but more susceptible to organized activist groups and unions, That was the 1970s. I assume this has grown worse, not gotten better.
-No Common Core nonsense in this house, the kids are going to be enjoying a serious competitive advantage in the workforce
Homeschooling pioneers - in the late 70s and early 80s - found few publishers of curricular materials willing to sell to them. Homeschoolers simply did not fit their business models, and there was some "professional" snobbery. By the late 80s, when we started homeschooling, several significant publishers (especially Christian publishers and distributors!) figured out how to address the swiftly growing market of homeschoolers. From about the late 90s onward, the choices of curricular materials available to homeschoolers approached bewildering! Can you say
flexibility and freedom?!We are uncomfortably close, as a nation, to the point where people able to read, do math, understand science, and are willing to work and keep learning are becoming an ad hoc elite. There may be some hyperbole in saying that, but we are becoming pathetic! Worse, those people who are able and willing to create and produce have two large parasites living off and hindering them: government regulatory (and other) bureaucracy; dependent people living who have made government social programs their career and lifestyle.
