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Are you thinking of educating your children at home? You owe it to yourself and especially to your sons and daughters to give it serious consideration. Their futures are at stake.
If your children are presently enrolled in government schools because you think that your local ones are good even if other government schools are bad, you are likely wrong. Read this article by Jeff Mockensturm to learn why.
Parents who think their local government schools are good are often giving those schools the credit the parents deserve themselves. In a community of parents who take an active interest in their children’s education—reading to them at home, helping them with their homework, etc.—student outcomes can be decent in spite of what goes on in the classroom.
Of all the ingredients in the recipe for education, which one has the greatest potential to improve student performance?
Teachers unions put higher salaries for their members at the top of the list, but teacher compensation in America has soared in recent decades at the same time that indicators of student performance have remained flat.
Other answers include smaller class size, a longer school year, more money for computers, or simply more cash for fill-in-the-blank. But those factors exhibit either no positive correlation with better student performance or show only a weak connection. On this important question, the verdict is in, and it is definitive: The one ingredient that makes the most difference in how well and how much children learn is parental involvement.
When parents take a personal interest in education, several things happen. Children get a strong message that education is important to success in life and isn’t something that parents just dump in someone else’s lap. Caring, involved parents usually instill a love of learning in their children—a love that translates into a sense of pride and achievement as knowledge is accumulated and put to good use.
Amid the generally sorry state of public education (government schooling) today are heroes who are rescuing children in a profoundly personal way. They are the homeschoolers—parents who sacrifice time and income to teach their children themselves. Homeschooling is the ultimate in parental involvement.
In her informative 2019 article, 100 Reasons to Homeschool Your Kids, Kerry McDonald points out that homeschool parents “can focus family learning around their own values, not someone else’s.” Check out the article for the other 99 very good reasons to give this promising option a try. If you are a mom who is thinking of taking on the challenge of educating your children at home, another of Kerry’s articles will be of interest to you. It discusses three specific mothes who have found that entrepreneurship is a particularly powerful tool for combining homeschooling, career fulfillment, and financial prosperity.
Teaching children at home isn’t for everyone and no one advocates that every parent try it. Plenty of good schools—many private and some public are doing a better job than some parents could do for their own children. But the fact is that homeschooling is working—and working surprisingly well—for the growing number of parents and children who choose it. It doubled during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic and continues to soar.
That’s remarkable considering that dedicated parents must juggle teaching with all the other demands and chores of modern life. Also, they get little or nothing back from what they pay in taxes for a government system they don’t patronize.
In the early 1980s, fewer than 20,000 children in the entire country were being homeschooled. Now the number is in the millions.
Some home school parents want a strong moral or religious emphasis in their children’s education. Others are fleeing unsafe government schools or schools where discipline and academics have taken a backseat to feel-good or politically correct dogma.
Reports from state after state show homeschoolers scoring much better than the norm on college entrance examinations. Prestigious universities, including Harvard and Yale, accept homeschooled children eagerly and often. Homeschooled children make headlines regularly as winners of spelling bees and for other impressive academic achievements. As Annie Holmquist explains, homeschoolers possess the attributes that public schools have tried and failed to instill in students for years.
There’s simply no evidence that homeschooled children (with a rare exception) make anything but fine, solid citizens who respect others and work hard as adults. Have you ever heard anyone say, after a riot or a drug bust or a rowdy post-game altercation, “Oh, there go the homeschoolers again!”? A recent Harvard study showed that homeschooled youngsters turn into happy, well-adjusted and engaged citizens.
In every other walk of life, Americans regard as heroes the men and women who meet challenges head-on, who go against the grain and persevere to bring a dream to fruition. At a time when troubles and shortcomings plague education and educational heroes are too few in number, recognizing the home school heroes in our midst is long overdue.
Lawrence writes a weekly op-ed for El American. He is President Emeritus of the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) in Atlanta, Georgia; and is the author of “Real heroes: inspiring true stories of courage, character, and conviction“ and the best-seller “Was Jesus a Socialist?“ //
Lawrence escribe un artículo de opinión semanal para El American. Es presidente emérito de la Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) en Atlanta, Georgia; y es el autor de “Héroes reales: inspirando historias reales de coraje, carácter y convicción” y el best-seller “¿Fue Jesús un socialista?”