by Rebecca Moore

Created on: May 16, 2008   Last Updated: June 14, 2010

When parents decide to home school their children, the reason is usually as simple as providing their children with the best education and upbringing they can offer. While this is all well and good, the reasoning is illogical. In order to be productive citizens in the future, children must be exposed to what that requires, to the people that they will inevitably have to work and live with.

If the parents have done their part to instill values, morals, and standards, the child should be able to withstand the peer pressures encountered in public education. And if not, experience is valuable. Parents cannot make mistakes for their children. There is no substitute for experience. Everything a parent shields their child from in the formative years will be experienced later when the child leaves the house, except the child will be clueless how to handle it.

In a public education, children are exposed to multiple teachers, multiple schools of thoughts, multiple methods of learning. In a home environment, children are exposed to one teacher, one way of doing things. In most cases, this 'teacher' has not gone to school to be an educator. While they may be very intelligent individuals, they are most likely not qualified or even able to explain long division, Spanish, nuances of Shakespeare, or reasons for civil unrest in the Russian Federation.

Home schooled children miss out on valuable socialization. The world is not made up of only the type of individuals found in our immediate families or church groups. When home schooled children go to get jobs or move on to college, they are at a disadvantage in not knowing how to deal with anyone different from them. They may just lack social skills entirely. In college courses, chances are, they have not learned all the basic educational standards one gains in a public education, and are faced with new topics that are not understandable without this previous knowledge.

Every parent should want their children to get the best education available. While some public schools unfortunately do not offer that, homeschooling is not the answer. Charter schools for example give parents an option that allows them more control over their child's education. Simply joining the PTA can give parents insight and allow them more involvement in their children's instruction.

Narrowing a child's scope of education and depriving them of socialization does them no favors.

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