Society And Culture: Home Schooling - Never A Threat

Society and Culture

Home Schooling: Never a Threat

The emergence of home schooling

Homeschooling is a progressive movement in education around the countries, in which parents choose to educate their children at home instead of sending them to a traditional public or private school. The generation of home school is influenced by its historical development and social background, mainly for the following reasons:

With the development of social economy, a large number of middle-class families have emerged. These families have better economic strength and have more leisure time. According to a survey, about 20% of parents in the United States have higher educational quality than school teachers and parents can easily get needed educational resources from the Internet.

Parents are not satisfied with the mechanized teaching methods in schools. They believe that the knowledge taught in schools is outdated and cannot meet the market demand for talents. Moreover, the teaching system ignores the individuality of students, resulting in low teaching efficiency. Combined with surveys showing that the quality of education in the United States has been declining for years, which led to parents’ growing distrusts of schools.

The United States is a country where many religions coexist. Despite it always advocates the elimination of racial discrimination and the coexistence of diverse cultures, there’re still some schools potentially instill a strong religious culture in children, making it hard for many more conservative or different religious families to accept.

The real problem

However, home schooling has long been controversial, with critics arguing that it leads to problems, such as a threat to democracy, uneven subjects, poor interpersonal skills and so on. Some countries, such as Sweden, Germany and most European countries have outlawed it entirely. In other countries, while not restricted by law, homeschooling is not socially acceptable or considered desirable and is virtually non-existent.

In America, shortly after the Trump was elected President of the United States, he appointed Betsy DeVos for America’s next secretary of education, which has caused quite a stir and represented a revolution in American education. One reason is that Betsy DeVos herself has been a strong supporter of charter school practice in Michigan and has provided substantial financial and political support for charter schools in Michigan. During a nearly four-hour hearing on Betsy DeVos’s suitability as America’s new secretary of education, charter schools were mentioned no fewer than 60 times, while home-schooling was mentioned just once. So, does it mean that home schooling is just a myth?

What can you do?

Be educated on what democracy really means is one way to dispel the myth that homeschooling is a threat to democracy. The reality is that the homeschooling is not a threat to true democracy. Home schooling is a reflection of the democratic society and diversity in the United States, which has been advocating the elimination of racial discrimination and the establishment of a democratic, free and multicultural society. True democracy is about freedom and individual rights. Homeschooling is one of the ways that parents can choose to express those rights, but not about forcing standardized education and ideas onto children.

The current situation

Actually, in recent years, with the development of technology and the changing of people’s attitudes, the implementation of home schooling seems to be less difficult than imagined, even more convenient and efficient and more popular with some people. Some other countries have highly regulated home education programs as an extension of the compulsory school system.

American home-schooled children tend to do better on standardized tests and adapt better to new learning environments, researchers say. A 2009 survey found that homeschoolers accounted for 67 percent of college completion in the United States, compared with 59 percent in public schools and even fewer in private schools with 51 percent.

Claire Dickson, a Boston girl who taught herself at home and was admitted to Harvard, is a successful example of family education. She was home-schooled from kindergarten through high school. It didn’t take long for Claire to change her stereotype of homeschooling. For example, religious classes weren’t required, and she wasn’t need to stay at home all day. She gets more access to learning, in addition to studying all the required courses, she is free to choose the subjects she is interested in. She can do her research outdoors in nature and meet friends of different ages. And her mother, Milva McDonald decided to pull Claire out of public school after she became aware of the shortcomings of public school, which is rigid educational environment.

In terms of the scale of home schools, the trend is increasing year by year. Scholars (1994) estimated that between 10,000 and 15,000 children were home-schooled in 1970. Mark Weston (1996) pointed out that at that time the number of children accept education at home range from 500 thousand to 2 million, accounting for 1% to 4% of total number of students in the United State. And according to statistics released by the national center for education statistics (NCES) in July 2001. In the spring of 1999, about 850,000 to 970,000 school-age children (ages 5 to 17) were homeschooled in the United States, accounting for 1.7% of the total number.

According to the National Home Education Research Institute, there are now more than 2 million children being homeschooled in the US, with the percentage rapidly increasing by 7 percent to 15 percent each year. Homeschooling is legal in all 50 states and in many foreign countries. It can be seen that American homeschooling has grown rapidly and has become a powerful educational force.

From the perspective of education expenditure and effect of home school, home school can be said to be less investment and greater effect. Studies have shown that parents’ education for every child in the school education spending an average of $500, the governments for public school children spending an average of $10,000, about 20 times the homeschooling spending. In addition, the homeschooling students’ academic performances were higher than that of school education, according to a survey from home school children in all subjects scores were 30% higher than their peers in public and private schools.