Homeschooling Professor Lays it Down

By Mimi Rothschild

I was overjoyed to read an article in the Boston Pilot that served as a pretty good introduction to the joys and advantages of homeschooling. Professor Michael Pakaluk is a professor of philosophy in Cambridge, Mass. who has chosen to homeschool his 16-year old daughter. He provides the following excellent list.

1. It’s efficient.
2. It’s inexpensive.
3. Homeschooling tends to develop good habits of reading.
4. Homeschooled children more easily become friends with their parents.
5. Homeschooling requires that the father play the role that he really should play in his children’s education.
6. Unity of studying and religious belief.
7. Homeschooling tends to foster a lively patriotism.
8. Homeschooled children can enjoy the innocence of childhood longer.
9. Homeschooled children socialize better.

I found the fourth point to be especially interesting. How many teenagers do you know that have healthy, loving relationships with their parents? Now, I’m not talking about parents who give their kids everything they want and allow them to walk all over them. I’m talking about good parents who are still able to claim that they are best friends with their kids. My teens and I have a wonderful relationship that exists because of homeschooling. Sure there are moments of antagonism and times that I must exact punishment, but for the most part, my kids and I enjoy each other’s company.
This may be one of the most coherent, simple, fair, and effortless defenses of homeschooling I have ever read. It is free from propaganda tactics or cheerleading for home education. Everyone considering homeschooling should check out the full article.

2 Responses to “Homeschooling Professor Lays it Down”

1. Crimson Wife says:

   May 8, 2007 at 12:26 am

   The homeschooling community today is so much more diverse than it was even a decade ago. You really can’t generalize from the experiences of the homeschoolers you knew growing up to today’s homeschoolers. The homeschoolers I knew growing up did all fit the stereotype of either being hippies or superfundamentalist Protestants. The homeschoolers of today come from every walk of life. I know Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, progressive/liberal Protestant, Mormon, Jewish, Hindu, Muslim, Unitarian, Baha’i, and atheist homeschoolers. Some are hippies but many are yuppies. There’s just no comparison between what homeschooling community was like in the ’80′s and ’90′s and what it is today!
2. Apollodorus says:

   April 13, 2007 at 2:54 pm

   As someone who has no children, but has known quite a few homeschooled children, I have some reservations about Prof. Pakaluk’s list. At the very least, not all of the points that he makes are necessarily true, and a few of them may be more often false than true. The most important point, of course, is that virtually none of it will be true if the homeschooling isn’t done well. Many of the homeschooled children I knew growing up were being taught by parents who were either not especially well educated themselves or were reasonably educated but not especially good teachers. Teaching is no easy business, and just being smart is definitely not enough.

   That point should be fairly obvious. Others may be less so. For instance, in my experience homeschooled children are definitely not better at socializing. In fact, the greatest worry I have about homeschooling is that it might tend to stunt a child’s social skills. Virtually all of the homeschooled kids I knew growing up — and I knew upwards of twenty of them at the same time — were conspicuously awkward when it came to socializing. They were, in fact, terrified, especially when it came to socializing with people who did not share the views that their parents had taught them. One of the skills that all of us who live in democracies need is the skill of interacting with people who do not share our beliefs. I’m not going to say that the alternatives to homeschooling necessarily do a better job at teaching this skill, but I have noticed an alarming absence of it in the homeschooled children that I have known.

   The idea that homeschooled children more easily become friends with their parents also seems far from obvious to me. Many of the children I knew seemed to think of their parents as unwelcome authority figures whose absence they welcomed. This phenomenon has much to do, I suspect, with the quality of the parents. I can certainly see how homeschooling creates an opportunity for child-parent friendships that are difficult to come by in other environments, but I myself have not seen that potentiality actualized.

   Finally, the homeschooled children that I knew certainly retained some of the innocence of childhood, and many of the children that I have known who have, say, started out in daycare centers at very early ages, have not. Many of the homeschooled kids I knew, though, were not just innocent, but worryingly naive and, frankly, unprepared for the world by the time they were 18. There are ways to avoid this effect, of course, but I have not seen them put into practice.

   None of my worries are directed at any essential features of homeschooling, of course, and I agree that homeschooling creates a greater opportunity to actualize the possibilities that Prof. Pakaluk mentions than most public schools. What seems to me to be unacknowledged is that these things do not follow as a matter of course from the mere fact of homeschooling. I worry about the quality of our public education system, but I worry every bit as much about the quality of homeschooling. Prof. Pakaluk might be a highly educated natural teacher with the dedication and wisdom to do a great job at homeschooling, and so might many other people. What I know from my experience is that not all homeschooling parents fit that description.