Tuesday, July 29, 2008

Good thought about socialization and homeschooling

Google Alerts are cool. It is nice to have an automatic process which digs up fascinating posts about homeschooling. If you are not using Google Alerts, I encourage you to check them out.

A recent Google Alert pointed me to Home School and Public School According to Me at Representative's Weblog. The post covers the main reasons why so many parents homeschool. It also addresses the frequent criticism that homeschooled children will "suffer" from a lack of proper socialization. The author also writes that there may be a few, very few, homeschoolers who are doing a worse job than public schools; however, we should oppose attempts by the government to make homeschoolers perform some specific tasks.

While reading this post I was reminded of Joseph Stalin's line "A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic." There are so many children who graduate from government schools with a poor or non-existent education. People who are really worried about education should be focused on public schools and leave homeschoolers alone.


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Technorati tags: homeschooling, homeschool, home school, home education, parenting, children, education

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I found your article on my Google alerts!I agree with you. People who are worried about education really should focus on the public schools instead of picking on homeschoolers. I think the reason they pick on us is because it is easier to pick on the "little guy." Despite the growth in homeschooling over recent years, it is still less common than sending your child to public school, so public school is still the normal or popular kid and we're the scrawny little wierdo that nobody understands.

Henry Cate said...

Currently the trend seems to be that the percentage of children being homeschooled seems to double about every ten years. At some point we won't be the scrawny little kid any more. I don't think we have to be 50% of the population before there will be some fundamental changes. I predict that when we reach 10% public education will undergo some major changes because of homeschoolers.

Anonymous said...

Google Alerts rock! I finally figured out how to use them well after watching Ed Dale's video tutorial in the 30 Day Challenge.

My kids are doing the challenge with me, and there are lots of other homeschool kids signed up as well.

I highly recommend this free program for anyone who is interested in developing Internet skills.

http://www.ThirtyDayChallenge.com/challenge/24104

Henry Cate said...

Sandra, thanks for the link to the challenge. It looks interesting.