Homeschool Controversies: Parents Need Alternatives for Failing Schools
By Mimi Rothschild
The fact that our public school system is failing is no secret. While public education might be a good idea in theory, it is very difficult to implement in practice. The institution is desperately top-heavy and ineffectual. It is clear that parents need solid alternatives for their children, but what form those alternatives take is subject to an even more intense debate. Home-school is one option that more and more parents are considering for their children. Nationwide estimates hold that roughly 2% of children in the United States are currently in home-school. There are several arguments commonly used to discourage people from choosing home-school for their children but, as you will see, these arguments are not really valid.
One of the primary arguments for keeping children in traditional schools is that public schools keep our population literate. At public schools, we can make sure a child knows how to read; if the child is in home-school, we have no way to tell. The fact of the matter is that public school in this country is a fairly new phenomenon. Even before public school was mandatory, people in the United States had astonishingly high literacy rates. Regardless of what some people might think, education is actually very important to home-school parents. That is why they don't entrust the education of their children to the government. Children who go to home-school get accepted into college at rates that far surpass their public school peers, scoring higher on college admissions tests than their traditionally schooled counterparts.
Another argument is that home-school and other alternative education options harm the public school system. Critics of home-school have pointed to a number of sensational cases where parents of abused and neglected children were using home-school as a cover for their behavior. Similarly, some cases of forced child labor have come to light where the parents were claiming that they had set up a home-school for their child. This makes it easier for people to brand and identify. If they can point to a home-school family and say that it is a sign of abuse, it makes them feel better but it doesn't make the assertions true. While there are some bad parents who use home-school as a cover, there are also bad parents who send their children to traditional schools every day. That is no reason, in and of itself, to shut down public schools. So why would it be a valid reason to stop home-school?
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mimi Rothschild is a homeschooling parent, children's rights activist, author, and Founder and C.E.O. of online education company Learning by Grace, Inc. Rothschild and her husband of twenty-eight years reside in suburban Philadelphia with their eight children.
Feeling that “our current system of education has broken its promise,” Rothschild co-founded Learning By Grace, Inc. to provide families with Internet-based multimedia education to PreK-12 children all over the world.
In addition to her twenty years of experience as a homeschool mother, Rothschild has written a number of books dealing with education published by McGraw Hill and others. Her Home Education Websites Blog consists of helpful online content and activities for Christian homeschooling families.
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