Homeschool Controversies: The Mind Is No Border
By Mimi Rothschild Socialization is the process whereby individuals learn and adopt (or adapt) the characteristics of their group such as cultural knowledge, skills, values, attitudes and whatever sort of behavior is generally considered appropriate. There are many agents of socialization. However, the most prominent and powerful are families, peer groups, mass media, and school or education. Although public education likes to frame itself in terms of objective knowledge, the fact is that as a social institution it plays a major role in the socialization of the children it teaches. Home-school, however, changes this and puts the power of socialization vis-à-vis the educator firmly into the parents' hands. Given this, it is not surprising that more and more parents opt every year to home-school their children. What is surprising is that more parents haven't already taken advantage of the great advantages of home-school.
Home-school, which began to gain popularity in the United States in the 1980s, has long been associated with parents concerned about the secular nature of public education and the limited availability or expense of morally “appropriate” private institutions. However, adopting the home-school model over the singular concern of religion is giving way to a plurality of concerns that both parents and students regularly level against in the institutional forms of education, and which turn them toward home-school.
Many parents are growing concerned about an increased focus on image and fashion among many peer groups in many schools. With home-school such issues cease to exist. Furthermore, it is the nature of many public schools to assume or stress a competitive study model. Students are encouraged to be better than others: to out-compete their peers vis-à-vis class percentiles and extra-curricular involvement. Of course, such pedagogy comes at the expense of cooperative and interactive styles of learning as well as the notion of studying or extra-curricular activities for the sake of learning or community involvement itself. It is typical for home-school models to encourage students to pursue their interests and nurture a passion for them. In addition, since each student in home-school is competing with their selves, it is typical for gatherings and functions which bring home-school students together to stress support and cooperation, or plain good-spirited fun.
Whether one's concerns with public education are rooted in quality, religion and morality, or student cultures of image and competition, home-school is a means through which parents may exert some control over how and in what environment their child is educated. While some choose to frame home-school versus public education in terms of protecting the child, it is perhaps more accurate to say that home-school enhances the student's range of choice and potential, for it allows them to pursue in greater depth the academic subjects which interest them most on terms acceptable to the parent and child. At the same time, it frees them from such secular concerns as fashion, competition or whatever other constraints are politically/socially pervasive throughout many public educational institutions.
________________________________________________________________
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.
Electronic reproduction of this article is permitted if content is published unchanged, appropriate credit is given, and the article title links to corresponding article webpage.
