Lindsey Holstein
ENGL 2000 – Wiedenfeld
Exploratory Essay
March 22, 2014
Home Schooling Versus Public Education John F. Kennedy once said, “Our progress as a nation can be no swifter than our progress in education. The human mind is our fundamental resource.” As a child, I spent a lot of time living in different areas of the country. It was made evident to me that in certain areas, home schooling was highly popular. There are many different views on which kind of schooling is better. Over the years, the home school movement has grown from 100,000 to nearly 2 million within twenty years (Isenberg). A former United States Department of Education employee first proposed the idea of home schooling in 1969. In the years since, home schooling has become more popular and in some cases is a favored form of education. An important issue in the educational world today is whether or not a parent has the right to take their child out of public schools to educate them at home. There are typically three different viewpoints on home schooling: individuals who believe public school will provide the best education, people who believe that home schooling is the best form of education, and those who believe public schooling will provide one with the best education, yet will deny a parent the ability to control what they are being taught. An education that fits the needs of a child is important; that’s why there are things to be considered when choosing an educational path for a child. Each child should be treated differently in each situation. A traditional form of education is public school. Most people tend to send their children to public school, because they went to public school themselves and never thought of giving their children a different opportunity. An additional reason that many families send their children to public school is the fact that public school has already been paid for by your taxes. Why would an individual pay to send their child to private school if they are already paying to send their child to public school? Most parents believe that public schools are changing their methods to provide a more challenging curriculum by piling on homework and adding more tests to the syllabus. This in return causes children to learn more, yet in a non-enjoyable way. Fifty-eight percent of parents of children in public school believe that their students are held to a higher standard than they would be held to if they were being homeschooled (Ray). In fact, 92 percent of superintendents believe that home learners are emotionally unstable, deprived of proper social development and too judgmental of the world around them” according to California researcher Brian Ray. This statistic also helps prove why most parents tend to choose public school over the other schooling options.
Public school education may be getting better, but there are still those who believe that the only good education is a home schooled one. Over the past decade, approximately 18,260 home schools have registered and this number continues to grow (Miesels). Many individuals support home schooling because they believe a child can get a better education at home in comparison to other forms of schooling. Individuals tend to also favor this form of education, because as a part you can control what your child is learning. Some adults believe that they can help develop their child’s character by teaching them from home and controlling what they are being taught (Taylor par. 1). Popular belief holds individuals to believe that home schooled children are socially awkward and interactively deprived, but research shows the opposite. Claudia Hepburn, Director of Education Policy at the Fraser Institute, conducted research that proves that home-schooled children are actually better socialized than their peers (Taylor par. 2). With social and academic activities consuming time and the intense pressures to excel in social cliques, public school presents an obstacle for