Homeschooling Report Card

 The Frasier Institute is a Canadian organization which believes we are best served by

a free and prosperous world where individuals benefit from greater choice, competitive markets, and personal responsibility. Our mission is to measure, study, and communicate the impact of competitive markets and government interventions on the welfare of individuals.

They have recently issued a paper titled Home Schooling: From the Extreme to the Mainstream that takes a look at homeschooling in Canada and the USA.  Below are some excerpts from the report with some comments by me. I have excerpted this from here.

Home educated children enjoy no significant advantage if one or both parents are certified teachers.

While the study sees this statement as a conclusion I would like to draw a further conclusion based not on empirical evidence but anecdotal experience.  Regardless of how good the teacher may be, no one, and I mean no one, can show the child the love a parent will.  And that will impact their learning more than any amount of education the teacher may have.

Though children whose parents have university degrees score higher on tests of academic achievement than other home schooled children, home education appears to mitigate the harmful effect of low parental education levels. That is, public schools seem to educate children of poorly educated parents worse than do the poorly educated parents themselves. One study found that students taught at home by mothers who had never finished high school scored a full 55 percentile points higher than public school students from families with comparable education levels.

Along with the comments above, may I add the benefits of the small class sizes in the home school.  And the lack of unruly students that the school authorities are unable to deal with.  Those problems don’t exist in our home school.

Despite a widespread belief that home educated students are not adequately socialized, the preponderance of research suggests otherwise. The average Canadian home schooled student is regularly involved in eight social activities outside the home. Canadian home schoolers watch much less television than other children, and one researcher found that they displayed significantly fewer problems than public school children when observed in free play.

My personal favorite.  May we now finally put the foolish socialization argument to rest.  Frankly, I don’t want my children to be like their peers in the public schools.  I prefer well behaved, respectful, kind children.

I’ll now step off my soapbox and give you time to read the report for youself.  It’s in pdf format so you may download, print and share with all the doubters and nay-sayers.