The No Fighting, No Biting blog by Kat, homeschooling mom to 5 commented on a paper called The Choice of Public, Private, or Homeschooling. The paper points out the statistics of those who are more prone to choose homeschooling. Out of the ten statistics she quotes, my family and I fit three of the factors.
Seems much more like coincidences if you ask me. We are not in a family where the father has a higher education (which is supposedly common when the children are not young). We do not live in a rural area with no or few private schools. We do not have an infant or toddler, nor did we when we started. Though we are religious, we are not Evangelical Protestants. Also, I, the mother do not have much time and little income… If I wished, I really could use private schools.
For us, homeschooling was not a rational choice born out of circumstance. In fact, it was rather irrational. I had a feeling that my children were being negatively impacted, and I acted. I could have made other “rational choices” but something in my gut told me to bring them home and educate them myself. It was not rational to stop a career as an interior designer specializing in kid’s rooms. It was not rational to forgo the private schools I could afford. It was not rational to cram myself full of educational information and strike out on my own. Decisions that save lives and change fortunes, are seldom rational.
Am I trying to prove my insanity here? Not really. Instead, I am trying to prove that homeschoolers cannot be analyzed down to statistics. Categorizing and analyzing children to find the median mode of education is what has wrecked the educational system to begin with. No two homeschooling families, or homeschoolers, for that matter are the same. They can count us, and our kids’ scores. They can take note of our affiliations; they can guess and conjecture about our motivations. However, at the end of the day, the bar graph will be nothing more than a pretty doodle.
Public education will never change until the “experts” stop trying to turn our kids into statistics and start looking at the individual.
Read why different people homeschool here:
Why I Homeschool My Son with Asperger’s Syndrome.” One Mother’s Story
Mother Knows Best: Why I Homeschool, Part One
Why I Homeschool: An Answer for Kaye