Donald Saunders

Homeschooling - Why Would You Want To Homeschool Your Children?

As homeschooling continues to grow in popularity, more and more parents are asking whether or not they should, or indeed could, homeschool their children. The starting point is to examine just why you might want to consider homeschooling and here we try to set you on the road to answering this question.

There are almost as many answers to the question of why you should homeschool your children as there are parents undertaking homeschooling.

Some parents wish to remove their children from a public school system which they see as failing, or as being positively harmful to their children. Other parents wish to school their children at home for religious reasons, or to instill certain values into their children. Whatever the reason, there can be little doubt that most parents choose homeschooling because they believe that it is the best educational choice for their children.

For many there are two sides to homeschooling comprising those things that it brings to the child and those things that it removes from the child's environment. Peer pressure and bullying are rife throughout the public school system today and can place children under considerable pressure and, at times, even place them in danger. Homeschooling your children allows you far greater control over just who your children do and do not come into contact with and how they are influenced.

In terms of a child's growth and academic development there can be little doubt that, in the majority of cases, homeschooling produces superior results and this is evidenced in such things as home schooled children winning the National Spelling Bees and the number of home schooled children attaining degrees (in many cases Master's degrees) at some of our finest universities, often at remarkably young ages.

Of course many people will claim that such children are simply gifted and that their success is due to their natural genius rather than to homeschooling. However, if this were the case then we are certainly blessed with an abundance of geniuses in our younger generation. The simple fact of the matter is that the numbers do not support this view.

The numbers, produced not simply by advocates of homeschooling but by bodies such as the US Department of Education, clearly show that home schooled children do far better than their publicly schooled peers with home schooled children a grade ahead by the age of 12 and as much as four grades ahead by the time they reach the equivalent of the 8th grade.

Homeschooling is certainly not an easy option and is certainly hard work for most parents, especially in the early days, but there is little doubt that it works and the rewards for both children and parents are well worth the effort.

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