Homeschooling Case

Homeschooling has been a popular schooling choice and has gotten to be increasingly more popular to this day. To homeschool means learning outside of the public school environment in the home instead of sending the children off to school. Mainly, parents choose homeschooling because they want an alternative to the problems that may arise in public school. "According to the most recent federal estimates, the number of homeschooled children in the U.S. has nearly doubled from 850,000 in 1999 to 1.5 million in 2007." (Rotherham 2012). Homeschooling has been criticized for many reasons, but there are many reasons why homeschooling is a good choice for a child. The reasons I am going to concentrate on are the parent being the teacher, the child's social skills, and learning skills.

One of the most basic issues involved in homeschooling is that parents don't have a teaching degree. This is a very strong argument because the student will get second rate education. A high school teacher has many obstacles that he or she has to deal with and doesn't necessarily have time to focus on one child's needs or problems. A parent can detect a problem the moment a child is suffering in a subject; therefore, the parent can easily assess the issue and address it immediately. "More than two decades of research have shown that homeschooling - otherwise known as home-based education or home education - is associated with relatively high academic achievement, healthy social, psychological, and emotional development, and success into adulthood for those who were home educated." (Ray, 2010). Those who take the stand that children shouldn't be homeschooled argue that homeschooling deprives children of many skills they would learn in regular schooling. One of the skills that those might argue that homeschooled children would be deprived of is being forced into group activities and teamwork. "One of the great advantages of homeschooling in a healthy family is that, as children grow older, they learn to take on responsibilities as apprentice parents for their younger siblings, thus growing gradually and comparatively seamlessly into adult life without the jarring interruption of spending their adolescent years in junior high and high school." (Johnson, 2008). When people hear the word homeschool, right away they imagine kids stuffed up in the house all day with their parents doing schoolwork. Homeschooling actually has a lot more than public schools have to offer including outdoor experiments. Also most of the home school schedules include a time every day for exercise, so the family can go out on a bike ride, or the child can go meet kids at the park.

When kids are in private or public schooling they have to follow the same schedule that the school gives, but homeschooling gives children the option to work at their own pace. "Children who are homeschooled also benefit from having more one-on-one