Home Schooling

There's an interesting movement taking place across America these days.  While all over the world tensions are heating up over wars and saber rattling, while the collective economies worldwide are in shambles and while most of the rest of the world, it would seem, are on their Internet blogs, a small, but growing number of parents are beginning to home school their children.

A survey released in December of 2008 done by the U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics reported that in the Spring of 2007, over 1.5 million children were being home schooled.  And that was up over 400,000 kids from just four years earlier.  And almost double the figure from 1999. What's going on?

The top three reasons parents gave for home schooling were:

1. They had concern about the school environment.
2. They wanted to provide more religious or moral instruction.
3. They had dissatisfaction with the academic instruction available.

Most of the concern in reason number one is centered around violence, the threat of violence or the way students were allowed to interact with each other while at school.  As we all remember, there were always bullies and snide little girls who both found a way to play tricks, talk badly about us or in some cases actually cause us minor harm in some way.  Some schools have gone a long way past that sort of behavior these days.  Kids have been injured or killed and not just in the mass slayings so much in the news these days.  We're talking about daily acts of purposeful harm or threats to students by other students.  Maybe it's the violence in the media and movies or the latest gansta hip-hop song lyrics or even fast food; no one knows for sure.  The simple fact remains that it gets harder to deal with every year.  And it's not just the kids making this a difficult matter to deal with.  Teachers have told me it's much worse sometimes to deal with the parents of those kids.  Some parents blame the teachers themselves for the way their kids are and the way they act.  It's as if there's been a paradigm shift in some people's minds that the school system should raise the kids and teach them right from wrong and how to conduct themselves around other people.  What had normally and rightly been a duty and responsibility of parents has now somehow  been shifted toward the school systems.  And in the litigious society we live in, we all know that kind of thing would even be impossible to do even if they wanted to.  Something is indeed out of whack.  It's actually surprising more parents aren't home schooling.

The second reason to home school given above really needs no explanation.  Parents merely want more structure and faith to enter into their children's education.  That's their prerogative.

And the third reason is actually self-explanatory also.  Parents just don't feel their school systems live up to their expectations for a quality education.  They would rather sacrifice their time and money than short their child's education.  A noble expression of love.

Elementary home schooling, preschool homeschooling and even high school homeschooling are on the rise in America.  And for all the right reasons.