I remain an enthusiastic advocate of homeschooling, but recent years have found me occupied with reforming “real” school. Two much-heralded but very different books, Joseph Murphy’s new survey of the professional literature on homeschooling, Homeschooling in America, and Quinn Cummings’ story of homeschooling her daughter Alice, The Year of Learning Dangerously, rekindled my interest in the movement that once so engaged my family.
A professor of education at Vanderbilt, Murphy is a social scientist, not an advocate, which makes his generally positive evaluation of homeschooling all the more significant. His survey of the social science literature on the topic usefully, if sometimes turgidly, compiles the growing evidence that homeschooled children learn more than their counterparts, at least to the extent that standardized tests measure learning, and are emotionally healthier as well, at least to the extent that psychologists’ “self-esteem and self-concept” scales truly capture emotional health. They volunteer many more hours in their communities and even spend more time participating in extracurricular activities.
While these findings have been widely reported, some of the other studies he describes deserve more attention. For example, low-income children who are homeschooled often reach or exceed national academic averages, whereas the average low-income children in public schools score “considerably below” the national norm.
“It’s easy to postulate that homeschooling parents are unusually committed, but these results still challenge the prevailing orthodoxy that societal problems inevitably hold education hostage.”
Challenge how? Homeschoolers _are_ unusually committed in that they care about their kids enough to actually spend time with them. Public schools are there for everyone’s kids, the kids who do their homework and dress in clean clothes and the ones who were at three different houses during the week depending on the social life of mom or grandma and change their clothes into new every Monday. How many homeschoolers or parents of charter school students would send/take/allow their kids to see The Last Exorcism II. Wanna know what a lot of kids will be talking about Monday? Django Unchained and Gangster Squad get released on DVD next week. Guess what the discussion will be then, even in some Kindergartens?