Home Education: Education for the Real World

My wife and I decided long before our first child was born in 1983 that we would teach our children at home. At the time, it was illegal for parents to educate their own children beyond 7 years old in our state (Iowa).

We think home education is the right choice for our children, and strongly suspect it's right for yours, too. If you fall into any of the following categories, you really should read the information on this page and use it to launch your studies into home education:

1. I'm thinking about teaching my kids at home.
2. I think home-schooling is wrong.
3. It doesn't make any difference how you educate your kids, as long as you set a good example at home.

If you're thinking about teaching at home I hope to  help you decide in the affirmative. This essay will show you why you're making a very wise decision. 

If you think home-schooling is wrong, then it's likely you're simply misinformed. You need to read this page and learn more. 

Finally, if you don't think it matters where your kids are educated, then your not misinformed - you're deluded. Your children are too important for you to be indifferent. This page will help you get interested in your children again.

What is Home Education?

Home education is just what it sounds like: Parents educating their children outside the normal institutional school classroom. 

Some parents categorize educational choices as home, Christian/Catholic or public. Since most of the problems of the public school system are actually symptoms of the institutional setting in which "education" takes place there, I prefer to lump public, Catholic and Christian schools into the term "institutional schools" and treat them together. I agree that Christian schools can teach biblical principles, but they fall way short of what parents can do on their own.

Institutional schools are a relatively new phenomena. Historically, most education has been done in the home. George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Albert Einstein, and many other great men and women of history were taught at home. 

Most people are surprised to find out that in the United States, literacy among the general population has been declining steadily since education went from being done in homes to being done in government-controlled institutions. 

Home-schooled children go to Harvard, MIT, state universities, Bible colleges and seminaries. Most universities are happy to have these children as their students. They tend to be high-performers and are better prepared for college-level material than their peers.

Does Home Education Work?

One piece of evidence suggesting that home education works is standardized test results. Contrary to popular belief, home-schoolers can take the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills (ITBS) and other standardized tests at home, provided the parent meets the qualifications for administering the test (for ITBS a college degree is required). Home-schooled children score significantly higher than their institutionally schooled peers on standardized tests.  

Christian/Catholic school students outperform public school students, though this fact is not immediately obvious since the norms for private school students are artificially inflated by the test scorers to reduce the apparent differences. In fact, much of the improvement being shown over the last few years by public school students on tests such as the SAT and ACT are a result of changes to questions and scoring criteria.

When tested for social skills, children educated at home generally have better self esteem and confidence. They get along better with their peers and with adults.

Why does Home Education Work?

There are several characteristics of home education that destines it to work better than institutionalized education. Similarly, there are characteristics of institutional education which dooms it to fail.

First, home education is one-on-one. Think about it: What do we do in an institutional school when we have students who have trouble learning? We get the student a tutor or move them into a special class with a higher teacher-to-student ratio. If we had the funds and the teachers, we'd do this with all students.

But home schools can have a high teacher-to-student ratio and practice one-on-one teaching in a cost-effective manner. Home education allows the child to be taught using techniques that all educators would agree are the best. 

Second, home education insures mastery of each subject studied. It is inherently "outcome based" in the best sense of the term. That is, the child does not go on to new material until he or she has mastered the current lesson. 

My daughter asked me once, "When do I get old enough to start getting grades in my subjects?" I replied, "You get straight A's in everything." I was telling the truth. It's not that she's brilliant; it's that we just don't move on until she has perfected her skills.

It's important to realize that this means that in some subject areas my child might be performing "below grade level." For example, when my oldest girls were in forth and fifth grade, respectively, they both were working on math that was at the early fourth grade level. But as they've grown up, they've caught on and are working at grade level for their age. (Our oldest will "graduate" just before her 17th birthday, and will have completed advanced high school math before entering college to pursue an engineering degree.)

Third, home education is whole-life-based. I like to say that our "school year" is 365.25 days, and our "school day" is 24 hours long. This is not stretching the truth. Because my wife and I are the primary educators of our children, we're much more aware of how every experience fits into education. Trips to the grocery store become math and reading lessons. Vacations are geography and social studies lessons. Life around the house teaches social interaction skills with people of all ages. Playing outside becomes a science lesson. (Our "book learning" time, in case you're wondering, is about 2-4 hours per day for about 160 "school days." This is plenty of time for all of our five children to get their lessons done.)

Fourth, home education provides better socialization than institutional schools. This is an area that most people don't understand. They think we're depriving our children of opportunities to socialize with other kids, and hence opportunities to learn important social skills. 

Where do you think your five-year-old will learn how to solve problems in interpersonal relationships better? In a group of 20 other five-year-olds or one-on-one with his mom? I'd rather have my kids learn my wife's manners than the manners of other children their age.

The other important socialization element in the home school is learning to relate to older and younger people. Kids learn to help their younger siblings (our youngest learned all his letters and numbers from his older sisters by the time he was three) and observe the growing responsibilities and privileges of their older brothers and sisters. Further, mom and dad provide solid figures of authority, examples of good manners and an example of a loving relationship. At home, we're a loving family. In the institutional classroom, it's 30 kids vs. one teacher in a no-holds-barred contest for domination of the school room.

Why Does Institutional School Fail?

Institutional schools are doomed to fail their students. Period.

Student performance tends to follow a bell shaped curve. At one end there is a small number of very high achievers. At the other end is a small number of "challenged" students who have trouble keeping up. In the middle are the 70% or so that are about average.

Institutional schools by design must serve the needs of the average student.The high achiever is going to be under-challenged and the slow learner is going to get left behind. 

The best schools offer advanced classes for the best students. But remember: We're teaching our kids in about 2 hours a day, giving them the rest of the day to pursue their own interests. The advanced students in the institutional school are stuck for six to eight hours in a school building. So even though you construct curriculum to challenge them, they're still wasting lots of time. 

As an "advanced student" myself I can tell you the result: You quickly learn that the advanced stuff is just harder, and it's easier to coast with the rest of the class until they've caught up than it is to go out of your way to get special attention. So institutional schools by design turn great students into average students.

Perhaps worse off are the slow learners. No matter what you call their "special class" they quickly figure out that they must be dumber than everyone else. Armed with an excuse to fail, they go through the rest of their lives expecting to be underachievers - and finding those expectations met. Institutional schools by design turn slow learners into failures.

Institutional schools feed the formation of peer groups and peer pressure. At home, a child's best friends are his siblings and mom and dad. In general this "peer group" won't steer the home school student wrong. On the other hand, the institutional peer group, made up of others of the child's own age, form their own value system fed from a "lowest common denominator" of the group's sense of right and wrong. It's no wonder groups of kids - especially when they reach their teen years and have spent more time in the loving care of the peer group than their own families - tend to get in trouble.

Education in public schools (and some Christian/Catholic schools) is dominated by a strong teachers union. If you've read any of my soapbox articles or book reviews you know that I have strong feelings about the evolution of companies from organizations where the customer and the product come first to organizations where the bottom line comes first. Schools are no exception. While public education may have started with high goals and expectations, the dominant issues today center around job security and pay for teachers. 

Teachers are paid by seniority, not by performance. It's hard to fire a bad teacher, especially if he or she has been around a while. The National Education Association resists all efforts to require teachers to perform to a set of standards, preferring instead to rely on union muscle to assure teachers of jobs from year to year.

This is not to say there are no good teachers. But my experience leads me to believe there are few great teachers who last more than a few years. And even if you know some great teachers, I doubt there are enough to go around.

Bob Dole hit the nail on the head in his acceptance speech at the 1996 Republican National Convention:

"I say this not to the teachers, but to their unions: If education were a war, you would be losing it. If it were a business, you would be driving it into bankruptcy. If it were a patient, it would be dying.

"To the teachers unions I say, when I am president, I will disregard your political power, for the sake of your children, the schools and the nation. I plan to enrich your vocabulary with those words you fear — school choice, competition and opportunity scholarships — so that you will join the rest of us in accountability, while others compete with you for the commendable privilege of giving our children a real education."

What About College?

We are now in the unusual position of having home-educated two of our kids from birth through high school. We're finding that people have a lot of questions about college for home-schooled kids.

Our oldest daughter finished her high school curriculum a year ahead of schedule. She was initially accepted into the College of Engineering at the University of Iowa, then later switched to Theater at St. Ambrose University in Davenport, IA.

Our second daughter finished high school two years early and has taken classes at a local community college along with two years toward a Computer Science degree at Coe College in Cedar Rapids, IA.

Most of the schools had ready answers for home schooled students seeking admission. For example, the University of Iowa Web site said we needed transcripts and that one of the parameters in the admission process was where you placed within your class. We sent an email to the director of admissions and were told we just needed to provide a list of "classes" and curriculum used. If she had taken any classes at traditional schools or community colleges we should include transcripts for those classes.

The school uses a formula to determine admission, but none of the values made sense for home-schooled kids. No problem, they said. Just send a letter explaining your school experience, any special activities you were involved in, etc. and the admissions committee would review it and let us know.

One school required a GED for home-schooled students. We found this unreasonable and unfair. After all, our kids completed all the legal requirements for high school under the law. If they had to get a GED, why doesn't a public or Catholic school student have to do likewise? We appealed this requirement and were surprised to find that they were very willing to work around it. The requirement wasn't mean to be demeaning, but was placed there out of ignorance.

Two main things we learned: First is to find out when and where SAT/ACT tests are being offered and make sure you take those at the appropriate time and have the results sent to the schools you're interested in.

Second, we were taken by surprise by the foreign language requirements. I figured there were graduation requirements that included foreign language, but at the UI they require two years of high school foreign language for admission. Our daughter got in just fine but had to fulfill the foreign language requirement as soon as possible.

Conclusion

Home education is better for children, and as a result better for our communities and our nation. While students in institutional schools are killing each other, home-educated kids are winning spelling bees and growing into tomorrow's leaders. It's worth going without a few of life's luxuries for a parent to spend the formative years of a child's life teaching him or her at home.

I could continue on a number of topics. I'm interested in hearing your questions or comments. Send me an email if you have ideas for more topics.