Assumptions People Make About Homeschooling

Last week, I noticed articles both online and in Time Magazine about a German family that moved to the United States in order to continue to homeschool their children. Apparently in Germany, homeschooling is illegal to such an extent that parents who try to do homeschooling can lose custody of their children, and this particular family repeatedly got in trouble with the law because of their decision to homeschool. They moved to the United States because here, homeschooling is legal nationwide. In some states, homeschoolers have to take standardized tests or alert the government of the fact that they are homeschooling, while in others, like Illinois, there are no laws at all regarding how home education must be conducted.

Having been homeschooled from grade 3 on through high school, there isn’t much about home education that I don’t know. But after having read the articles about this German family, I decided to try to find out just what exactly it is that people have against homeschooling. What I found pretty much amounted to nothing but a lot of false assumptions.

Most of the articles I found about homeschooling (with the exception of those written by actual homeschoolers) stressed that children who are homeschooled are “unsocialized“, which is a common misperception started by traditionally-schooled individuals who apparently don’t realize that “unsocialized” isn’t even a real word. Many people with little knowledge on the subject of homeschooling assume that homeschooled kids never get out and are locked up by themselves all the time when in reality, most homeschoolers belong to multiple homeschooling social groups, are involved in several extra-curricular activities, and even take classes at community colleges once they reach high school age. When I was in junior high and homeschooled, I went to parties with friends, played soccer with the neighbourhood kids, and spent afternoons instant messaging my friends online just like anyone else. Hell, by the time I reached high school, I was spending so much time hanging out with my friends and going to classes that I was hardly ever at home. Now, I make lots of “normal” people feel really naïve when they say to me “oh you poor thing, you missed the prom” and I tell them about how I did in fact go to a homeschooler’s prom as well as many other dances.

A lot of other websites about homeschooling state that most home educators do homeschooling because of their conservative religious beliefs. This is pretty hilarious to me, considering I’ve known a couple hundred homeschoolers and can count on one hand the number of them who chose to do homeschooling for religious purposes. A majority of the homeschoolers I’ve known are liberals, some of whom are also atheists, vegetarians, environmentalists, feminists, pagans, radical artists, or individuals who are non-conformists in some other way. Most of them homeschool because they aren’t happy with the public school system while others homeschool because their children have learning disabilities, severe allergies, or are advanced for their age and would be disadvantaged if placed in a grade according to their age. In other words, public schools believe in conformity, whereas homeschoolers believe everyone should be allowed to be unique and pursue their own goals.

Possibly the most ridiculous piece of information I found on the subject of homeschooling was on Wikipedia’s page about homeschooling, which stated that people are opposed to homeschooling because of the potential for unmonitored child abuse. It appears that one woman took her children out of school and was later charged with murdering them. Of course to say that this is a reason to be opposed to homeschooling is about as logical as saying that because one man from California robbed a bank, all men from California are likely to be bank robbers. I’ve known homeschooling families who have experienced all kinds of problems, from severe illness to financial difficulties to divorce, yet generally, I’ve found that homeschooling parents do homeschooling because they are concerned about the well-being of their children. To assume that homeschooling and child abuse are related only proves that the person making that assumption is very uneducated when it comes to the subject of home education.