The Advantages of Home Schooling
Abstract
The recent increase in popularity of homeschooling makes it one of the most discussed education-related topics nowadays. It receives lots of attention from media and government. According to statistics the number of home schooled children in the United States has increased from 850,000 in 1999 (Loon, 2015) to around 2.2 million in 2015 (Ray, 2015). The paper covers the main features of homeschooling, and briefly describes its most popular types, highlighting the differences between home-based and classroom education. The main focus of the paper is the advantages of homeschooling, and its benefits for the intellectual and psychological development of the learner’s personality. The effectiveness of homeschooling is supported by up-to-date data from Brian D. Ray’s research on the topic. The increase of popularity of home-based education is supported by statistical data.Key words: homeschooling, education, psychology.
The Advantages of Home Schooling
Education is one of the topics which will probably always be one of the most discussed ones. The question about the quality of education worries not only parents, but also government and educational workers. Contemporary education has improved greatly in comparison with the state of education in the previous century, but it is still far from perfect. Modern technologies contribute a lot to the ways children could be educated nowadays, and that is why more and parents in the United States of America prefer homeschooling to traditional classroom education. With the help of homeschooling the education process could be made less troublesome, and more interesting, innovative, and personally oriented. And though homeschooling has many opponents among both parents and educators, it proves to be practical and effective as this type of education has many advantages in comparison to traditional schooling. Though the concept of homeschooling might seem something completely new at first sight, its roots go back to 16th and 17th centuries, when education was a privilege of rich people of higher social ranks, whose children were usually taught at home by private teachers.
Nowadays the term rarely needs explanation. It is home-based education conducted by either a parent or a tutor, “an age-old traditional educational practice that a decade ago appeared to be cutting-edge and “alternative” but is now bordering on “mainstream” in the United States” (Ray, 2015). This form of education appears to be the fastest-growing one in the United States nowadays. Homeschooling in its modern shape started in the 1970s, having two differently motivated groups of advocates, one of which were “fervently religious and … the rest might best be characterized as the philosophical heirs of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.” (Guterson, 1992) Therefore there were two major purposes of educating children at home back then, states Eric J. Isenberg in his article What Have We Learned About Homeschooling? For those motivated by religion it was to prevent their offspring from objectionable curriculum. The purpose of another group was to provide their children with more academic education. (Isenberg, 2007) Nowadays home educators could be subdivided …
