Exploring the Benefits of Homeschooling and How to Achieve Your Education Goals
What is Homeschooling and What Are Its Objectives?
Homeschooling refers to the process of educating a child at home instead of sending them off to school. But, of course, that is a simplified definition.
Homeschooling is a decision that many parents make for a wide variety of reasons.
Many families homeschool for religious reasons, but there are also secular and educational factors that exist. One objective is that parents want to teach their children their own culture, religion, or other important values instead of allowing public schools to inundate and indoctrinate them with subject matter outside of reading, writing and arithmetic.
Another objective may be to provide children with opportunities that they would not have in public education, such as hands-on science experiments and real-world educational moments; visiting art museums in person instead of just reading about them, attending subject-specific lectures from experts in various fields instead of reading about it from a textbook.
Regardless of why people choose to homeschool their children, there are a host of benefits associated with this practice.
The Advantages of Homeschooling
There are so many benefits of homeschooling, such as the opportunity for personalized learning and a flexible curriculum.
Children, like adults, are all different and they require different methods of teaching. In a homeschooling environment, a parent who knows their child can customize their teaching methods to their child’s specific learning style.
Learning and Teaching Styles
- I have children who learn in an auditory manner and do very well with verbal teaching. I have children who can learn what they need by reading or seeing it and I have children who need to be hands-on, actively learning in a very physical way.
- Home is Where Great Learning Begins speaks about my youngest son and one of the ways that we work with his need to be hands-on.
- Another of the benefits of homeschooling is the ability to choose the overall homeschooling method that works best for your family.
- You can have a look at Choosing the Best Homeschooling Method for Your Family for more information about the various individual homeschooling methods.
Educational Freedom
There is also a sense of educational freedom without having to worry about the pressures associated with school. This is actually one of the biggest benefits of homeschooling. Public schools have to go by a set of rules that a person, who does not know your child, sets in place. Check out Unbelievable Freedom; Why we Homeschool for a little more on the simple freedom of homeschooling.
- There is nothing at all, written in stone, about when children have to cross certain milestones. The stress of pushing a child to meet an arbitrary timeline can lead to falling further behind. When the timeline is dropped, a more relaxed child can learn at their own pace and surprisingly, many will excel beyond those timelines.
You may want to have a look at Homeschooling-Children Know Best; Listen Completely, as it talks specifically about learning, outside of these arbitrary timelines.
Disadvantages of Homeschooling?
If you do a basic search on the internet you will find a host of what some people say is the ‘disadvantages of homeschooling’. Typically the people writing those articles are ones who do not homeschool and therefore do not understand the benefits of homeschooling. You will read things like:
- It takes a lot more time, effort, and work than sending your child to public or private school. Well, yes, a parent has to teach, or, depending on the curriculum, at least oversee the work being done. By that measure, it takes more time than dropping them off at a public school.
- And, of course, my favorite ‘disadvantage’ (*insert eye roll here) is Socialization. I won’t go into that one again here, however, you can read an in-depth article about it at Socialization; The 1 ‘S’ Word I Hate. This article gives stats and Ph.D. level research along with personal stories and examples concerning how wrong this ‘disadvantage’ is.
The Benefits of Homeschooling can Lead to the Outcome your Child Needs
When looking at the benefits of homeschooling, of course, you always want to factor in the advantages and disadvantages. However, the main point to consider is the outcome. What is the potential outcome of taking over the knowledge and learning that your child undergoes in school? Let’s take a look at it.
When you control the learning environment for your children, you can give them the space to explore what their interests truly are, therefore getting an idea of their natural aptitudes in each particular area. This is a terrific way to help them get on a path toward their future career.
An Example of the Benefits of Homeschooling
For example, if your daughter is showing a strong aptitude for science and these subjects hold a great deal of interest for her, then you can weigh her subjects more heavily to science, allowing her to further research that field for herself.
- Maybe you offer the study of zoology, which is not typically a high school offering, and she finds her passion for it. The outcome in this situation could be that she learns, early on, that she needs to be on a path toward veterinary school.
On the flip side of that same example, maybe she truly enjoys the subject matter in zoology but finds that she leans more toward wanting to own and operate a ranch or even an animal rescue.
- Helping her by crafting her education toward business-type subjects; accounting and finance, management and leadership, etc. would be more beneficial, allowing her to design the outcome that she wants.
Children, when given the right opportunities, have a remarkable ability to learn and make these kinds of decisions. They can best do that when they are not inundated with all of the additional stresses and pressures that come along with public education.
Problems Facing Children
It is widely known that peer pressure is, by far, the most stressful part of a child’s daily life, many times without a parent knowing or understanding what is going on. If you do not know what your child is facing, it is hard to know what to do to help them.
As if peer pressure weren’t enough, we are seeing, more and more, that public schools are pushing way more social issues and teaching way less educational material to our children.
If there was a bright side to the Covid shutdown, it was that these underhanded methods came to light and parents started taking more control of their children’s education.
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