A Look At The Pros And Cons Of Home Schooling

Are you trying to decide if home schooling is right for you? Consider these pros and cons of home schooling to help you make your decision.

Pros And Cons Of Home Schooling: The Pros

What are the positive things about home schooling? There are so many, you could read about them for hours. But here are just a few:

Nurturing Home Environment

What can be better than having your child spend his learning time at home, in an environment that you as a parent have complete control over? Public school teachers try their best, but your children simply can’t get the supervision in public schools that they get at home. Virtually every public school has its bullies. If there are bullies in the home school, they are usually the student’s brothers or sisters, and you can stop the bullying before it even starts.

Children Learn Better In The Safety Of Their Homes

This is a sensitive subject to bring up, and no disrespect is meant to the families who have lost children because of violence in schools. But let’s face it, there has never been a home school shooting yet, and chances are good there never will be one. Public school shootings, on the other hand, continue to happen in spite of all the safety measures.

We have to include the issue of safety when we discuss the pros and con of home schooling. With all the violence and dissonance in the world today, there are lots of weird characters out there, and some of them could end up in your child’s public school.

Parents Control The Curriculum

In every discussion of the pros and cons of home schooling, this is the number one reason why parents home school their children. Parents – especially Christian parents – believe the secular public school curriculum teaches too much theoretical instruction about evolution, not enough instruction about sexual morality, and too much of a secular viewpoint about history and social studies.

Parents who home school their children integrate traditional subjects, like math and reading, with a version of other subjects – science, social studies, and history – that fits into the religious and moral beliefs of the family. Home school parents get to teach reading from The Bible.

Pros And Con Of Home Schooling: The Cons

Critics of home schooling say that home school children are not properly socialized. However, home schooling always involves schooling outside the home, where children interact with people of all different ages and diversities, as opposed to just interacting with children their own age.

The older your children get the more they are expected to learn and the curriculum is suddenly more difficult than it was a few years ago. To home school high school children may seem like a really daunting feat. You may not feel as confident teaching your children when it comes to high school level home school. This really doesn’t have to be a scary experience, there are plenty of materials that can help you along the way and options available to make teaching high school in home school an enjoyable experience.

Qualifications

It may seem like teaching high school for home school is really out of your depth. Add to that the pressure of preparing your child for college and it only seems to become more difficult. Relax, you will be able to find a good curriculum aimed at high school level children with teaching aids to help you. This includes Cd’s, videos, tests, quizzes and online learning. All these support systems will make it considerably easier for you to teach high school subjects.

Outside Help

There is also the option of hiring a tutor for specific subjects if you really feel incapable of teaching. Consider getting another home schooling family with high school age children to join you for these tutoring sessions. This will help with the cost and it is always helpful to share ideas with other kids. There are also distance learning courses, online high school courses and community college courses.

These options are especially helpful if in addition to teaching high school level home school you have younger children. Another thing that you should consider is looking for support groups that are geared towards high school level home school. You will be able to get advice, tips and just have somewhere to share your experiences.

Electives

It is important to have electives included in your home school high school program. Find activities like theater, choir and sports activities that your child can sign up for. Think about what subjects to supplement the core curriculum with. A foreign language is part of a well rounded high school curriculum. Discuss what subjects your child is interested that may help him or her later on when applying for college or their future vocation.

If your child is going to apply for college then consider having an SAT prep course. These are extremely helpful and you can do them yourself at home. If your child already has a specific vocation or career in mind then think about internships and apprenticeships. This will help your child decide if this is the career that they have in mind and broaden their choices.