Here's an essay by a home-schooled college student, who thinks that it's a lousy way to get an education:

Raposa told us that prior to the founding of Jamestown, England's only other experience with colonization was in Ireland. Raising my hand, I suggested that the English rule of Normandy constituted a sort of reverse colonization. "I've never thought of that," said the professor, who then felt obligated to explain to the rest of the historically ignorant class why England was connected to Normandy. Further research reminded me that Wales was also a pre-Jamestown English colonization experience.

One obstacle to actual education during this class was that the lacking education of my obviously public-schooled classmates required precious lecture time be spent discussing historical facts any high-school graduate should already know.

"Washington didn't actually chop down a cherry tree," the professor told us, eliciting a surprised response from the students. Ferdinand and Isabella drove the Moors from Spain in addition to funding Columbus' voyage, taught the professor, who astounded my classmates when he said scientists in Columbus' time didn't actually believe in a flat earth. Only my hand went up when the professor asked how many of us knew what the Crusades were, so he had to spend twenty minutes explaining them. The incident I'll never forget because it was so indicative of the ignorance of both the students and the professor came a few weeks into the course. During a break, one student mentioned to Raposa that he'd been reading and came across an unfamiliar term. "What does 'Anglo-Saxon' mean?" Professor Raposa hesitated a minute, saying he wasn't entirely certain of the term's origin. The answer is pretty simple, especially for a history major like our professor. The Anglo-Saxons were the pre-Norman inhabitants of England. The term is derived from the coupling of the Angle tribe and the Saxons of Saxony, Germany.

I didn't learn a thing from my entire history class. Well, no. That's not true. I did learn about staple crop economies. I told my family about this at dinner one night, however, and my 14-year-old sister piped up. "Oh, I already know about those. I just read about them in a book the other day."

Well, I did learn one other thing. Remember those papers about Garrison's essays I mentioned? I paid special attention to the first two papers, researching Garrison's essays, analyzing them, and refuting them. I met all the requirements for the assignment, even abiding by the page-limit, yet both my articles only received B's. The professor explained that he didn't want us going beyond the assignment requirements, so he marked my papers down. I learned that if you want to succeed in college, you should only do the bare minimum.

This was just one class. I could mention my journalism class, which taught me nothing. Or my argumentation class, which taught me nothing. Or even my American government class at the highly-regarded Patrick Henry College, which taught me (you guessed it!) nothing. This isn't intended as a commentary on my own intelligence, as I'm a mediocre student at best. Rather, the problem is that college classes these days don't teach anything that the average student from a good homeschool high-school hasn't already learned.

The whole systems seems to be broken, from K12 through grad school. I suspect that it's got the same problem that the health-care system does--the people who are getting the service aren't the ones paying for it.

There seem to be several stereotypes of home-schooled kids. One is that they tend to be far more knowledgeable than their public school educated peers. Another is that they tend to be socially inept and/or highly religious (I'm not saying that these are causal relationships, only that the stereotype links them).

But how much of this is true? I find it hard to believe that a substantial majority of home-schooled kids are smarter or more knowlegeable than public-schooled children. We have to acknowledge that some kids are simply going to have lower IQs regardless of the form of education they receive. And also that some parents who home-school their kids are either not going to do it well, do it right, or have the skills needed to teach more advanced classes. Can you really home-school a child in algebra? Maybe. Trig? Calculus? And how many parents will have an education level that enables them to successfully home-school? Can a parent who has not gone to college teach a child to prepare them for college?

I'm agnostic on the whole issue, but just as we can have lousy public school teachers, I think we can also have lousy parent teachers. So why should we expect someone like this smart kid in the post to be the norm, rather than the exception?

How do we know that people are not simply taking a few brilliant home-schooled kids and holding them up as examples of the superiority of their system, when they are really simply exceptions to the rule?

And also that some parents who home-school their kids are either not going to do it well, do it right, or have the skills needed to teach more advanced classes.

Bias warning - we home school our two youngest boys. Correction - we're doing distance learning with a school district across the state. The diff is, really, meaningless save that they provide a cirriculum.

It is possible that parents who home school self-select for the ability to teach. If you don't do well you'll soon know it because your kids won't be learning anything.

I can't speak to the knowledge about teaching advanced classes; we've not gotten there yet. However there are a variety of means to gain the knowledge. Engage a tutor, learn the material yourself (staying one lesson ahead is reccomended) co-op with other parents etc.

And how many parents will have an education level that enables them to successfully home-school?

It is not, I submit, merely a matter of having an education level, but an attitude and willingness to dive in and learn.

I'm not a fanatic on the subject; but I do favor methods that work over ones that do not.

The problem with the public school system is that most of the people who are getting the service don't want it - they see it as a boring waste of time, and their parents see it as free daycare. Some of the math classes my father teaches have 50% failure rates - but you can be certain that homeschooling wouldn't do better, because parents who don't care that their kids have been truant 15 days per semester certainly aren't going to care enough to teach those kids well themselves!

Yes, many public schools perform poorly at teaching bright motivated kids as much as they could learn - but where they're all utter failures is at teaching unmotivated kids to want to learn. I suspect that home schooling and private schooling work well partly because any parents who value education enough to make such a large time or financial commitment are much more likely to pass that sense of value on to their children. I wonder if voucher systems might help at that psychological aspect of schooling - even if the schools don't get any better, perhaps parents who are frequently reminded of the cost of their children's education will take a more active interest in it.

I've always felt a compromise would work best. If there was a way for kids to be homeschooled part time and still pick up a handful of classes, stuff the parent might not have time or knowledge to teach and a chance to get a bit of socialization in. In some cases that might be math, or even athletics or drama.

If they can have work experience classes that get kids out of a period or two of class... Maybe they can give a chunk of voucher money to the school in exchange for cooperation.

The other option is for homeschooling parents to work together. If you have a small group of parents some are more likely to be good at some subjects and others at different subjects. Tuesdsay is Trig day at the Thompson house. Kids learn in far smaller groups. You just need more homeschool kids to get a system like that working.

I'd also like to add that this is more of a blast against the university's admission policies/requirements and ability to judge ability level than anything else. I noticed this myself in college where I noticed some people got immediately into impacted majors because of their high GPA scores but then had to go through basic reading and math classes. What's the point of a high GPA if you didn't learn anything?

Can you really home-school a child in algebra? Maybe. Trig? Calculus?

I think so. Indeed, I remember my Middle School Algebra teacher having to meet with parents who were upset that she gave students "Zeros" on homework where parents taught their children how to solve binomials in a simplified manner rather than the "distributive property". So I can say I witnessed a whole class of students that were taught algebra at home. I must admit I learned most of my Trig and Calculus in public school. But I was very stunned to learn that many college students were taking Algebra (which I learned in middle school and from my parents).

"I was myself spared the intellectual humiliations of a college education."

(H. L. Mencken, The Trenton, N. J., Sunday Times, April 3, 1927)

Me, too.

I think that Roy S is on to something when he brings up "unmotivated kids". I watched my college decline in skill level and motivation as the years passed. Campus activities died off, everyone left for the weekend, and the overall quality of education declined.

I was fortunate enugh to live in a school district in High School that had great teachers who knew how to motivate kids to learn, and it hemlped me out -- high school was at least twice as challenging as college was for me.

But, as I progressed through college and watched the incoming freshman classes, the level of motivation kept steadily declining to the point where less than 50% of the incoming class bothered to attend the week-long orientation sessions that were set up just for them.

I hesitate to plame the internet, text messaging, and video games, as they are all just strawmen. For some reason, parents seem to be less and less interested in their childrens' success levels and motivations, in an effort to "be their friend", "be cool", and afford plasma TVs.

Perhaps I'll see it differently when I have kids, but the general sense of motivation and responsibility seemed to fall into the gutters for anyone born in the late 80's who grew up through the 90's.

The economic problem underlying bad education (and bad childrearing in general) is that parents don't have a large enough economic stake in the success of their children. Education presumably is correlated with future income, but the parents don't get that income, the children do.

This is the same problem as low birth rates in western countries. The earliest form of child neglect is to neglect to cause the child come into existence in the first place.

A solution: have a portion of the future earnings of the children be remitted to the parents, for example through the income tax system.

Some legitimate research has found that overall, home schoolers have about the same success/failure rates as students who attend public schools.

I also recall reading an article some years ago about students from the worse schools in Los Angeles not only getting accepted to Stanford, but on scholarship.

School is highly dependent on personality and how parents view its importance (I do very poorly in classroom settings and to this day can't sit in a lecture based classroom more than a few hours. My son is worse than me. Unfortunately, the modern 'must test' environment are removing alternate forms of education.)

One last point often lost; public schools are mandated by law to do much more than just teach. All sorts of government programs are implemented through the schools. In addition, they are forced to accept students who are "high maintanance" for highly dubious social reasons. (In years past my children have had fellow students so severely retarded and/or handicapped, that they consumed a very disproportionate amount of the teacher's time and school resources.)

Can you really home-school a child in algebra? Maybe. Trig? Calculus?

My son, eleven years old, is home-schooling. He studies for seven hours,
monday through friday, and three hours saturday morning. This year,
among other subjects, he's studying, on alternate days, pre-calculas
and advanced placement physics.

Today's lesson was in physics. The real heart of the lesson is the
problem set. He did 23 physics problems. To give an idea of the
level he's working at, I'll quote four of them.

6. In order to find the local attraction of gravity on top of a
high mountain, Mick decided to construct a simple pendulum. He
attached his 0.180 kg compass to a piece of string that was 0.650 m
long. The radius of the compass was 0.03 m. He then pulled the
compass back and released it. He noticed that it took 1.63 seconds
for the compass to return to its initial position. What value for
the local attraction of gravity could Mick calculate from this data?

11. A boy attempting to pull a 48.7 kg crate was unable to do so
and found that he was being pulled in the opposite direction at an
acceleration of 1.12 m/s(2). The coefficient of kinetic friction
between the boy and the surface was 0.512. The radius of the pulley
was 12.5 m and its moment of inertia was 2.97 x 10(-2) kg m(2).
Find the mass of the boy.

9. The initial voltage across the capacitor is 51.5 volts. The
switch is closed. What will be the voltage across the capacitor
when t = 0.15 seconds?

18. Find the heat energy required to raise the temperature of
352 grams of ice at -12.0 degrees C to water vapor at 307 degrees
C.

[From "Physics: An Incremental Development," John Saxon]

I've a pretty good idea at what level he'd be be taught if he were
in the public school system. There are at least two boys of his
age in his boy scout troop who have at least his mathematical
aptitude if not better. Basically they're one grade up from most
of their peers in the sixth grade. As they go through public school
they'll never get any further ahead than that -- at least until
college.

If you look at how they're being taught and how my son is being
taught it isn't too hard to figure out why there is such a difference
in where they're at now. Basically it boils down to my son
being allowed to move at his own pace. If he's having trouble with
something he can slow down and spend a lot of time on it. If he
understands something he can move right to the next subject. The
difference between how much he learns on a given day and how much
he would learn if he were in a public school may be small but it
accumulates and compounds.

For his friends in public school though if they're good at
something then beyond a certain point all that really means is
that they have to wait for the rest of the class to catch up.

"Some legitimate research has found that overall, home schoolers have about the same success/failure rates as students who attend public schools."

I should search for that. My questions above were aimed at the stereotype that home-schooled kids are _automatically_ superior. However, I suspect that what happens in many cases is that a bright home-schooled kid is held up as proof that home-schooling produces superior results, but that nobody ever holds up the home-schooled kid who did poorly, or was taught poorly, as a counter-example.

Homeschoolers fall into few broad but well defined segments which have little in common. About 3/5 are religious conservatives, 1/4 are those whose parents actually want their children educated, and the remainder are people with strange ideas (such as "unschooling").

One funny occurence in this regard happened when my daughter went to a sleepover with other homeschooled girls once when she was 9. She returned shaken a bit. Other girls cosplayed their favourite Bible characters, so they looked at her a little strange when she didn't have one ready.

BTW, regarding Roy's concerns, she took Calculus with EPGY at Stanford. It's not very affordable, $500 for course. But oh well.