Many of you out there reading this have had a child or two get behind in their lessons at school and have felt that you needed to spend the money, make the investment, to have your child tutored at a local learning center. Or you paid to just have a private tutor come to your home and spend some one-on-one time with your child. If this hasn’t happened to you, then maybe you know someone else who has gone this route.
Why do parents pay good money to have their children tutored in one-on-one sessions so that they can catch up on subjects in which they have fallen behind? The idea is that the tutoring sessions will help the child get caught back up to the same level as his or her classmates on whatever subject in which they fell behind. By having one-on-one sessions, it expedites the learning process because it gets rid of the inefficiencies and extra fluff that slows down the learning process in a classroom setting where many children are learning together. The tutor can focus in on what learning styles and processes work best for that particular child and utilize those approaches, rather than focusing on ways to teach many students at once with many different learning styles, and then give enough time for everyone in the class to stay caught up to each other, and for all students to finish their schoolwork, which is what teachers have to do in classroom settings.
This one-on-one tutoring approach allows a child to learn more subjects faster, meaning that he or she, if being taught by a tutor utilizing this approach all day and every day, can have shorter school days, or learn more throughout the course of a day, allowing that child to have a superior education over their counterparts that go to conventional schools, or have more time to play with their peers, which develops their social skills.
And here’s another kicker for you: studies have shown that tutors don’t have to be certified to be effective at tutoring – certified and uncertified tutors have about the same effect in terms of helping a child to learn.
This is where homeschooling comes in. It basically takes one of the two adults that care about a child more than any other human being on the planet, that is, one of their parents, and makes them that child’s one-on-one tutor. If you’re one of those parents that has the knack for, and disposition towards, tutoring your own children, then this might be the right path for you.
If you keep reading, I’m going to get to the list of reasons for why you should support homeschooling, why it’s beneficial to school districts, and for society at large. But, before I do, I need to talk about something that to me is alarming.
An Alarming Story
Some years ago, there was a family in Sweden that decided to go to India to work on a humanitarian project. This included a husband and wife, and their son, of whom they were the mother and the father. The boy’s mother was actually born in India and was in fact Indian. Because of this transition, and because they wanted their child to be ready for the public schools in India, they decided to homeschool their child. At the time, homeschooling was legal in Sweden. Not only that, but the local school, to the parents, was a noisy environment, which in their opinion made it difficult for their child to learn.
So, on that day that they boarded a plane to fly to India, the Swedish police stopped the plane and boarded it. If you were one of the passengers on the plane, you would probably be terrified, if not traumatized by seeing that spectacle. You would probably be wondering if there was a terrorist aboard your plane, or if there was a bomb in one of the suitcases. But that’s not what happened. The police approached the Swedish-Indian family and forcibly removed them from the plane, and once they got off the plane, the child was forcibly separated from his parents, and whisked off to a foster home – if you were that child, such an event would be nothing other than traumatic. In fact, this whole event caused the child to be in such an emotional state that he vomited at the airport, which should be proof enough of how traumatized he was. The parents were apprehended and taken away.
For what reason was the child ripped from his family? For what reason did the parents get the full wrath of the state beating on their shoulders? Because they were homeschooling their child, which had been legal in the country at the time. The claim was that homeschooling their child was traumatic to their child and that this child needed to be “rescued” from that environment. And for that, the parents needed to be punished. Seriously though, here’s a question: ripping a child away from the family environment where he feels most safe isn’t traumatic, but homeschooling a child so that he can be on par with his classmates in a new country is traumatic? What kind of logic is this? Did the Swedish people lose their minds? I certainly think so.
The parents have been to court several times to try to regain custody of their son, but to no avail. To this day (to my knowledge), several years later, the parents are only allowed to see their child for one hour every five weeks. On one instance, the mother, when seeing her child during one of the visits, was overwhelmed with emotions and grief and started to cry (You would, too, if your child was ripped from you by the state, and you missed your child, and had a chance to finally see your child…), in which the attending social worker told her that if she cried again the meeting between her and her son would end immediately. Talk about the state being heavy-handed all because they were trying to homeschool their child!
I’m talking about the Johansson family. Domenic is the child who was taken away from his parents, Annie and Christer. The child was ripped from his family at the international airport in Stockholm, Sweden, at the behest of the Social Services of Gotland. If you’re interested in learning more about their story, a quick internet search will yield a multitude of information and opinions.
The reason I bring up this case is because it represents how the political left in Western countries views and treats homeschooling. They tend to look at it as bad for society and bad for the upbringing of children even though all the data suggests that homeschooled children are actually better for society than children who went through the state school system. If done properly, homeschooling could be to our benefit, save taxpayers some money, and allow the tax monies being allocated to education to be used more for the underprivileged children still attending the schools. They talk about how bad it is to rip immigrant families apart, and how the left’s political policies and programs are pro-family (despite their doublethink in calling a traditional family “patriarchal” and “fascist”), but then turn around and rip families apart over the issue of homeschooling? The whole thing smells of bad fish.
It should also be noted that the political left also tends to look at the state education system as the means to indoctrinate children to their beliefs and ideologies, and they can’t indoctrinate children that aren’t in the government-run schools – this is a predominant reason why they oppose homeschooling as well as private religious schools. In truth, children should be taught how to think critically and look at all sides of any issue in an objective way, to come to conclusions based on critical thinking – sadly, this way of thinking, is missing and not being taught in many public school systems, but is an area of strength within the homeschooling environment. (It should also be noted that learning how to handle one’s finances and money would do wonders at helping young people, once they enter adulthood, be able to be on the right track to becoming prosperous, but at the original time this article first appeared – 2019 – only 19 or 20 states have that as a requirement in their education curriculum.) Children in state school systems are not taught critical thinking skills; they are instead taught what to think, that is, they are indoctrinated and then scolded for practicing critical thinking.
It’s interesting to note that the political left, which claims to have the moral high ground, talks about how they celebrate diversity and pluralism, which, by definition means that there are lots of different points of view and ways of thinking that disagree with each other. But then they are the very same people who try to make sure everyone thinks alike, and punishes people that don’t. Talk about a contradiction.
Reasons to Support Homeschooling
With this story in mind, let’s go over some of the reasons for why homeschooling can be good for society.
1. They get better scores on their standardized tests than their public-school counterparts. This improves the aggregate test score for the nation.
Here in the United States, where homeschooling is legal in most places, we find that those students who are homeschooled right tend to have higher standardized test scores. Now imagine if a country like Germany, where homeschooling is illegal, changes their laws and starts allowing homeschooling. What would happen? Those students would, on average, have better standardized test scores than they would have if they stayed in government-run schools. Now if they take those new standardized test scores and add them to the country’s aggregate, they would see an increase in the country’s average test score, allowing them to actually see an improvement in education.
2. It saves tax revenues from being spent, and/or spreads limited education resources out over fewer students who truly need it.
Let’s say you live in a place where a certain amount of tax revenue is allocated to be spent per student in government-run schools, for example, $8,000 per student. By allowing some of those students to be homeschooled, we free up tax money that could be used elsewhere, perhaps to raise the salaries of our teachers, who really should be paid more, but can’t, because government can’t find the money. Or, they could lower property taxes which makes that community that much more affordable. Well, homeschooling allows that hidden money to be found. At a time when government is very wasteful and inefficient with its monetary resources, this is a way for government to be that much more efficient and less wasteful with its limited financial resources.
On the other hand, let’s say you live in an area where education expenditures stay the same even if the number of students decreases. In this case, if some of the students leave the system to be homeschooled, that means the school resources will be spread out over fewer students. Imagine a teacher who teaches 25 students, but 5 leave to be homeschooled – that means this teacher will be able to spend just a little more time with those who remain, who are more likely to be those children who are more underprivileged, which could make all the difference in the education of those students.
Since those students who stay tend to be more likely to be disadvantaged and underprivileged, and those who are homeschooled tend to come from a more privileged background, that is, they come from families that have the financial resources to afford to teach their children at home, this means we’re clearing up more resources for those youth who are disadvantaged.
3. Homeschooling is a way for parents to get their children out of an environment that can be rife with bullying, which can be traumatic to the child, and put them in a safe, psychologically healthy environment, where they can be nurtured and loved, and where they can more easily learn.
The Swedish claim that homeschooling is traumatic to a child, even though it’s not. But what really is traumatic, if we’re truly being honest, is being in a school environment where you have to deal with bullying every day. Taking a child out of that environment can really improve that child’s psychological health and greatly improve their learning process. This can greatly improve their chances of learning and improve their chances at prospering when they enter the working world as adults.
4. Home schooled children are much less likely to drink, use marijuana, smoke, or use illicit drugs. They are also less likely to have access to those things, especially illicit drugs. Because of this, they are also less likely to be diagnosed with disorders related to drug or alcohol abuse.
Think about this – because they’re not in an environment where they have tremendous peer pressure to fit in, and because they are not in a classroom setting where one or more people may be sellers, they are less likely to be influenced and pressured into smoking, drinking, using marijuana or some illicit drugs, and for those same reasons they don’t have access to other students who may try to sell those things, making them less likely to try them.
There are some that argue that the data is skewed – that it is based on the fact that there is more parental involvement in their lives, that they come from intact two-parent families, and that they tend to come from homes that are financially better-off than the average public-school student, and that those three things are the real reasons behind the statistics, not homeschooling. There is some truth to that – like I said earlier, homeschooling is usually done by families that can financially afford it, and come from intact, traditional husband-and-wife family structures, leaving those more likely to be underprivileged and disadvantaged in the school systems, but allowing more resources to be devoted to them because some of the students left to be homeschooled. But, in my opinion, the fact that homeschoolers are not in a place to have those influences, pressures, and access speaks very loudly for itself about the unhealthy environment found in state schools.
There’s also another element that you should think about – when these homeschoolers reach adulthood and the working world, they are going to be less likely to have addiction problems, or to commit crimes – these things suggest that letting families homeschool their children can actually make society better.
5. As counterintuitive as it may seem to some of you reading this, children who are taught in a home school environment are more socially advanced than their public-school counterparts. They can more easily convey their thoughts and ideas to other people, which means that their communication skills are superior to those that go to conventional state-run schools.
Think about it – if a child goes to a conventional school, whether public or private, he or she will spend most of their time socializing with other children that are the same age as themselves. On the other hand, a child that is homeschooled will spend most of their day interacting with one of their parents, who acts as their one-on-one tutor, and who usually happens to be twenty to thirty years older than the child – this means they are learning their social skills from someone decades more advanced than themselves, rather than from other children who are at the same social maturity level as themselves.
Not only that, but children who come from homeschooling families tend to have more experience interacting socially with other children from different age groups. For this reason, they are better socially with not only adults, but with other children both older and younger than themselves.
6. Proposal: we could leverage homeschooling to improve the future of underprivileged and disadvantaged inner-city youth from poor families by encouraging families that homeschool their own children to include one of those underprivileged youths when educating their own children at home and giving them a financial incentive to do so.
We talk about how the public schools in the inner-city are deplorable and do a lousy job educating the underprivileged, meaning that they don’t have the resources and education they need to escape poverty and become more prosperous. This causes the cycle of poverty to repeat itself in the next generation when those students become adults.
On the other hand, those who are homeschooled fare better than those that go to public schools – better psychological health, better social skills, less bad influences, less likely to be the victims or perpetrators of violent crimes when they become adults – the differences are even more pronounced between people who are homeschooled and people educated in public schools in the inner-city.
With this in mind, why not create a financial incentive for parents that homeschool to include one or more young people from a poor, inner-city, underprivileged environment? By taking many of the young people out of a bad environment and educating them in a good and nurturing environment, we can help to change their future, and save taxpayers some money. This would be based on two conditions: a) school systems get paid per student and if students aren’t in that school system it won’t get paid for them; b) the financial incentive given to homeschooling parents for each underprivileged student they help is less than the amount of money the school system would be paid if they were educating that same student in the local public school – for example, $2,000 per year per student as a homeschool incentive rather than $8,000 per year in the state system. In other words, this proposal, if brought to fruition, could help save the local government some tax money, which could be allocated to other things, or be used to lower taxes, all while helping to make society better.
Conclusion
So, in conclusion, I’ve tried to explain to you why many of us conservatives believe that homeschooling is a good thing, not a bad thing like many people on the political left believe. I tried to explain the reasoning for why the political left tends to be opposed to it, and I gave you an alarming story of what could happen in this country, the United States, if we went the same route as countries like Sweden – we would actually be ripping families apart rather than work to keep them together and strengthen them, which would be far better for society-at-large than ripped-apart families. I gave you some very good reasons for why homeschooling can be, and is, good for society and the taxpayer, and I gave a proposal for how we could leverage homeschooling to benefit the underprivileged and disadvantaged youth, many of whom are minorities, in poor inner-city areas that could benefit their long-term well-being, and because of that, benefit society as a whole.
Personally, I have a niece, and some nephews, that are being homeschooled, and they are some of the most intelligent and sociable children their age that I have ever met. If you are like me, you, too, have met children that are being homeschooled and you too know the benefit that it can be to our children, and to the next generation of people that take over our society. They haven’t lost their creativity and their sense of imagination, which many people lose in the state system (I’m not kidding!), which are abilities that are important when they later become adults and take over the leadership positions in society – the creative sense goes a long way in terms of being able to problem-solve future problems that undoubtedly always spring up in society.
If you don’t already support homeschooling, I would encourage you to consider doing so.
Thank you for your time.
