Comparing Homeschooling With The Public And Private School System

February 27, 2009 by  
Filed under Home Schooling

The first question parents ask regarding homeschooling is this: Does it really work? Many parents are aware that the public school system has major problems, but they’re not sure if homeschooling is the better choice! Most work harder to earn more so that they can put their kids in private school. When it comes to their children’s education, they want the best: no holds barred!

However, they should know that studies done in this field show that homeschooled students perform much better on average and have a keener mindset towards learning. This effect is partly explained by the fact that when parents are involved, levels of learning improve almost automatically. When the kids know that the parent is taking an active role in their education, they’re liable to work more owing to the motivation.

However, when a larger number of students is taken into account from different walks of life, one thing remains constant: homeschooled kids are superior! The study sponsored by the Unites States Department of Education showed that the scores obtained by homeschooled students were ‘exceptionally high’! The median scores of homeschooled students in every grade were significantly higher than public, private and even Catholic schools!

The homeschool students in grades one to four were actually a whole grade level above their counterparts in public schools. And when these students got to eighth grade, they were approximately four years ahead of their peers.

The public school system is to blame for part of this mess, but not entirely. Home schooling is actually even proving to be better than even private schools!

What’s more: the costs of homeschooling are a lot lower than private schools. While most government schools spend about $6500 per student every year, private schools spend about $3500 only. And the cheapest option is homeschooling, which costs a little less than $550 per child per year. However, this amount doesn’t take into account the time spent by the parent for which a teacher gets paid.

In the 1850s, public school was made compulsory for students in most of the states in the US. If they were so good and had greater standards of education to offer, then why use force to get students into them? One wonders.

One of the foremost arguments is that education was valued by only a few. To make the concept of education available to all, and especially the rural public, the public school system was brought in. This doesn’t explain how the illiteracy rate in 1840 in Massachusetts was only 2%, whereas by the year 1995, had shot up to a whopping 19%! Books in the nineteenth century were very expensive, unlike today, and yet the figure is up by 17%. This tells us that homeschooling really does do wonders.

In the United States alone, more than a million kids are homeschooled. Out of these, thousands have been accepted into the very elite of colleges and universities. Homeschooling enables a student who is eager to learn to do so with a parent or tutor without having to face mocking and sarcasm from peers: a condition that pervades public schools.

All in all, it’s quite simple to see that homeschooling is a more viable and less costly option for your child’s education!