If you pull the average American off the street and ask them to describe what they think the average homeschool family looks like, they’d probably paint the picture of a bunch of children and adults wearing pleated khakis, button-downs with sweaters, socially awkward children, sheltered and overly-structured in their lives (or, oddly enough, totally unstructured in their lives and constantly causing chaos).
In Europe, homeschoolers face even more scrutiny. Seen as cultists by the media at large, they are treated even worse than domestic terrorists in some central and western European nations.
Even people who are more libertarian in terms of education would likely say, “sure, I don’t think it should be illegal, but I’d never do it myself. … How would the children become socialized? … I wouldn’t want to spend that much time around my children. …” and the list goes on.
The arguments against homeschooling are many and the vast majority of them are bad. While homeschooling — which I define here in the legal sense of simply meaning not sending children to a school, so this includes traditional homeschooling and unschooling — isn’t necessarily for everybody, the arguments against it are lazy and easily disproven.
There’s a constant theme through many of these arguments — they’re lazy because they are almost always only applied to homeschoolers. The people who ask them rarely ask them of the obvious alternatives — traditional schools (particularly traditional public schools) — and argue against homeschooling with the intention to say that putting children in a traditional school would be better. This status quo bias is a tricky psychological situation for most people to break out of. They come to see what is most common around them as “normal,” “natural,” and “good,” without seriously questioning it. If many of the arguments below were applied to traditional schools, the schools would collapse tomorrow from parents withdrawing their children in outrage.
While rebuttals are easy and obvious once you actually interact with homeschoolers and see that they are, in fact, rarely the stereotype people imagine, the best way to get people to see past their preconceived notions is to meet them in the real world. Change happens by people not realizing it is happening. Social norms and attitudes towards same-sex relationships, for example, were largely changed by people meeting same-sex couples and seeing that they are by and large normal people. Arguments are only so good — get out there and meet detractors in the real world.
“How will your child learn X?” or “How are you qualified to teach Y?”
This is one of the most common and intuitive objections to homeschooling. In the politicized, ideal version of traditional schools, teachers are experts who are not only well-versed in their fields, but also well-versed in pedagogy. Removing children from this environment implies that they will be receiving training and instruction from somebody equally as qualified in, say, mathematics.
Even if the idealized version of traditional schools was oftentimes accurate, this doesn’t mean that parents have to have a teaching certificate in mathematics for the child to learn math. Homeschoolers oftentimes have curricula designed by people trained in these fields, can hire tutors, or can turn to technology to learn what they need to help their children learn.
“Okay, fair for traditional homeschooling, but what about for unschoolers? If you don’t have a curriculum, how do you expect the child to learn Z?”
While unschooling comes in as many different forms as there are children, we can say that people learn without imposed curricula. Children are naturally curious and will be driven towards learning things without being forced. Daniel Greenberg, the founder of the Sudbury Valley School, recalls stories in his Free At Last of 10-year olds coming to him and requesting, totally of their own volition, to be taught arithmetic. In an unschooled atmosphere, children may ask parents to teach them something or may turn to technology to find a program, app, or game that teaches the skill.
(Despite being traditionally-schooled, much of my knowledge that I use comes from playing video games growing up. My curiosity of history, writing, reading, geography, economics, politics, and basic science largely come from playing games like Sim City 4 and Civilization IV.)
But unschoolers can learn about the world and the skills and knowledge necessary to operate within it in other ways — by living in it. The strongest, deepest learning comes from engaging in meaningful, voluntary behavior and actions. If a child finds fishing fascinating, they’ll learn about the things related to fishing. If a child finds computers interesting, they’ll naturally follow that info to what they find relevant — and this ultimately feeds other fields. Reading about history helps inform the mind about economics and philosophy. Playing Sim City 4 can help a child learn about economics, culture, and politics. The list goes on and on.
“Okay, fine. But what about socialization? How are children going to learn how to interact with other people if they spend their entire days at home?”
I have a friend who was homeschooled through most of his life and ran into this complaint quite often while a young teenager. While a parent of another child would be telling this homeschooled child who can engage in intelligent conversation with them that homeschoolers aren’t socialized, they would fail to see the irony of it all.
Even taking a simplistic view of homeschooling, this is a crazy assertion for a few reasons.
1. There are plenty of homeschooling co-ops and organizations where children and adults can hang out and learn from each other.
2. Homeschool children — who aren’t put in a tightly-controlled environment (a classroom from 7:30-3, shuffled off to after-school activities from 3:30-5, and then forced to do homework from 5-7) — have more opportunity to become socialized and interact with the world around them than their traditionally-schooled peers.
3. The alternative — traditional schooling — is intensely unlike the “real” world that comes after graduation. People are not truncated and separated by age in the workplace, sorted by last name in civil society, forced to walk with their arms at their sides in a single-file line, and expected to shut up and sit down everywhere they go.
The background assumption — that traditional schooling socializes children better than homeschooling — is absurd when you really think of it, too. The idea that people will only socialize when they are forced to do so is silly at best and mindbogglingly authoritarian at worst.
“You just want kids to run around playing all the time with no structure!!”
The idea that every homeschooled family is just a bunch of kids running around causing chaos is a favorite strawman of some opponents of homeschooling. Unless children are poked, prodded, and cajoled into sitting down and shutting up, they’ll never learn anything, so the argument goes.
There are a couple things here that are important to point out.
1. Many homeschool families, as noted above, use curricula and have schedules throughout the day. They may prefer this type of homeschooling to unschooling.
2. Children do learn from playing, and quite well. If you let them run around and play, they’ll find something to focus on and learn skills with in many cases.
3. Just because structure isn’t imposed doesn’t mean it isn’t there. Structure is important to an individual’s life. It’s too important to leave to schools. People need to be allowed to experiment with their lives and build structure for themselves. A one-size-fits-all approach to structure is just more likely to leave people unfulfilled and unhappy with what they’ve had imposed on them — and incapable of building that structure for themselves.
It’s tricky to refute objections against homeschooling while also attempting to refute arguments against unschooling. Some homeschoolers like to distance themselves from unschoolers, but they shouldn’t. Children are masters at learning about the world and creating structure for themselves if given the opportunity. Since it moves the locus of decision and purpose closer to the individual doing the learning, the child, traditional homeschooling is usually superior to any traditional school. When it isn’t, that’s usually because it’s trying too hard to be like a traditional school.