Homeschooling vs Public Schools:

Pros and Cons

The pros and cons of homeschooling vs public schools is, quite frankly, an unfair contest, at least as far as your child is concerned. There's no doubt in my mind that, in most cases, public schooling cannot match the advantages of homeschooling.

See what John Taylor Gatto has to say:

"School is a twelve year jail sentence where bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned. I teach school and win awards doing it. I should know." (John Taylor Gatto, Dumbing Us Down)

So how come public schooling has got so many cons?

"We need to realize that the school institution 'schools' very well, though it does not 'educate'...It's just impossible for education and schooling ever to be the same thing." (John Taylor Gatto, Dumbing Us Down)

The Pros of Homeschooling

The fact is, however good the teacher or the school, there is no substitute for the pros which come with homeschooling:

• The ability to follow your child's interests. One look at our homeschool lesson plans will show you just how far William and Catherine's love of dinosaurs has taken us.
• Flexibility. See how homeschool scheduling gives you a unique chance to organize your time in the way that best encourages your child to learn.

I'm going to call on another iconic figure, John Holt, to explain more:

"We like to say that we send children to school to teach them to think. What we do, all too often, is to teach them to think badly, to give up a natural and powerful way of thinking in favour of a method that does not work well for them and that we rarely use ourselves." (John Holt, How Children Learn)

When we look at the pros and cons of homeschooling vs public schools, you can see that schools are stuck in a trap. There's no getting away from the fact that there's a teacher with the task of schooling up to 30 children who may or may not want to learn.

And there's a bigger question, should you care to open the box:

What is our schooling trying to teach, anyway?

John Taylor Gatto has a rather stark answer, which he proves by looking at the history of homeschooling:

"The truth is schools don't really teach anything except how to obey orders," (John Taylor Gatto, Dumbing Us Down)

The Cons of Public Schooling

When you really look hard at the task public schools face, you begin to realize that it's not about the cons of one bad school or a few poor teachers. There are lots of very good schools and very good teachers. But look what they're faced with:

"One of the fundamental ideas behind most of what we do in school is that children should and must spend many years memorizing a lot of dull facts before they can begin to do interesting things with them. This is a foolish way to go about things, and it doesn't work," says John Holt.

"Most children get so fed up with learning the dull facts that they quit before they get enough of them to do, or even to want to do, anything interesting with them. And even of the children who do learn all the facts, most have their wits so dulled in the process that they can't think of anything interesting to do with them." (John Holt, How Children Learn)

So I'm going to throw at you a bigger question. When it comes to the pros and cons of homeschooling vs public schooling, what are you hoping your child will get out of education?

If you think I'm suggesting that by choosing homeschooling over public schooling one of the pros and cons you have to weigh up is giving up any academic aspirations for your child, you're wrong. One look at the homeschooling statistics will show you that one of the pros of homeschool is that homeschoolers typically score 15 to 30 percentile points above public schools on standardized academic achievement tests.

If I've done enough to rock the boat and show you why schools are not the place to send your child, see Part Two of my article on the pros and cons of homeschool vs public schooling.

I'll leave you with another John Taylor Gatto quote:

"Formulaic schooling...must be killed, not modified. Attempts to tinker with its ruthless algorithms prolongs our society's agony and makes the situation worse," (John Taylor Gatto, Weapons of Mass Instruction)

When it comes to the pros and cons of homeschooling vs public schools it's well worth knowing that you do have a choice and school isn't necessarily the right answer.

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