Many of you read the negative article about homeschooling that was written by Dennis L. Evans and published in USA Today on the September 3, 2003. Matthew Bass,who was homeschooled from K-12, wrote an excellent rebuttal to Mr. Evan's article. Matthew is 21 and is currently working on his Computer Science degree through distance learning at Thomas Edison State College. The article by Matthew Bass is republished here with his permission.
An article by Dennis L. Evans lambasting homeschoolers appeared in the September 3rd, 2003 edition of USA Today. The title of Mr. Evans’ article was “Home is no place for school,” but the title may as well have been, “Parents not qualified to teach their own children.”
Mr. Evans states that there are very few home educated students in the U.S. He then goes on to imply that there is not a home education “movement” taking place. On the contrary, according to the National Home Education Research Institute, an estimated 1.5 to 1.9 million children in the United States, grades K through 12, are home educated. This is a 764% increase from just 10 years ago, when there were approximately 248,500 students. This is not a movement?
Mr. Evans doesn’t stop there. He goes on to state that the idea that anyone can teach “is simply wrong” and that the teaching competence of parents “will wane in more advanced grades as the content and complexity increases.” The facts clearly contradict this assertion, though, as a NHERI study conducted nationwide found that students who are home schooled score, on average, “at or above the 80th percentile in all areas on standardized achievement tests.” This is surprising, is it not, considering parents are supposedly not qualified to teach their own children? The essence of homeschooling is creativity in meeting various challenges and the statistics clearly show that those challenges are being met.
His assertion that, by being taught at home, children will miss out on all that life has to offer is simply not true! The vast majority of home schoolers have refined their social and communication skills far above the mob socialization of the public school system. My own home educated brother, for example, is an accomplished author, having had articles published on Renew America and other web sites, as well as in a local newspaper, The Raleigh World. My brother is 17 years old.
Mr. Evans writes that home schoolers are isolated and “captive of the orthodoxies of the parents.” Is that a bad thing? What happened to parents imparting their values to their own children, disciplining their own children, and yes, teaching their own children as they have done for thousands of years of human history? Mr. Evans obviously thinks that the state can now do a better job than the parents can. Indeed, his aim is nothing more or less than for every student in this country to be “captive to the orthodoxies of the state.”
There is a “wide range of legitimate forms of … schooling available for parental choice,” Mr. Evans writes, implying that home education is not a legitimate form. I would argue, however, that given the large numbers of home schooled students who are successfully entering the workforce and quickly gaining leadership roles, home education is the most legitimate form of schooling available! Leonardo da Vinci, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Douglas MacArthur and scores of other historic figures took advantage of the home education methodology, and Mr. Evans dares to call the process through which they were educated illegitimate?
Aside from the issue of legitimacy, there is the issue of choice... (article continues)
