Home Education Today

This comment was posted to an article on the choice to homeschool. The editor felt the comment warranted further opportunity for discussion and placed the comment and response in a post.

Although you do bring up some very valid advantages toward homeschooling, don’t you feel that problems such as drugs are something that you cannot shield your child from for their whole life? One of the best lessons you can teach your children is how to stay away from drugs, but hiding them from it isn’t necessarily the way to do it. Eventually they will be on their own today and it is up to you as a parent to teach them “how to say no.” Also, when taking them out of a school system, you are taking away many valuable lessons that can be taught as in how to work with other people that you may necessarily not like. It can be argued that the most important things you learn in school are social rather than educational, so why keep your child from learning these valuable lessons just to shield them from something they’ll run into eventually anyways?

Many people hold such sweeping assumptions about homeschoolers and homeschooling. While personally I could provide you with facts and experiencs of my own children, that is really not the point.The perception that homeschooled children are hiding and unaffected by the rest of society is a pervasive misconception. This is a myth founded on misinformation.

Homeschoolers are not hiding but rather choosing not to participate in a system that for individual reasons they feel is not the best for their family and children.

Why assume homeschooled children are always shielded from drugs? Drugs are a part of our society whether that is desirable or not. Our children are just as much a part of the “neighborhood” as is anyone else. And like everyone else they, too, must learn how to cope and handle these pressures. They do not wear signs that say, “Drug dealers beware, I’m homeschooled!” and somehow that protects them from life’s realities.

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