With the ever decreasing standards in the public schools, a lot of parents are beginning to look for alternatives. One alternative to traditional public schools is homeschooling. Is homeschooling the answer? It may be, but parents need to be aware of the problem of unbalanced education. In this article, I will write about this problem form my own experience.
I am currently a student at a state university working on a history degree. I make very good grades and am on track to graduate suma cum laude next Spring with a GPA of 3.97. I believe that homeschooling has contributed greatly to my academic success. In fact, I think that my experience homeschooling was one of the things that made me want to pursue an advanced degree and a job in academia. I will explain.
As a homeschooler, I was much more free to study the topics that interested me in school. Of course I had to study some subjects I did not enjoy like math and science, but I was able to concentrate on the subjects I wanted. Since my favorite subjects were English and History, I was able to devote more time to those. I studied enough to get by in the classes I did not enjoy, but not enough to become proficient at them.
This had both a positive and a negative effect. It meant that I have a much better grasp of literature, history, and politics than most students my age, but it also means that I am not particularly good at math and science.
I am by no means ignorant in those subjects. In fact, I think I am a little above average in them, but I am not nearly as proficient in them as I believe I could be.
This is because I did not feel compelled to exert myself any more in subjects I was not interested and also because I did not have very good instruction in those areas. I took video classes through high school. Although these were great for humanities classes, they were not so good for math and the hard sciences. Although was well educated, she was also weak in the subjects in which I happened to be weak. This meant that I had no one to ask when I had a problem.
Thus, homeschooling has made my education a little less balanced than it might have been had I gone to a public school. In preparing for school, this hurt. It meant that my well above average verbal SAT score was largely tempered by my slightly above average math SAT score. I was admitted into the college of my choice, but I did not receive much financial aid. On the other hand, it has helped now that I am in college. I learned enough in high school to pass my general education math and sciences classes with As and I continue to make As in my upper division history and political sciences classes because that is where my interest is.
I am glad that my parents made the decision to homeschool me because it has helped me tremendously in my academic and professional careers. I think it would help other students in a similar way as well. The only thing I would caution is that you do not neglect math and hard science. Find a homeschool cooperative or a tutor to make sure that your children grasp all of the concepts that they will need to know for the SAT and for their math and science classes. This is especially important if your son or daughter is thinking about going into one of those academic fields.
