Posted on 03/16/2004 12:46:31 PM PST by hsmomx3
(AgapePress) - An expert on the family is crediting the home schooling movement with helping to re-establish the traditional family in the United States.
Dr. Allan Carlson of the Howard Center for Family, Religion, and Society, is offering high praise for the home schoolers of the nation. Carlson says the American family was being eroded by feminism, no-fault divorce, and the growth of day-care. But then, he says, along came the home schooling movement and much of that has started to change.
Carlson says God's first institution, the family, is being restored through home schooling. "In home education, we see the broad, productive home visibly reborn, and an important lost family function returned to its proper sphere," he says.
The Howard Center's president says home-schooling families are larger, closer, more active, more stable, and have re-established the spiritual element in the foundation of societal structure.
Carlson also credits home schoolers for forcing changes elsewhere in the culture. "The educational effects are vast. Home schoolers are reinventing both American teaching and American learning," he says, "and the children excel. By grade eight, these children are, on average, almost four years ahead of their public and private school counterparts."
And the family expert says these home-schooled students, once they leave the home school nest, go on to establish their own stable homes and families, and contribute further to society as adults.
A recent large-scale study of home schooling outcomes by the National Home Education Research Institute revealed that the home-school graduates tend to become exemplary citizens who take an active role in shaping their society. The study found that home-educated adults had higher voting rates, more involvement in political campaigns, and more social engagement through activities such as boycotting and writing letters to editors, than did the average U.S. citizen.
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