Personally, I have **never** met an academically successful child who wasn't either homeschooled or afterschooled.
Both homeschooling and afterschooling require a lot of work. Afterschooling is actually harder, though, since the child is tired from being in school and a lot of indoctrination must be undone.
By the way, I was a doctor in and owner of a large health clinic. During my career, I likely had contact with several thousand families. Because I wanted ideas on how to make my own family life more effective, I would ask successful parents about their home habits and values, and their study routines for their children.
Honestly...In all those years of working with families, I have **never** met an academically successful child who was not either homeschooled or afterschooled. Even my foreign patients, they too were afterschooling. They found help from their nationality clubs, relatives, neighbors, friends, and older children. Their kids were more likely to be active in study clubs.
My conclusion: Government schools are not teaching children anything. They are sending home a tuition-free curriculum. It is the parents who doing 99.99% of the hard work of actually making sure their kids learn.
“Personally, I have **never** met an academically successful child who wasn't either homeschooled or afterschooled.”
I'm sure you're right.
“Both homeschooling and afterschooling require a lot of work. Afterschooling is actually harder, though, since the child is tired from being in school and a lot of indoctrination must be undone.”
That may be. However, I know many folks whose children do well academically in traditional schools where both parents work full-time and even work long hours. I've seen folks try to homeschool with both parents working, and that doesn't work easily or well, and often results in relative failure.
Thus, most homeschoolers generally forgo one income, while many children who obtain a good education even while attending traditional schools do so with both parents working.
“Government schools are not teaching children anything.”
I don't agree with this statement. I'd go so far as to say, “Many government schools are not teaching children anything.”
But I live in a state and a region where several counties have public schools considered well above average. And, indeed, I've met some of the young men and women who have attended some of the better public schools, and many of them have actually learned a fair bit of stuff while inside the public school building.
No doubt, much learning also takes place outside the school building.
I'm more than willing to admit that these schools are probably more the exception than the rule for public schools. Nonetheless, some academic education is happening within their walls.
The very best public schools are nearly competitive with good private schools.
And good private schools can provide very good academic educations, indeed.
As well, once past the elementary school level, very good private schools can do things that are much more difficult for homeschoolers. My two sons were homeschooled through eighth grade. Now they attend a Catholic high school. Not every class, not every teacher is a winner. But over the past three-and-a-half years (my older son went to the high school part-time starting in eighth grade), I'd say that roughly six out of seven of my sons’ teachers are truly excellent.
It is a joy for me to pick my sons up from school in the afternoon and hear them tell me with excitement what happened in this or that class, with this or that teacher. Many of the teachers at their school are truly expert in the subjects that they teach and are truly excellent at actually teaching.
There are trade-offs, to be sure. There are advantages to homeschooling through high school on which we lose out. There are disadvantages of a traditional school that we must bear. But there are advantages to the traditional high school, as well, at least if it's a really good school with really good teachers.
My wife and I are still very involved with the guy's school stuff. I check homework every night. My wife or I listen to the younger guy recite his spoken German, so that he does it well for the teacher the next day. If there are problems, we contact and talk to the teachers. With my older son, he struggled a lot in Algebra II his freshman year. His teacher took extra time each week with him to help him, but my wife and I made sure he did an extra 10, 20, 40, 50 problems per night to really master what the teacher taught him during the day. He eventually earned and A- for the year, and his diligence earned him the underclassmen Algebra II award for the year. But the afterschooling done by my wife and me could only be effective in conjunction with the during the day schooling and extra help from his Algebra II teacher, who took the time, and who had the complete command of the subject matter as well as the teaching skills, to be effective with my son.
But frankly, it's a lot less difficult, a lot less time-consuming with them in school than when we homeschooled. My own view is that my wife (who did most of the homeschooling) did such an excellent job teaching them the habits of learning for eight or nine years that these habits enable them to get the most from their teachers and their classes now that they're in high school.
There are any number of generalities one can make about education. I have my own set of them: Homeschooling is generally to be preferred to any other method of education, especially in the early years; private schools generally outperform public schools; many (most?) public schools are sewers.
But they're all generalities, and don't all fit each individual child, or the circumstances or the environment of each family.
And that's what homeschooling is really all about - doing the best for each individual child, given the totality of a family's circumstances. Even though our kids are now in a traditional school, we still consider ourselves homeschoolers, because our focus is on putting together the right pieces for our two sons individually, without regard to generalities, bumper sticker sound bites or ideologies.
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