I just know that many people don’t understand homeschooling, or feel that we are harming our children by making this choice. I found the article below from the “Journal of College Admission” – so not even a Homeschooling journal or anything. The audience is College Admissions Officers!
Here are a few paragraphs I snipped from the article.
……………..
Several colleges think so well of home-educated students that they have been actively recruiting them for several years (e.g., Boston University, Nyack College). Christopher Klicka’s (1998, 3) survey of college admission officers found a Dartmouth College admission officer saying, “The applications [from homeschoolers] I’ve come across are outstanding. Homeschoolers have a distinct advantage because of the individualized instruction they have received.” This individualized instruction, combined with homeschooled students’ experience in studying and pursuing goals on their own, may be showing long-lasting effects. Admission officers at Stanford University think they are seeing an unusually high occurrence of a key ingredient, which they term “intellectual vitality,” in homeschool graduates (Foster, 2000). They link it to the practice of self-teaching prevalent in these young people, as a result of their homeschool environment.
A few researchers have examined adults who were home-educated without necessarily linking them to the college scene. J. Gary Knowles (Knowles & de Olivares, 1991; Knowles & Muchmore, 1995) was the first to focus research on adults who were home-educated, collecting extensive data from a group who were home-educated an average of about six years before they were 17 years old. He found that they tended to be involved in entrepreneurial and professional occupations, were fiercely independent, and strongly emphasized the importance of family. Furthermore, they were glad they had been home-educated, would recommend homeschooling to others, and had no grossly negative perceptions of living in a pluralistic society.
……
Yet, to date, it appears that almost a dozen investigations address home-educated adults and the research shows that the home-educated are disproportionately involved in community life, civic activities and in democratic processes, decent, civil, respectful, and disproportionately exhibiting leadership traits. This is not to say, of course, that every homeschool graduate is brilliant, attractive, and destined for success. It simply means that, on average, they appear to be doing well in the “real world” because the environment in which they were educated-in the broad sense, academically, mentally, morally, and aesthetically-gave them sound academic skills, a solid and confident social and emotional nurturance, respect for others, a stable worldview, and a zest for learning.
……………..
Research and probability show that the home-educated college applicant is very likely to succeed in college, both academically and socially. Consider that the home-educated typically have strong self-discipline, motivation, and self-initiative. “These kids are the epitome of Brown students,” says Joyce Reed, who became an associate dean of the college twelve years ago. “They’ve learned to be self-directed, they take risks, they face challenges with total fervor, and they don’t back off” (Sutton, 2002).
………………
Recognize that you may hold biases and prejudices you do not recognize. After all, about five American generations have been attending age-segregated, institutional places of learning for 12 years of our lives, and most reading this article spent at least 16 years in these institutions. Most Americans (and those in many other nations) have no idea of what it would be like to be home-educated and how we might be different, for better or worse, had we experienced this age-old practice.
