Homeschooler

I've been homeschooled my entire life.  I have never set foot in a public school, and, truth to be told, when I see them I shudder.  They look like gaudily-painted prisons.

When I was stubborn or uncooperative about my schoolwork, my mom used to threaten to send me to public school.  Luckily for me, I have only one year of school left, so I think I'm fairly safe.

My mom has many reasons for homeschooling me, and I have many reasons to appreciate it!


First, there is the matter of religion.  Of course I want to preserve my faith, and I feel that I can do that much better at home.  I have significantly less temptations, and very little peer pressure.  I study out of predominately Catholic books, and since my parents and I are in control of what I learn, I get to explore alternative views of things like history and science.  Instead of being taught evolution, I was presented with the hypothesis and the refutations of it and allowed to draw my own conclusions.  (Obviously my book - Exploring Creation With Biology - is against evolution, but it was not dogmatic about it.  That book is really good.  My biology-major dad loved it.)
I mentioned peer pressure.  Obviously that has a large bearing on religion as well - being homeschooled, it's easier for me to choose who I want to be around, and of course I choose people who are like me.  My friends don't put pressure on me to wear tight jeans or dye my hair pink or act impurely or anything like that, because they themselves would never do those things.  I'm not saying that I refuse to be friends with somebody who doesn't share my views, but as it stands now, most of my friends do.

Another reason I like being homeschooled is that I feel that I'm getting a better education this way.  I'm not trying to brag, but there are statistics showing that homeschooled children do consistently better on tests like the ACT.  (If you don't believe me, look it up.  You can start here.)  Really, I'm not trying to be a snoot.  I'm only sharing my personal experience (and the test results).  I know that there are public-schooled people who are eons ahead of people like me in intelligence.  Only....I haven't met too many of them. 

Homeschooling, if done right, increases one's self-discipline.  This is very important, because in today's world, self-discipline is the last thing on most people's minds.  It's all about gratifying ME, and instantly, too.  We can't restrain ourselves - we're not taught to!  And so we're morally weak - lots of times, physically weak as well.  With homeschooling, most of the time you have to do it yourself.   You're not herded from class to class, your mom isn't going to walk you through every lesson and every subject, and it's oh-so-easy to stop taking that Religion test and start blog-hopping instead....
Now, I am by no means perfect in this.  Far from it.  I've struggled many times (including now) to keep up with everything.  I may be way ahead in some subjects, but I'm still doing a couple subjects from last year, too.  But nevertheless, I'm working on it, and learning from all my responsibility.  I'm very much involved in my schoolwork.  I feel like this way I'll be much better prepared for the responsibility of an adult than if I were public-schooled, being spoon-fed my information and having everything tidily taught to me.

I know that one of the most common objections to homeschooling is that homeschoolers are "anti-social".  You hear it all the time: "Homeschoolers have no social life!  Those parents are depriving their children of normal interaction and therefore forcing them to become shy, socially-unskilled recluses!" *insert glare of righteous horror at homeschooling parents*

I could go on and on and on about this.  As a matter of fact, there was much more that I wanted to cover in this post - but I'm kind of running out of steam now.  Perhaps I'll do a "Part II" sometime, if I remember what else I wanted to say.  Anyway, this post is getting rather long and seeming to get more confused the longer I go, so I shall end presently. 

If you have any questions about homeschooling, comment and ask me!  I'll be happy to answer them - perhaps with another post.  Homeschooling is rather misunderstood, on the whole, and I'd be glad to help clear up the confusion.

What do you think of homeschooling?  I'd love to hear your opinion.

Picture not mine - unfortunately I don't remember where it came from.