High School at Home: A Recipe for Disaster?
By Barbara Frank
"Although high school home schooling looks like a recipe for disaster, it is becoming more popular........but we feel that home schooling is shortchanging our teens."
This quote is from High Schools in Crisis; What Every Parent Should Know by Ellen Hall and Richard Handley. Hall and Handley wrote their book in an effort to promote alternative high schools. They describe the detrimental effect our public school system has on American teenagers, and then contrast that with a detailed account of how they ran Mountain View, a private high school in Ojai, California. (Interestingly, Mountain View "evolved out of the newly spawned home school movement of the 1970s.")
While most of the book is about public and private high schools, the quote about "shortchanging our teens" is found in a very brief section that refers to homeschooling. There, the authors mention the higher-than-average SAT scores of homeschoolers, followed by a glowing account of two homeschooled sisters who were "beautiful, musically talented, and academically bright." The reason they approve of these two, however, is that they stopped homeschooling in order to attend high school.
The authors' complaint about homeschooling through high school is that they believe homeschooled teens suffer from "social isolation." They ask, "Can a parent provide mentoring adults and a circle of friends to develop social skills if a teenager is not going to school?" Their conclusion?
"We feel that school attendance is important for teenagers, so they can learn the habits of successful living. Whether students end up working as a scientist (sic) in a research lab or at the fast food restaurant, they have to get to work on time, wear the right clothes, and have lunch money. Many of these skills are acquired just by attending school."
Whoa! Where to begin? For starters, the idea that the parent should "provide mentoring adults and a circle of friends to develop social skills" for their homeschooled teens is rather insulting to the teens. One of the things I learned very quickly as a mother of homeschooled teens was that they were perfectly capable of choosing their own friends. Through homeschool groups, our church, our neighborhood, and eventually their work, they met many different people; they liked some better than others.
In fact, though my teens had been homeschooled all of their lives, each had a few homeschooled friends, but not many. My daughter once told me that just because someone was homeschooled didn't mean she and they had anything else in common. There had to be that clicking of personalities that could only be recognized by the two people in the friendship. This didn't have anything to do with me beyond my willingness to drive so that they could hang out together.
As homeschoolers, my teens were not accustomed to limiting their friends to those six months older or younger than they were. Never having been to school, they didn't have that mindset. Today, as young adults, both have friends in a wide range of age groups.
As for learning "the habits of successful living," it's ridiculous to assume that school is the only place teens are going to learn "to get to work on time, wear the right clothes, and have lunch money." Teens witness these things in their own homes from the time they're small, when they watch their parents getting ready for their days.
They also learn to get themselves ready for everything from playdates to soccer to church. Once they reach their early teens, they have to be on time for their babysitting jobs or co-op classes; later on, they have to arrive on time to their part-time jobs. To state that young people can only learn this by going to school is simply untrue.
The authors justify their opinion by citing students who came to their school "starving" or disheveled, and who had to be taught not to borrow everything they needed. Then they ask, "If students don't get these skills in high school, when will they learn them?" In other words, their parents can't or won't teach these skills so high school is their only alternative.
I've got news for them: parents all over the country are teaching these skills to their teens. Some involve their teens in learning about the family finances or working in the family business; others use a curriculum. I wrote one such curriculum for my own teens, Life Prep for Homeschooled Teenagers, and now other homeschool families use it. If anything, it's the high schools that aren't teaching such practical things and the homeschooling families that are. Where have the authors been, anyway?
The teens who are being short-changed are those in our public high schools. They spend their days being taught an outdated curriculum in an atmosphere that is not conducive to learning. High school students mark time in an environment that resembles nothing in the real world, their freedom restricted and their creative abilities suppressed. If anyone is suffering from isolation, they are.
Copyright 2008 Barbara Frank