School's Out Forever

Sunday, Apr. 09, 2006 By DANIEL WILLIAMS
"We have teenagers who want to be with us, and we love being with them," says Helen Devenish
PETER MATHEW FOR TIME
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So how do homeschooled kids turn out? Pretty well, it seems. They're ineligible to sit for exams such as the N.S.W. Higher School Certificate or New Zealand's 7th Form Bursary, which would indicate how they stack up academically against their traditionally schooled peers. However, numerous studies, mainly American, have given homeschooled children a glowing report card: better abstract thinking and language skills, above average in all the main subjects. While much of this research was commissioned by homeschooling organizations, few experts argue against the practice on academic grounds. "Homeschooling can often produce very smart kids," says psychologist Bob Murray - largely because learning becomes a way to please their parents.

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Universities have a discretionary power to accept applicants without entry scores, so homeschooling isn't necessarily an impediment to tertiary study. Indeed, a high proportion of the homeschooled just keep on studying, often well into their 20s. Why? Perhaps their childhood experience fires a profound love of learning. Or does their sheltered upbringing cause them to delay the leap into a scary world? The most persistent objection to home education is that it denies its charges the socializing experience of school. "Living in the community, being with other children . . . these are vital parts of a normal life for a child," says Sharryn Brownlee, immediate past president of the N.S.W. Federation of Parents and Citizens Associations. Schools aren't perfect, she adds. But nor is life. "You have to give the child the opportunity to learn and grow."

Asking someone involved in homeschooling whether it stunts children's social growth elicits much eye rolling, and a sigh-laden explanation of where you've gone wrong. It's all about false assumptions. You think homeschooled children never meet other kids? They meet them all the time, they protest - at ballet class, at church, on excursions arranged by and for homeschoolers. You think children mingle widely at school? School culture virtually precludes any but the most cursory contacts between children of different ages. You think all children are happy at school? Many spend years feeling anxious and excluded, victims of bullying or just their peers' natural insensitivity. And what else does school entail? Exposure to the juggernaut of peer pressure, to alcohol, recreational drugs and underage sex, to the myriad maladies that will bleed young minds of their innocence. "This argument that homeschooled children suffer socially is the biggest furphy," says the H.E.A.'s Strange. "Homeschooled children are better socialized. They're respectful. They speak confidently to all kinds of people. And they play easily with children younger and older than themselves."

Listening to homeschooling parents, it can seem that some of what they regard as depravity and rebellion is just youth asserting its independence. There's a bigger issue here that advocates of homeschooling tend to skirt. Socialization is too complex a phenomenon to be reduced to whether a child is sweet-natured and has a few chums. School does no less than expose children to the diversity of human nature. It's where they make, over the course of a decade, thousands of acquaintances. They might not have been friends with the weird kid, the brainiac, the pretty boy, the bully or the one whose sister got expelled, but they're more complete - and less vulnerable - for having known them. It's this vast network of acquaintances that helps to shrink and demystify the wider world, making it easier, when the time comes, to join it.

Other misgivings about homeschooling are as hard to shake. The Australian Christian Academy recommends a curriculum called Accelerated Christian Education, in which creationism is taught alongside evolution as science. Promotional material for the Muslim Education Network of Australia includes the line, "By ensuring the quality of our children's education we may be able to help save our children and ourselves from the hellfire." In her western Sydney home, Mujahidah Flint explains how important it is not to believe everything you read. Later, discussing 9/11, she and her daughters mention some material they've seen on the Internet: did their visitor know that hundreds of Jews who worked in the World Trade Center might have been told not to come to work that day?