Is Homeschool Right For Your Child?
By Sun Kyu Bae |
Published April 10, 2009 |
Articles |
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The ability to homeschool a child is only half the equation. Find out if your child is a good fit too!
If you read my first two articles and determined that homeschooling is a good fit for you, congratulations! Not many people can relate to the significance of making the decision to homeschool, except for other homeschoolers and coming from one, you just took two huge steps into our journey. Before you take the final plunge on the go/no-go homeschool decision, you need to consider one last critical question: is homeschool right for your child?
Top Factors To Determine Whether Homeschool Is Right For Your Child
There are 4 factors to consider when answering this question:
One-on-One Lessons. The first factor is to determine how much your child will benefit from one-on-one lessons. If you think your child will benefit most from learning one-on-one vs. 10-to-1 in private schools or 20-to-1 in public schools, then homeschooling may be a good fit for your child. Now, you may ask, “Isn’t it obvious that all kids will most likely do better one-on-one?” True, and maybe I'm starting off with a loaded one here. But I want to especially note the importance of the one-on-one factor as it relates to children who would benefit the most from one-on-one lessons. I'm talking about children with special needs and/or especially gifted kids. You can see how these children, if placed in a typical 10-to-1 or 20-to-1 classroom setting, will have the greatest potential to slip through the cracks of the education system and end up in a program that would be suboptimal at best and wholly destructive at worst.
A good rule of thumb to assess how this factor measures up in your child is:
Identify the educational goals for your child (i.e., 4-year university, Ivy-league for you high achievers),
Assess how different the outcomes of those goals will be if you taught your child on your own vs. letting the schools teach your child, and
If both outcomes (one-on-one vs. school-taught) meet the educational goals you’ve set up for child, then this factor shouldn’t weigh too heavily to determine whether homeschool is right for your child.
If, on the other hand, you think that the only way your child has an opportunity at meeting the educational goals is to teach one-on-one and that the typical public school may actually harm your child’s chances of meeting those goals, then you have a strong case that teaching one-on-one via homeschool is the right thing for your child.
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