Inspired by chrisls recent post about home schooling, I tried to organize my thoughts on it today. I brought it up over lunch today, and one of my coworkers, who works and lives in Calgary but is in town right now, happens to be home schooling his daughter, so I got to ask all about it.

His main two points seemed to be that first, getting enough socialization is not remotely a problem, and that second, home schooling is a ton of work for the parents. Secondarily, home schooling is expensive, because the opportunity cost of a parent not working is significant.

The socialization thing is not hard at all, since you make up for school by doing activities. Soccer, piano, dance, etc., and it all adds up just fine. Plus in Calgary there are weekly classes for home school kids as an option, which is a nice feature. It could be argued, I suppose, that the kind of social experience kids get in activities is different from school, but that might well be an argument in favor of it instead of against it. I certainly have some very negative memories about certain other kids and times in school, to go with the generally positive ones from high school.

The level of work is large, of course. It means that one parent pretty much can't work, or that the parents won't see much of one another because they need to make sure scheduled time away from home doesn't overlap. Plus, designing a curriculum and so on, and participating deeply in the way that would make it valuable, takes up quite a bit of time and energy.

On the upside, though, you have lots of flexibility. My coworker said that the general consensus is that it takes less than three hours a day to get through the required subjects that they would normally cover in school, and the rest of the time is open for whatever you or the child is interested in. I imagine some days that is amazing and wonderful, and other days somewhat daunting. I remember once getting a bad grade because I missed some school to take a tour of colonial history on the east coast -- certainly no ludicrous punishment like that would happen absent overstructured schools.

One of my major recollections from school over the years is the huge amount of time which was basically wasted. There were many classes and days where I learned little, in part because I was quicker than some of those around me, but also in part because I found the material boring (those may be related, of course). Now, dealing with boredom is an important ability, and one that needs to be learned fairly early on. I don't think that it should take 12 years of enforced practice, though.

I'm increasingly coming around to the opinion that home schooling by interested and capable parents is better for the kids than normal school. The upsides -- better, more tailored instruction, higher level of interesting content, and so on -- seem to me to outweigh the negatives -- mostly having a different experience from peers which makes it harder to fit in. Of course, that doesn't automatically mean that everyone should home school, since the large additional costs to the parents of course make a difference, and not every parent will be willing and competent.

The last thing my friend from Calgary said was that there seem to be three groups of people that home school: parents who want more religious instruction than the schools will have; families that move around a lot, so the kids wouldn't have any sort of continuity at school; and the small group of generally liberal parents who think they can do a better job than the schools.

I find I had a pretty strong negative visceral reaction to home schooling the first few times I thought about it, largely because I associated it with the first group above, and basically considered it the province of parents who wanted to completely control the exposure their kids had to information to make them as indoctrinated as possible. I now think that while that may be the largest example of the use of home schooling, it's not at all the only one, and that you might well be able to raise someone to be much more open minded than the school system would.