Believe it or not, as a homeschooler, you’re actually more prepared for college than your public-schooled counterparts. Yes, this is a very biased statement and now I’ve got the government and every single member of the teacher’s union against me, so let me explain what I mean in the form of a list.
1. Flexibility
Organization is very important when you’re in college. In fact, it’s necessary. Public schooling is a daily routine of going to school, doing school work, going to lunch, more school work, go home, do homework, go to bed, and repeat the schedule until you take tests on everything you learned at the end of the week. College is very different from that. You’re given everything you have to do at the beginning of the week and given a deadline as to when to finish it all. Some days you may not have classes and on days that you do, there may be a three hour gap between each class. What you have to do then is plan your week out accordingly, which isn’t much different from homeschooling.
2. No Standardized Tests
Now this the big baby of public-schooling. The main issue with standardized testing is that all of a teacher’s effort is put into preparing his or her students for exams instead of actually getting them to learn something. In a university, a professor’s success is dependent on how many students they can get enrolled into their course. In grade school, a teacher’s success is dependent on how well their students perform on the EOC (End of Course) Exams or the FCAT if you live in Florida. In the end, the only thing a student has actually learned is memorization. I remember explaining to someone when I was in the 5th grade that I didn’t know how to write a two paragraph essay and that I only knew how to write 5-paragraph ones: an introduction followed by three supporting arguments and a conclusion. Throughout school, you’re practically taught that 2+2=4, but are never told why. You’re just expected to know it. Usually, the dialogue kind of goes like this:
“Why do I need to know this?”
“It doesn’t matter. You just need to know it.”
3. Socially Prepared
This is a hard one for many to comprehend, even for me. If a child spends their entire life at home, how can they be prepared to communicate with the outside world? In public school, children grow up talking and hanging with their peers and they spend most of their time when they’re not in class doing just that. Who their friends are and everyone else they know are mostly dictated by what class they’re in. At a young age, many of the problems in their peers’ families and even their teachers are reflected onto them; a problem that is easily controlled in a homeschooled environment. Homeschooling gives homeschoolers more freedom to interact with people in their community. Not only with people your own age, but with adults as well; something that is actually useful out in the real world.
So there you have it, a 5-paragraph essay explaining why homeschoolers are more prepared for college (and the real world) than publicschoolers. My 5th grade English teacher would be proud of me.
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