According to Murphy, home-schooled children do well academically. They enter higher education in proportions similar to those who attended public or private schools and score as well or better on college entrance exams. Yes, but what about the social-backwardness of the home-schooled students? According to Murphy, home-schooled students are not socially backward. Most, he says, seem confident, assured and well-adjusted. And here’s the kicker: Murphy says home-schooled students have fewer behavioral problems. This is all very surprising to me, I must admit.

 
When I found out there was no regulation enforcement of home-schooling in Kansas, it seemed to me that the system should be trashed. But as I learned more, my attitude has changed.

As it is, nobody keeps track of what home-schoolers are taught. Kansas does not even have a state statute regulating home schooling. Rather, home schooling is lumped in with non-accredited private schools.

Those schools function on the “honor” system. The state asks that each student spend 186 days a year in the “classroom,” and 1,116 hours in the school year learning, but there is no enforcement whatsoever, according to state officials.

There are 22,000 students in Kansas who are home-schooled, and of those, 3,463 are in Johnson County, according to state officials. Home-school parents must register their students with the state. But that really is usually the last contact the parents have with the state on home-schooling.

The lack of real oversight would seem to be a recipe for academic disaster, not to mention the question of whether there is social reclusiveness of students who spend their days hanging around their parents, instead of their peers.

Yet, home-schooling is probably the fastest-growing form of education in America, according to The Economist magazine. A few decades ago, home-schooling was illegal in 30 states. Today, it is legal everywhere.

Today, approximately two million students are home-schooled, which is about the same number that attend charter schools.

That was revealed in a new book, Home Schooling in America, written by Joseph Murphy, a professor at Vanderbilt University.

This book really is revealing, because it explodes most of the preconceived notions I had, and probably most have, about home-schooled children.

I, for one, could not imagine either my wife nor me — nor any parent — successfully structuring a daily regimen of teaching at home, not to mention whether we would even know much about what we were supposed to be teaching, particularly in the upper grades.

And if that were not difficult enough to imagine, my hat goes off to any parent who is able to harness the cooperation of the child in learning daily from a parent.

But, according to Murphy, somehow it all works.

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