Beverley Paine

For many, the unintended benefits of home educating experienced during the early months and years far outweigh the original reasons parents say motivated them to give it a go. I compiled this list many years ago national and international research including John Peacock's major Australian study, The Why and How of Home Education in Australia (more articles on the benefits of home education can be found at http://theeducatingparent.com/sitemap.html#benefitsanddisadvantages):

• closer family relationships, with children playing a more positive and significant role in family life, and an emphasis on family making skills;
• parental personal fulfilment and increased learning opportunities for parents as well as children;
• greater understanding of personal responsibility;
• natural fostering of co-operative and team behaviours;
• an empowering process for both parents and children;
• greater freedom from arbitrary time limits such as terms and year levels to pursue educational activities and interests;
• increased opportunity for one to one interaction with more skilled peers or parents, which lead to cognitive challenges and gains;
• children are able to ask more questions, with more time allowed for answers to be found, leading to increased motivation for learning;
• children and parents engage in more complex language in the home learning environment compared with classroom settings, and this improves the intellectual and language development of children;
• children have been shown to rate equal to or higher than average on standardised achievement tests;
• home educated children's self concept has been shown to be significantly higher than schooled children, indicating that home education does not socially deprive children but produces socially well adjusted young people;
• children are less peer oriented;
• increased involvement in community activities;
• greater attainment of independent learning skills, self-motivation and organisational abilities.

Schools promise these outcomes but fail to guarantee achievement for ALL students. Schools continue to fail students, citing many excuses: family problems, individual learning difficulties, lack of adequate resourcing, under-financing by funding bodies. Problems in classrooms persist decade after decade while politicians and bureaucrats continue to shift the blame and experiment without adequate evaluation processes in place.

For home educating parents failure is an unacceptable outcome. The drive to succeed in the home learning environment is very high, with parents continuously searching for better and more successful methods, resources and outcomes to improve their children's educational opportunities and to meet their individual learning needs. Unlike school teachers parents are directly accountable to the student, in an immediate way, every day. Problems with education are not left to fester indefinitely. Home education allows considerable flexibility in delivering excellence in education - flexibility schools can't match.

See the following articles for additional information :

• Australian and Overseas Research Links
• Solid Evidence to Support Home Schooling Michael Farris

You may like to read a couple of frequently asked question responses Beverley wrote in reply to some emailed questions:

• FAQ: What is your homeschooling life like?
• FAQ: Does this stuff work? I don't dig this homeschooling idea at all and reckon that homeschooling leads to socially retarded kids...

If you want to know more about how Beverley and Robin home educated their children their book, Learning in the Absence of Education (a title picked by their then ten year old son) contains many essays on how their children learned to read, write, spell, how the family managed daily life, dealt with socialisation issues, etc.