Homeschool and Socialization
BevK April 28th, 2007
CBN has posted an article that takes a look at homeschoolers and socialization from a Christian perspective. It has some interesting things to say including the results of testing homeschoolers and public schoolers with the Vineyard Adaptive Behavior Scale. I don’t know what that tests, but I’ll be looking into it.
Socialization: Homeschooling vs. the Schools
92 percent of superintendents believe that home learners are emotionally unstable, deprived of proper social development and too judgmental of the world around them, according to a California study by researcher Dr. Brian Ray .
Questions about inadequate socialization are often brought up as a means to disqualify homeschooling as a viable alternative form of education, but are the arguments valid?
That really is the question. From the article:
So how do these different settings affect children? Dr. Thomas Smedley believes that homeschoolers have superior socialization skills, and his research supports this claim. He conducted a study in which he administered the Vineyard Adaptive Behavior Scales test to identify mature and well-adapted behaviors in children. Home learners ranked in the 84th percentile, compared to publicly schooled students, who were drastically lower in the 23rd.
The article goes on to look at what makes homeschooling different and why homeschoolers would do so well on such a test.
Perhaps the most important statistic quoted in this article, where Christian parents are concerned, is the percentage of Christian youth disowning their faith.
Consistent with these figures, Christian producer and occult expert Caryl Matrisciana reports that 75 percent of public-schooled American youth brought up in Christian households disown their Christian faith by the first year of college. NHERI finds that this is only true for less than four percent of homeschooled youth.
