[joshkaufman]

I think a child's social skills are very influenced by the type of environment at home.

Many families homeschool because they want to intentionally "protect"/isolate their children from the mainstream. This is very common with religious families that choose to homeschool so their kids (1) are exposed to the family's values and belief system to the exclusion of others, and (2) aren't corrupted by the evils of the outside world. That's a perfect recipe for social awkwardness.

Isolation is not a primary component of the homeschooling/unschooling approach. In fact, if your goal is to expose your kids to as many cool things and people as possible, more unstructured time doing things in the real world may actually make them more socially skilled than their peers.

[fr0sty]

This is just as unfair a characterization of home-schoolers as the GP.

[joshkaufman]

What part do you think is an unfair characterization - that some parents prefer to isolate their children for religious/moral reasons, or that doing so can lead to social awkwardness?

According to a 2001 U.S. Census survey, 33% of homeschooling households cited religion as a factor in their choice, 14% objected to what the school teaches (i.e things like evolution), and 9% cited morality. (See data at http://www.census.gov/population/www/documentation/twps0053/... and http://www.census.gov/population/www/documentation/twps0053/...)

In a 1999 study by the National Center for Education Statistics, only 48.9% of US homeschooling parents cited "Can give child better education at home" as the primary reason for homeschooling. That means 51.1% of homeschooling parents in the US think their kids would get a better education at school, but choose to homeschool for other reasons, which are primarily religious/moral in nature.

I'm not saying all homeschooling parents (which includes all religious homeschooling parents) want to isolate their children. The point is that, for a non-trivial percentage of parents, removing their children from the mainstream is a primary motivation for homeschooling.

[lotharbot]

> "That means 51.1% of homeschooling parents in the US think their kids would get a better education at school"

No, that's not what it means.

It means 48.9% thinks "better education" is their main reason for homeschooling. For the other 51.1%, "better education" is not the main reason, but may still be on the list.

It's true that a non-trivial percentage want to isolate their children from the mainstream, but please do not misrepresent the statistics to make your point.

[joshkaufman]

That was what I thought at first too, until I double-checked the study. If you look at the data here (http://www.census.gov/population/www/documentation/twps0053/...), the cumulative percentage is 214.2%. That means it wasn't a "multiple choice, pick one" question - it was a "mark one or more reasons" question.

That means that 51.1% of parents surveyed did not mark "quality of education" as a reason they chose to homeschool - it was on the list as an option they could have marked, and they chose not to pick it. That's pretty telling, IMO.

[bugsy]

Parents can also believe that homeschooling does just as good a job as other schools.

Because they don't list that their motivation was that they can do better than a public school does not mean that they believe they will do worse.

Consider the case of someone sending their child to a French immersion school. Most would not say that the immersion school is better than all other schools, but that doesn't mean they believe they believe it is worse. Likely they are sending their children there because they want them to learn to speak French fluently, not because they believe other schools are worse.

Here's a more recent study from the US Department of Education:

http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2006/homeschool/TableDisplay.asp?Tabl...

This 2003 study is considered to be far superior to the 1999 one cited for reasons discussed in this article:

http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2006/homeschool/parentsreasons.asp

For example, on the 1999 study two flaws listed are "when faced with an open-ended question, parents may not have recalled or responded with all of the reasons for homeschooling that were applicable to their situation" and "parents were not specifically asked to report their primary reason for homeschooling".

As you can see the 2003 study addresses these procedural errors and breaks out factors cited at all separately from those cited as primary concern.

The most listed factor for both was environmental factors in other schools, meaning "safety, drugs, or negative peer pressure". This was a concern of 85.4% of families, and the most important factor for 31.2%.

Dissatisfaction with academic quality of other schools was a factor in 68.2% of families, but a primary reason in only 16.5%

Regarding the assumptions made previously that any included component of religious or moral instruction implies isolationism and a lack of socialization, that claim is not supported by studies.