Homeschooling or going to school? Parents increasingly opting to teach their children at home
According to The Washington Examiner, in 2023, nearly 10 million children were homeschooled. This figure has skyrocketed especially since the pandemic and has not stopped gaining steam, especially since many schools got caught up in woke indoctrination.
File image of two homeschooled siblings in 2015 in the United States.
The time is coming for children to grab their backpacks, get their pencils, pens and other school supplies ready and get ready to go back to school. However, many of them will be receiving this education from the comfort of their own homes.
Homeschooling allows parents or guardians to take primary responsibility for the education of their children instead of sending them to school. Parents act also as teachers and must guide their young ones through the curriculum as well as assure that they learn all the educational material corresponding to their age.
Although in principle this strategy implies an added responsibility, in recent years, this type of education has been gaining popularity.
In 2023, a total of 10 million students were homeschooled. According to The Washington Examiner, this represented a 51% increase over the past six school years and by far exceeds the 7% increase that had been recorded in private school enrollment. On the opposite side are the public schools, whose enrollment decreased by 4% in favor of homeschooling.
Where is there a perceived increase in homeschooling?
What is causing the increase in homeschooling?
First it was the pandemic that forced parents to teach their children at home. But now parents are opting more for this educational model due to the progressive policies that more and more schools, both public and private, are adopting and that, in many cases, go against the education that parents want their children to receive.
A survey conducted by the Pew Research Center last February revealed that 33% of American public school teachers believed that American parents "should not have the right" to request that their children not attend gender identity classes. That is, more than one-third of respondents asserted that it should be public schools, not parents who educate their children on this issue.
Charter schools (which have free tuition and are publicly funded but independent of school districts) also seem to have been attracted by the progressive ideology.
Thus, a report from The Heritage Foundation claimed that terms such as "diversity," "equity," "inclusion," "restorative," "justice," "social-emotional learning," "gender identity," or "culturally affirming/relevant" had been used nearly twice as often in these types of institutions versus district schools. Thus, charter schools used these terms a total of 2,517 times in 211 schools versus 1,317 times detected in 211 district schools.
All these surveys mark a growing trend, and more and more parents are choosing to educate their children at home after losing trust in public and even private education. This was the result of a survey conducted in August 2023 by The Washington Post and George Mason University.
These institutions polled a total of 1,027 parents with children aged 5 to 20 and asked them why they homeschooled them. Forty-six percent said they did so because "local schools are too influenced by leftist views."
And one of the great advantages of educating children at home is that the educational path is chosen by the parents, as well as the values they will receive, as the director of Florida Home Education Department, Grace Rodriguez explained to newspaper Las Americas:
"Parents become completely responsible for the student's learning, they can teach them with the curriculum they decide. They do not have to be licensed as an educator, as long as they report to their county on the progress of the education."
The woke ideology that schools are adopting isn't the only reason parents are choosing homeschooling. Having children go to school also worries parents because of problems such as school shootings, bullying and, in general, the quality of the school environment with teachers having to worry about a group of students and not attending to special needs. All this contributes to the fact that homeschooling, now more than ever, appears to be the solution to many problems that parents see in their children's education.
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