Home Schooling vs. Public Schooling

Parents carefully contemplate what kind of education their child should receive. Educational styles such as home and public schooling are both geared towards helping teach children the skills that they might need for their future profession. In either style, a child will have class work to perform and problems to work to reinforce lessons. To make sure the information is solid within the child's mind, tests are usually given. Although both schooling methods will help a child learn, the types of social interactions they will be exposed to will be different. Both schooling methods effectively increase a child's knowledge, but the social development of children brought up in each system varies.

Home schooled children are constantly around the house, and therefore learn how to effectively manage house chores. To put this idea in a generalization, home schooled children live in their own home economics class. Often they will have to wash dishes, mop floors, vacuum, and laundry; task that working parents who have children in school prefer to do when the kids are not around. Young home schooled children are usually taken on shopping trips with their parent, and they learn to peruse the aisles of a store to find what they need to help their parents. Unlike home schooled families, activities such as store shopping or cleaning are usually taken care of while public school children are away at school or fast at sleep, so they miss out on these opportunities to become proficient at life skills. Homework also plays a big factor in how much free time a school child has at home, further limiting the activities a child can do at home. From having a lack of time public school children are less likely to develop proficient house keeping skills at an early age. Good house keeping skills are more likely to manifest in home schooled children, who spend most of their time at home.

Spending more of their time in the household, home schooled children are less likely to be exposed to negative influences. Parents can control what and when their child learns something with a greater degree of precision than public school child, who is exposed to constant free thought. In the home environment parents can promote ideals such as abstinence and religious devotion to their children, and try to guide them to be morally pure at heart. Often home schooled children do not know the meanings of words such as orgy or brothel, due to the parent's choice to avoid sexual topics to promote abstinence. In a public institution words such as this are common, along with a myriad more. Public institutions are not allowed to celebrate religious pursuits, forcing children to learn their own values and ethics. More often than not, these values are derived from their friends, and many students become subject to peer pressure in an attempt to fit in. Some public institutions teach children how to put condoms on cucumbers to promote safe sex over abstinence, drawing focus away from what is morally right or wrong and instead placing it on the resulting hygiene. In public schools, the diversity of people and beliefs is heavy, exposing children to a wide array of lifestyles that can have. In contrast, home schooled children are more family orientated and will more than likely keep the beliefs and values that get instated within them.

While home schooled children may get more direction in how they should live, they often lack a direction in life. Most home schooled courses do not require standardized testing, which would tell them their standing in knowledge at the national level. Without guidance councilors most home schooled children are left to their own to find out how to acquire scholarships or apply for a college. Lacking guidance, home school children are not always pushed to determine what they want to do with their lives, and are prone to being unsure. Unlike home schooling systems, the public school system is geared to prepare students to go into college. Most of a public schools curriculum is designed to be built off of itself, and many school activities are instituted specifically for college. Mandatory as well as optional standardized test are given to help students better understand their current understanding of the materials they have learned. Counseling bodies have been set up to specifically to direct public school students on how to apply for college, and make sure that those who want to go are able to find all the help they need for their endeavor. Students who are unsure of what they want to do with their future are free to utilize a counselors to help them find out what kind of career best suits their future interest. Although home schooled students are free to seek out direction for future careers in many ways, the public school system already has a structure in place to help students transfer from high school to college.

Both the home and public schooling methods are effective at their task, which is to give a child knowledge. Although both types of education get the job accomplished, the effect on a child's social development varies significantly between the two. In home schooled children, one would expect to find people who are handy around the house, a bit naïve in mind, and unsure of the future. Looking to public school children, one would expect to see that as a whole they are not often as handy to have around the house, often know too much about the wrong subjects, and are forced to be constantly thinking about their future. Some children tend to be more or less social than others, and are naturally people who tend to ignore society. When parents pick a style of education for their child, it is most important to consider what kind of adult they want their child to be.