Home Schoolers DO go to College (Sometimes)

Parent Cafe
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I’ll admit it. I’m the quintessential overly-involved mom.

The worst of the worst, I home schooled my kid K-7. And I loved every minute.

In seventh grade my daughter sat me down and had the talk.

“Mom, I love you. Home school has been great, but I need a life. I want a best friend. And a boyfriend. And I NEED a real math teacher. I want to try jail school in the fall.” (I’d always affectionately referred to conventional schools as “jail school”, so in her mind, she was using the proper term.)

I knew it was coming. I’d seen her asking a million questions of her public school cousins, asking to go to their school events, getting crushes on boys they knew. I think in my heart I knew it had only been a matter of time.

I waited for her in the car after her first day of public school. When she came skipping out of the building grinning ear to ear, it was bad enough, but when she went on a 30 minute tangent about her amazing teachers and how much she’d already learned…well, it was kinda hard to take. She LOVED public school. She loved her teachers. She made friends easily. She was already talking about joining a drama club, and a green science club, and then she told me about the boy in the lunch room…and I knew. It was over. Any sick horrible hope I had that she’d hate school and want to come home…was crushed like a fruit roll-up under a school bus tire.

Kid made all A’s her first year of school ever. Her teachers gushed about wanting 30 more just like her. Ugh. And it just got worse. The next year, when she started high school, it was more of the same. She took to formal academia like an obsessed crazy woman…which my husband and I found really interesting, because we were extremely relaxed home schoolers who never tested her, never had deadlines, and in all honesty, never used a formal curriculum.

We were guided by a single principle for elementary education. Elementary kids should read a little, write a little, and do a little math ever day. We read to her at least an hour every day. We listened to her read to us. Our house had a culture of reading and investigation and we all participated.

We took her to the library twice a week, and we encouraged her to follow her own interests and come up with her own projects. We supported her investigations and pretty much just road in the back seat of her education while she drove.

I’m not advocating this system of education for anyone else, and I know it wouldn’t work for all students, but we loved it and it seemed to work out really well for us.

I just wanted to put the word out…that home school kids…even very unstructured home school kids…can make the transition to formal education settings. They don’t all suffer crushing shyness or social dysfunction. (some do, and I imagine a similar proportion of traditional schoolers do, too)

My kid graduated salutatorian of her high school class. I never once asked her if she’d done her homework, but I always dropped everything and helped if I was ever asked, which was rare as to being nonexistent. I cautioned her about taking too many demanding, challenging classes. She defied my voice of moderation and sanity, and took every AP class she could cram into her schedule. And she mastered them.

Sometimes I feel like one of those poor birds who laid an egg, and a parasitic species flew in and kicked my egg out of the nest and laid its own alien egg for me to raise. But I swear to God, I saw this kid come out of my body, and she has her Dad’s feet. My husband and I are laid back hippy people. We would have been happy if our daughter had been an artist, or a chef, or a plumber or something. Instead, we got this weird academic person who seemed as puzzled by us as we were by her.

My kid is a microbiology major at the University of Michigan these days. She works part time for a research lab at the college during the school year, and full time in the summer at a biological station, helping researchers to study biofuels and switch grass and the microbial fungal communities of snail guts (God knows why, and if I ask my daughter she just goes into a rant like the professor on Gilligan’s island and it makes me laugh with disbelief and pride). She has an apartment with a roommate she loves, a full social life, and she’s planning to go to grad school.

If you happen to be a home school kid, or the parent of a home school kid wondering if home schooled kids do ok in college? They can, and they do. They even go into research disciplines and STEM…which you constantly hear reports of being anomalous and non-existent among the home schooled. (By the way, we’re also not remotely religious and we haven’t forbidden buttons on clothing, R rated movies, or access to birth control…lol)

I will say that home school kids need a bridge. I think they need time to develop functional independence, and the opportunity to transition to traditional learning. They might get this by switching to public school for high school like my kiddo did, or by taking high school classes at community college, or working a job or apprenticeship… but there has to be a bridge to functioning inside the expectations of traditional academia. They need the space to be self regulating, and self accountable. They need independence from us, because it’s a developmental necessity.

But yeah, if your home schooled kid is ten years old and spends his day building rivers in mud puddles and creating architecture on minecraft, and loves to take everything apart in the garage? Don’t mess with him. He’s on the right track. Squeeze in some reading, some writing, and some math, and spend the day helping him research combustion engines and hydronic power. Elementary education doesn’t have to look like a mini version of college. It can be full of wonder and joy. I always felt my primary job as an elementary educator, was to get my kid to fall head over heals in love with learning. Seems to have worked out:)

And It’s ok to do things different.

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Yes, sometimes those of us who come from unstructured, hippy parents do just fine :). Sometimes we even end up at U of M :wink:

(I was not homeschooled, but I might as well have been for the first several years. I didn’t have friends and I was years ahead in school. I don’t regret anything though.)

My parents wouldn’t have been able to help with homework if I asked, but whatever I had an interest in, they’d do whatever they needed to do to make sure I was able to explore that. A completely unstructured upbringing was exactly what I needed.

My mom still calls me her alien child because I’m so unlike them. >-)

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Did anyone out here say they didn’t succeed in college or later in formal school settings? Sorry… this post strikes me as both a humblebrag and a backhand at “jail schoolers”.

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@inparent , I’m going to assume that you did not home school your children based on your post. It is quite common for homeschooling patents to get asked, with annoying frequency, how your kids will adjust to ‘the real world’.

I homeschooled my four all the way through 12th grade. All went on to college. The oldest has two graduate degrees. Number 2 is a nurse. Number 3 Is a CPA and the youngest is currently at a Service Academy. Homeschooling certainly didn’t hold them back. Each of them would say that it helped them to be well prepared for the ‘real world’.

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Not a backhand at “jail schoolers” at all. Hell…I sent my kid to jail school, too. Worked out very well for her, and we were treated very very well by the public schools here. We were very impressed with their tolerant attitude about home school, and their allowing our kiddo to stand on her own merits. She was treated very fairly, and we are tremendously grateful for this. They did an excellent job.

Again, and I mentioned this… My choices wouldn’t work for every kid, or every parent. I very much respect the difficult job our public school teachers do. Schooling your own kid gives you an empathy for teachers that you would never develop otherwise. It’s a HUGE responsibility to be in charge of someone’s education.

There are few people I think as highly of…as teachers.

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And yes, it’s a common misconception that home schooled kids do not go on to higher education, do not study STEM fields, and don’t adapt to college well socially. You have no idea how often home school parents hear these things from “well meaning and concerned” friends and family.

Just tryin to shed a little light. That’s all.

And yeah…I am kinda proud of that kid. Will admit that in a heartbeat. :slight_smile:

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I haven’t seen it as a common misperception out here. But maybe that is because the homeschoolers who post out here are looking for advice on how to get into college. There is a homeschooling forum, so lots of posts come up in the “Latest Posts” stream from homeschoolers talking looking for colleges.

Not to belabor the point, but "We were treated very well by the public schools here’ – you seem shocked. I think homeschooling is fine, but to me your posts seem to show a disdain for schools and constant surprise that they worked for your kid or anyone else.

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I known some families who homeschooled and their kids did very well with the transition either directly to college or to a 4 year high school, and I know some who, IMO, did their children no favors by homeschooling as the transitions did not go well or did not happen at all.

Same thing can happen if the family does traditional schooling.

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It continues to amaze me how people have to make so many snarky comments on this board and can’t just “move on” keeping their thoughts to themselves.

With that being said yours is a beautiful story that I enjoyed reading. Thank you for sharing. I am an elementary school teacher and what you describe is a wonderful journey of learning. My oldest (now late teen) would have been a wonderful home school candidate and I wish I had done it with him until middle school. My younger needed it too probably until about 3rd grade due to extreme boredom in the classroom. But, hindsight is 20/20. Reading and reading aloud…I truly believe that is the key to education. If only our culture left more time for more families to enjoy it.

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^^^If people kept their thoughts to themselves this wouldn’t be much of a message board! :slight_smile:

I’m curious OP, why did you call school outside of the home “jail school”???

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We had a great experience with homeschooling, much to my surprise. Our “bridge” back go traditional classes was dual enrollment.

It’s great that you were open to traditional school for your daughter! It’s easy to be rigid and prideful about homeschooling too. Really it comes down to what is best for a particular child and family.

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Who’s saying that they can’t? I’ve been a homeschooler for two decades and I run a network that includes several hundred families, and I’m not seeing the concern you describe. Our children have no problem transitioning to formal education. Some start taking courses at local colleges at 14 or 15. Four year colleges love to have them because they’re self-directed and tend to do very well in college.

This is an old stereotype and one I haven’t heard in a long time. It’s unfortunate that it’s coming from a former homeschooler. In my experience, homeschoolers don’t experience shyness any more than public school children do, much less “crushing” varieties, nor are they socially dysfunctional. In most cases, it’s generally the opposite. “Homeschooled” is actually a misnomer; it’s called “homeschooled” because the driving force behind the process is the student’s family not the public school, but rarely does the majority of the education take place in the home. Most homeschoolers I know do more away from home than they do in it.

I don’t know what reports you’re listening to, but they’re not anything like my experience. A lot of our kids go into STEM. I know many homeschool families who do 4 years of lab science in high school and a lot of the kids love it. We send kids to all kinds of colleges all across the country – some even to U. Michigan. Our kids are walking the halls of Harvard and every other tier of college in this country and they’re in all kinds of majors.

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This is another old stereotype that most enlightened adults realize has little to do with the majority of homeschooling families. People homeschool for [many reasons](http://childrensmd.org/uncategorized/why-doctors-and-lawyers-homeschool-their-children-18-reasons-why-we-have-joined-americas-fastest-growing-educational-trend/). Most homeschoolers aren’t religious extremists.

One of the reasons [url=https://alumni.stanford.edu/get/page/magazine/article/?article_id=39384]colleges[/url] like homeschoolers is because they are self-directed and independent. Colleges aren’t looking for families who recreate traditional education at home. Many homeschooled kids never attend public school, take community college courses, or hold down a job before enrolling in college full-time and they do just fine. They earn scholarships. They make the dean’s list. And yes, some of them are even doing it while taking STEM majors.

All students need space to grow and be independent. It’s a mistake to think that only comes from a formal setting. Homeschooled students don’t need a “bridge” to the adult world because they’ve been steeped in it since early childhood. It’s no surprise to those of us involved in education that homeschoolers do well and are sought after by colleges. We expect nothing less.

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I think the OP when she said “jail school” was poking fun at herself, the way she herself saw public school as being, the tone of the piece, at least initially, was her shock at how much her kid loved public school, to her chagrin…:).

I think a lot of the stereotypes the OP is trying to prove wrong are still common ones. Homeschooled kids often do better than kids in traditional schools, and there is evidence that ‘unschooled’ kids can do the best of all, that reality is out there, and colleges, including the elite schools, encourage homeschooled students to apply, I know a number of homeschooled kids who got into, for example, the “godhead” schools of HYP. There are a lot of people, though, who see homeschooling as no school at all, the kids are aimless, etc, but given there are a lot of people out there who think getting a ton of homework out there shows educational efficiency or quality, so not surprised that myths about homeschool kids abound.

When my son was little and we looked into homeschooling, a lot of the homeschooling groups out there, and information, were religious groups, especially fundamentalist Christian ones, they homeschooled to keep their kids away from the secular world of school, they have their own textbooks, etc. By the time my son hit middle school, when we were looking to do it again, the landscape had changed, the unschoolers, homeschoolers were more and more dominated by people who felt that regular school, public or private, didn’t work for them, it had nothing to do with the evils of secular society (many of the homeschoolers I have run into tend to be middle of the road to liberal with the kinds of issues the religious fundamentalists have, with science and social issues).

I think the biggest stereotype that abounds out there is the socialization one, and that quite honestly is ridiculous, unless the parents keep their kid chained in the house doing schoolwork, of course they are socialized. Homeschool kids make friends of kids in the neighborhood, they make friends in homeschool co ops, homeschool kids do things like little league, they do other kinds of activities. I heard that about my son and laughed, with the music he was doing, with other activities, he was socialized just fine, made friends, and has a lot of them now, had no problem with ‘real life’, though he was homeschooled from 8th grade on. He didn’t have the stats that the kids in public school heading for college did, but that was because he was focusing on music (which if you think people look down on homeschooling, you should see what schools and guidance counselors and people think of how music students operate in schools or out,).

There are also advantages to the ‘unsocial’ aspects of homeschooling, for one thing they can avoid the horrible issues of those days, the mean girls, bullying, self consciousness, the whole ‘clique’ crap and so forth shrug.

In the end, it depends on the kid. For my son, in a sense as much as he liked the teachers and the classes, it was ‘jail school’ in that the time in school, the required activities, and then homework kept him from his passion with music, for him being in school X hours a day, then Y hours of activities, then Z hours of homework meant having no time to practice, not to mention finding time for his other music programs, so homeschooling made sense, where he could for example in the online program we used finish 1 class at a time and do it at his own pace, whether it was a month or 6 months…but that was him, another kid might go stir crazy doing what he did, and that is fine. Homeschooling may be an option where traditional school doesn’t work for a kid (lot of people with out there kids homeschool/unschool), but kids also may thrive better in a ‘real’ school.

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I’d still like to hear the OP’s story behind “jail school”. Maybe just a family joke, maybe more.

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My biggest gripe with traditional elementary schools…and why we’ve referred to traditional school as “jail school”…has nothing to do with criticism of the teachers, or even the gross necessity of the status quo as it is.

I understand why you have to have a different approach when you’re working 30 to 1 with the public’s children. I understand why you need arbitrary rules, routine, and soul crushing standardization. I understand why you need to spend half the day on crowd control and corrections. I understand the politics of anything that serves the public. I understand why the needs of the mean must be put before the needs of either other end of the spectrum. I understand why there isn’t time for customized learning or flexibility, or embracing creativity or individual initiative. I get it. I think traditional schools do the best they can with the set of limitations and objectives inherent. There ARE different priorities involved with one person trying to provide education to a group of 30 unrelated individuals.

To me? Those limitations are too restricting. Particularly at a time in kid’s lives when they are most in need of stimulation, exploration and customization. They are a jail so to speak, in our family view. The necessary limitations can crush the joy of discovery, they can impede learning and enthusiasm for learning, and are stressful and exhausting…which again, in our minds, loosely describes institutional incarceration. (no one has to agree with this opinion) And yes, of course, it’s meant to be a bit tongue in cheek.

I found a solution for my family. We really liked secular unstructured home school for elementary.

I don’t know what the solution is our public elementary schools…or even if the majority of people would agree with my criticism of the current system. I think Finland’s public elementary model is very attractive. I do very much respect the efforts of those trying to provide quality public elementary education.

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Thanks for explaining @MaryGJ! - I don’t agree but I appreciate you sharing your view.

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I have nothing against homeschooling, and have seen it work well for people. However I disagree with your negative stereotype of public schools MaryGJ. My kids attended public elementary, middle and high schools and the quality ranged from good to outstanding. Both of mine are academically talented and neither felt as if they were in " jail".

It would be wonderful if every single child received an education perfectly tailored to them but that is not likely to ever happen. I support efforts to work on getting all schools to become as good as the ones that my kids attended. I also feel that people are perfectly free to choose private schools and homeschool options.

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Takes all kinds to make a world. Variety is the spice of life:)

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I work with a young woman in her late 20’s who was homeschooled. She has an MFA … so add another to that list of homeschoolers who were successful in college!

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This is not a topic that deserves a scorecard. All ways of education can succeed or fail. Of course there are successful homeschoolers/public schoolers/private schoolers/ dropouts! And the opposite!

What IS deserved is a respect for all - given the terms are for the benefit of the child to thrive and learn.

Congrats OP on your D’s transition from home schooling to public schooling. I hope it has given you more respect for the public school system.