Home schooling

[Grieve]

Has anyone tried this, either for themselves or their children? My wife is pushing the idea bigtime, particularly after some bad experiences at our local school (maybe not surprising, we do live in West Virginia after all...)

I'm still on the fence, but the stats sound promising:

http://www.hslda.org/docs/nche/000010/200410250.asp

The study demonstrated that homeschoolers, on the average, out-performed their counterparts in the public schools by 30 to 37 percentile points in all subjects.

The study found that the average scores of the homeschool students were at or above the 80th percentile in all categories. The homeschoolers' national percentile mean was 84th for reading, 80th for language, 81st for math, 84th for science and 83rd for social studies.

In 1986, researcher Lauri Scogin surveyed 591 homeschooled children and discovered that 72.61% of the homeschooled children scored one year or more above their grade level in reading. 49.79% scored one year or more above their grade level in math.

A study at Wheaton College in Illinois showed that the freshmen that were home schooled for high school scored fifty-eight points higher on their SAT scores than those of kids that went to a normal school

58.9% report that they are "very happy" with life, compared with 27.6% for the general U.S. population. 73.2% find life "exciting", compared with 47.3%.

There are also some stats showing that 19.8% of homeschooled males get a Masters (compared to 5.4% nationally), and 8.8% get doctorates (compared to 3.1% nationally).