Homeschool "Cons"?

So is it true that homeschoolers are socially inept? Or that they have an inferior education? Or that they have been too sheltered to face the “real” world? I honestly do not know, because I have not spoken with every homeschooler in America. But to judge from my own experience with those of my homeshcooled friends, I’d say that our time at home was invaluable, not detrimental.

Granted, it is not often that the above-mentioned assumptions come up in conversation. Most people that I talk to regard a home education to be beneficial and out of the several universities that I considered for application, only one even hinted that my education might negatively impact my chances of being accepted.

But from time to time I have encountered a subtle condescension in conversations that suggests that the old biases against the home educated are still lingering in the popular imagination. Whether it be the casual statement made by a guest teacher at summer camp back in 2002, “at least he’ll get to meet other kids his own age,” or the observation by a friend that I might not be comfortable in a classroom setting, the vibe does not suggest that my kind are entirely accepted yet. Which is strange, since – if I remember my American history correctly – public education was not a fact of life until the Twentieth Century.

But facts and figures aside, how does my personal experience disprove the assumptions? For starters, I’d say that I’m socially stable by-and-large. Growing up at home, I got along with my sister just fine, in defiance of the stereotypical sibling-rivalry model. It was based on the assumption that siblings aught to get along, and we got to know one another on very personal terms. Likewise, I was called to interact with a range of age groups within my own extended family, as well as in my homeschool group – which also solved the problem of social interaction.

What about inferior education? I suppose that is subjective, because I do not think that my education was lacking at all. Rather, the liberty that I experienced growing up leads me to suspect that what restraints I might have experienced in a public environment were simply non-existent at home. History was read out of real books of our own choosing, not textbooks. When given the opportunity, I chose ballistics as a science focus and my sister and I jointly took a course in forensics. We also had liberty to choose our foreign language, so we took Japanese because we were simply interested. And Mom could tailor the curriculum whenever there appeared to be trouble – such as the hateful Hooked On Phonics and our different mathematics programs. Too, if ever there was a subject that Mom could not teach, but required more than a few books – like Japanese or high school chemistry – we could always turn to tutors or other moms in the homeschool group.

But what about my worldview, my opinions? Was I not simply indoctrinated by my parents from day one? Again, that is a subjective argument, because one must first argue that any education will not have a bias. Of course my parents were biased, but so are all my instructors at university. But what my instructors at university largely fail to do is teach how to think. At home, my parents and family and friends taught us how to think rationally, and we even took worldview classes at the homeschool group, where we read books by authors with radically different assumptions about life and compared them. Those were some of my best memories. As a consequence, now that I’ve been to university and experienced the different worldview available to me, I’ve not only kept the faith of my childhood, I’ve come to appreciate it more.

So are there any cons to being educated at home? I’m sure there are plenty, but I can’t think of any.