Just thought people might find this interesting... Possibly the most common reason people feel homeschooling is not ideal is because they think the homeschooled child will not have a chance to develop social skills. Just reading through this thread shows this.


This page here (http://www.nheri.org/research/research- ... oling.html) summarises a lot of data, citing lots of studies, but I'll do an overview. A caveat, though, is that this is for studies on Americans, not Singaporeans, but the results should still be comparable to the local situation, or at least relevant.

Homeschooled students, when put through psychological tests, actually show themselves to have better social skills than their traditionally-schooled peers. One theory as to why this is so is that at school, children learn social skills from children (i.e. they learn from people who don't have well-developed social skills). Homeschooled children learn more of their social skills from adults (i.e. people with better social skills, who are preferrable to learn from). The papers cited ta the bottom of the linked site include a study that shows that homeschooled children were also found to have a similar number of friends in their own age group as traditionally-schooled children, but a higher number of *close* friends.

As a group, they also tend to do significantly better academically than others, are more active in the community as adults, and so on. This is all mentioned on the page and backed up by studies and data.

Obviously, this is only on average. There will be some above and some below average, naturally, but in general, they are quite well-off, socially speaking.

Perhaps I've opened a can of worms here, but I'd like to hear someone who says that homeschooling prevents/hinders children having friends and/or social skills actually back it up with a study or some statistically significant data for once...