Children schooled at home have better social skills
                    Challenges orthodoxy

                    Julie Smyth
                    National Post

                    Children who are educated at home have
                    better social skills and achieve higher
                    grades on standardized tests than
                    students in private or public schools,
                    according to a new report.

                    Contrary to the popular belief that
                    children educated at home are
                    disadvantaged because of a lack of peers,
                    the study by the Fraser Institute shows
                    they are happier, better adjusted and
                    more sociable that those at institutional
                    schools. The average child educated at
                    home participates in a range of activities
                    with other children outside the family and
                    98% are involved in two or more
                    extracurricular activities such as field trips
                    and music lessons per week, the report
                    says.

                    Home-schooled children also regularly
                    outperform other students on
                    standardized tests.

                    Children taught at home in Canada score,
                    on average, at the 80th percentile in
                    reading, at the 76th percentile in
                    languages and at the 79th percentile in
                    mathematics, the report shows. Private
                    and public students perform, on average,
                    in the 50th percentile on mandatory tests
                    in the same subjects.

                    In the United States, students educated
                    at home also achieve the highest grades
                    on standardized tests and outperform
                    other students on college entrance exams, including the Scholastic
                    Aptitude Test (SAT), according to the study.

                    Parents of home-schooled children in both countries are generally
                    higher educated when compared to the national average.

                    They tend to be in two-parent families and have a
                    higher-than-average number of children than the overall population.

                    Patrick Basham, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, a conservative
                    public policy group in Washington, and author of the report, said he
                    was surprised to see such positive results linked to home schooling.

                    "People think these children are neurotic, unsocialized and can't
                    function in normal society. But the opposite is true. I think the fact
                    children educated at home do better than private school students
                    would also surprise people. It is not something that is widely debated
                    or studied," he said.

                    Home-schooled children are still a tiny minority in Canada, although an
                    increasing number of parents are opting for this style of education. In
                    1979, 2,000 children were educated at home. By 1996, 17,500
                    students -- 0.4% of total enrollment -- were home schooled. The most
                    recent figures show the number has risen to 80,000 children.

                    Parents educate their children at home for a variety of reasons,
                    including the desire to impart a particular set of beliefs and values, an
                    interest in higher academic performance and a lack of discipline in
                    public schools, says the report.

                    "Although parents home school their children for myriad reasons, the
                    principal stimulus is dissatisfaction with public education," said Claudia
                    Hepburn, director of education policy at the Fraser Institute, a
                    Vancouver-based conservative think-tank.

                    Home schooling is legal throughout Canada, but most provinces
                    require parents comply with provincial education legislation, which
                    means they must provide satisfactory instruction. Alberta is the only
                    province that funds home-based education.

                    None of the provinces requires that parents have teaching
                    qualifications. However, having one parent who is a certified teacher
                    has no significant effect on the achievement of students educated at
                    home, the research shows.

                    Gary Duthler, executive director of the Federation of Independent
                    Schools in Canada, the association for non-public schools, said
                    children educated at home likely do better and are more sociable
                    because of the smaller student-teacher ratio and the fact students of
                    all ages learn together.

                    "In institutional schools, there is social pressure for 10-year-old
                    children to behave like other 10-year-olds and they tend to not play
                    with any older children at school.

                    "In a home setting, that same pressure is not there, so it helps the
                    children mature."

                    He said they probably also do well because they have access to
                    education resources and teaching expertise over the Internet but
                    their parents are controlling their education.