Homeschooling FAQ:

Questions:

• What is Homeschooling?
• What about Socialization?
• What are the Laws Regarding Homeschooling?

Q. What is homeschooling?

A. Any family who homeschools will have a different response to this. One response is that it is a lifestyle of education that families live out together. It includes parents taking on the responsibility of being the administrators of their own children's educations. This may mean that they teach most academic classes at home in their own way. It may also mean that they search out teachers for their children in different subjects. Either way they are attempting to give their children the best education possible. This of course happens in as many different ways as there are families with children.

Q. What about socialization?

A. This is probably the most commonly asked question homeschool parents get. Since socialization really means learning to interact with others, the question assumes that homeschool students stay home all of the time and rarely interact with others. The facts are very different than this. In fact, homeschool students regularly interact with a wide variety of people of all ages, sex, religion, etc. Research has shown that homeschool children have fewer problem behaviors when interacting with other children and that they showed more maturity than their traditionally schooled counterparts (http://learninfreedom.org/socialization.html). Self esteem has been shown to be about the same between these two groups.

Q. What are the laws regarding homeschooling?

A. There are excellent resources to answer this question. One is Home School Legal Defence, and another, Smoothing the Way. There is also the "Pink Book" which explains Washington State Laws. You can download it from the following website. Washington Homeschooling Laws