Should children be homeschooled?

Stronger relationships can be formed between parents and children

Question: Should children be homeschooled?
Position1 of 3›: Yes, children should be homeschooled
Argument‹4 of 4: Stronger relationships can be formed between parents and children

Homeschooling gives families the ability to spend more quality time together.

The argument

Homeschooling provides a level of flexibility that allows for more family time, and stronger bonds follow from simply being together more. The teaching relationship does much of this work directly. When parents are the teachers, children learn to communicate with them far better than they would if the two were constantly separated, because instruction requires explaining, questioning and being corrected — the kinds of exchange that build fluency between two people. Children also learn to respect their parents as they would respect a teacher at school, which adds a dimension to the relationship that a purely domestic one does not contain. The calendar contributes as well. Vacations can be taken during the school year rather than only when school permits, and children can learn on the road, so travel becomes an extension of their education instead of an interruption to it. That combination produces both more family bonding and more exposure to different environments at the same time. Timing matters more than it might appear. Summer is the busiest vacation period of the year, with approximately 60% of Americans travelling then, which means the conventional school calendar delivers families to destinations at the precise moment those places are most crowded and least themselves. Visiting at any other time of year is a different experience — quieter, cheaper, and closer to how a place actually is when it is not receiving most of a country's holidaymakers at once. A family able to go when others cannot gets both a special shared experience and a setting in which a child can genuinely learn something, which is why the flexibility benefits the education as much as the relationship.

Premises

[P1]Homeschooling's flexibility creates more family time, and when parents act as teachers children learn to communicate with and respect them more closely. [P2] Families can also travel and learn together outside the busy summer season, gaining special bonding experiences and exposure to different environments that benefit a child's education. [C] Therefore, because stronger relationships can be formed between parents and children, children should be homeschooled.

Counter-arguments

Although family bonds can increase, they can also be torn apart. There is absolutely no way for a child to escape from home in the way that public school provides. Fights can grow much larger than they may have if the family wasn't in their home all day.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P2] More family time is not necessarily a good thing.