Homeschool is the Better than Public School

I'll begin with some refutations Public school is an unsafe environment for children. Guns Concerning guns, my opponent makes a very unsound argument. My opponent means to imply that "hundreds" of incidents of school shootings occur on an annual basis. This is simply nonfactual. One would have to actually go back quite a bit before the more recently sensationalized stories of violence at school to even find a ten year period where more than a hundred homicides occurred in school. http://youthviolence.edschool.virginia.edu... Scattered, isolated incidents don't show a trend which is capable of justifying such a grand statement as "This is only one of hundreds of stories..." Drugs It is certainly undeniable that drugs are sold on campus. However, my opponent provides no reasoning as to why we should view this as a bad thing in any way except for the fact that most of them aren't 18 yet. There is no mention of anything that proves that the public school environment is what causes minors to do drugs. Here lies the difference between correlation and causality. My opponent is confusing the presence of drugs in public school as the reason these kids are doing drugs. Drug addiction and other such things frequently begin and continue to occur outside of school. Furthermore, most of the heavier drug abusers are truants who waste most of their free education. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov... Sex There is no real substance to this argument. Much of it is based off the notion that sex is wrong. There is no reason to believe that having sex is wrong, yet my opponent says it is the worst thing about public education. It is as if my opponent wants promiscuity to be a punishable offense. Abstinence until marriage is a personal choice, and has little correlation to the safety of the school environment or the moral standard in said environment. While there are statistics to show that much of what my opponent says is true in regards to STD's, I disagree largely with my opponents certainty that it is an issue of major importance. My opponent is attempting to use alarming sounding numbers to disguise the insignificance of sex to the issues of public education. My opponent is implying throughout his point that sex is killing off our children, which it is not. A quick look at the sampling methods and introduction of the following report shows this to be truth. http://www.cdc.gov... Sex related deaths barely even register next to the grim reaper known as the automobile. Quality of education I have a very simple refutation to this point, and I derive it directly from some basic thoughts on the nature of statistics. It is obvious that there will be more outliers and under-achievers in a school population if you sample more of them. My opponent seeks to show, primarily by means of standardized test results, that homeschool results in superior quality education. However, there simply aren't as many people being home schooled, and so there aren't quite as many under-achieving dregs holding down the averages. Most individuals of that description are in the public education system. Attempting to use statistics which will clearly be skewed beyond all recognition to establish superiority is ridiculous. My argument is simple. I maintain that they are basically the same. My opponent came in seeking to establish that one is superior to the other. As the Con, however, I can simply maintain a neutral position. Neither is better than the other. I believe I have sufficiently shown already that most of the arguments presented by my opponent are either dramatizations of fringe statistics or simply unreliable. Home school and public school students typically learn the exact same things. If the students do what they're supposed to do, which in the higher achieving minorities in public education they do, then the learning is equal in quality. The instructors in public school are trained educators, which can fully compensate for the lack of a personal touch provided by a parent. However, these things both vary tremendously. Unsupportive or inattentive parents may be just as unhelpful as an extremely poor teacher. New social, scientific, and religious ideas This is more of a secondary point, but worth mentioning all the same. My opponent doesn't wish for his children to have to learn about horrifying things like homosexuality. However, once again, what is wrong with this? Nothing. Homosexuality isn't so horrifying that children can't know about it. Much the same with many other things. Some parents may take advantage of the opportunity to neglect teaching their children anything that conflicts with their religious beliefs, such as evolution. These are things which one must learn in public school, and generally they all serve to enrich each child's understanding of the world.