December beginner's tournament: Homeschooling is superior to the public primary school system

Some of his sources helped me with my rebuttals. In this round I’m going to rebut Bens’ arguments and show why homeschooling is better than the public school system. 1. Public schooling is critical to a kid's social development -- especially during primary Con brings forward the social development of the children and he believes children should go to public schools so they can develop their social skills. But this argument can actually get turned against him, because research suggests that homeschoolers are more socially developed. The data is shown in the table below. (round 2, con, source 4), data from . http://myplace.frontier.com... But how is this possible? There are multiple reasons, but this paragraph shows it pretty well: Dr. Raymond Moore, author of over 60 books and articles on human development, has done extensive research on homeschooling and socialization. "The idea that children need to be around many other youngsters in order to be 'socialized,'" Dr. Moore writes, "is perhaps the most dangerous and extravagant myth in education and child rearing today. " Children often do not respond well to large groups. They become nervous and overexcited by noise and too many people. Learning becomes difficult. Behavioral problems develop. After analyzing over 8,000 early childhood studies, Dr. Moore concluded that, contrary to popular belief, children are best socialized by parents -- not other children. (1) It turns out that in classes the students experience a lot of group pressure. There is so much rivalry, ridicule and competition most of the students feel like they have to look and behave like the others to blend in. In the process the students forget their own values any maybe they never even discover who they truly are (1). Furthermore, many homeschoolers often enjoy social experiences like visiting museums, traveling and taking dance classes (1). 2. The economy will benefit more from a public schooling system rather than home schooling Con believes homeschooling is bad for the economy, because it reduces GDP. But GDP has one little flaw that’s very important in this debate: GDP doesn’t measure the value of domestic work. When you cultivate some vegetables in your garden you’re producing goods, but that’s not included in GDP. When you buy the same vegetables in the supermarket they are included in GDP. When you homeschool your children it’s not included in GDP, but when you send them to public schools it is included in GDP (2). So homeschooling reduces GDP, but is this bad? I believe it isn’t. After all, the goal of education is to teach students skills. The goal isn’t to boost GDP. That’s a number that tries to show how much utility people in a country have, but it forgot domestic work also gives utility. Off topic: please don’t get me wrong. I believe GDP is a very important number, but it has a few flaws. I believe it’s important to always keep those flaws in mind when working with GDP. But con mentioned a few other things. First of all, G (government expenditure) goes down. So with homeschooling governments have to pay less for education. The funds that are freed this way can then get spent in other ways. To give some example, governments can decide to increase spending on healthcare or research. Governments can also reduce their debt. Next, con brought up the fact the teachers of public schools are going to lose their job when homeschooling becomes more important. This is a form of creative destruction. Something old (the public school system) gets replaced with something new (homeschooling). Since the facts show homeschooling is better at educating children this is a change that will do more good than harm. Sure, it’s bad news for the teachers, but they will eventually be able to find a new job. Something similar to this happened around the time cars became popular. In 1900 the US employed about 109,000 carriage and harness makers (3). Almost all of these people lost their job and in the present you hear nobody complain about how awful is was those people lost their jobs. 3. There is a moral imperative to educate in public rather than in private (tied to economics and viability of homeschooling in general) Con is under the impression that homeschooling will increase the gap between the rich and the poor. So let’s begin by looking at how big the impact of income is on the quality of homeschooling. (Round 2, pro, source 1) Well, it looks like earning more will boost the performance of the children, but it’s not much. Furthermore, even the children from the poorest parents outperform the children in the public school system by a lot. But maybe income isn’t the best indicator, so let’s also look at the education level of the parents: (Round 2, pro, source 1) Again it helps a little if the parents are highly educated themselves. But again even the children of the lowest educated parents outperform those from the public schools by a lot. So far it looks like income and education aren’t very important, but let’s also look at the expenses homeschooling parents make: (Round 2, pro, source 1) And we again have the same conclusion. Spending more on education helps, but it’s not much. So children who have rich, highly educated parents who spend a lot on homeschooling are performing better than children from poor, lowly educated parents who don’t spend a lot on the education of their children. But the difference is very small and even the most disadvantaged children totally outperform the students from public schools. But con also brought up the idea many poor people just can’t afford homeschooling. I did some research and I came to the conclusion that homeschooling is just as expensive as attending a public school. Maybe it’s actually cheaper. As can get seen in the image above multiple parents are able to homeschool for less than $600 per child per year. Meanwhile, parents who send their children to public schools have to pay for the supplies themselves. These costs are on average $630.36 per child per year (4). It turns out homeschooling is just as accessible for poor parents as the public school system. Also, con, thanks for conceding to my first argument in which I pointed out homeschooling is more effective than the primary school system in teaching the basic skills. Since I’ve gave my rebuttals, I’ll hand the debate back to con so he may rebut my arguments. Sources: 1) . http://finehomeschooling.com... 2) . http://www.oecdobserver.org... 3) . http://www.econlib.org... 4) . http://learninglab.wbur.org...