Picture this: Your child comes home from school, and upon your seemingly harmless inquiry of his day, he bursts into a flood of tears. You quickly discover an array of causes ranging from the lack of security in the public system to the incompetence of the school-based curriculum. What can you about this situation? We are all familiar with that age-old question, "So what did you learn in school today?" that often we overlook it in its simplicity and take for granted its importance to our education. I've done extensive research on the subject of education and have collaborated several of its problems into one view. The public system is failing. The solution is homeschooling.

Today I will prove that the advantages of homeschooling far outweigh the disadvantages. We will reveal how homeschooling avoids the violence in our public schools, point out its flexibility and convenience as a learning tool, and demonstrate how it helps to build strong family and personal relationships.

Homeschooling isolates children from the violence in our public schools. We can all imagine how terrible it would be to have to enter a school each day, wondering if we would come out alive. Violence in our public schools has become more and more of an issue in recent years. School shootings such as Columbine in the spring of 1999 have shocked families and students alike into the realization that the safety and security of our public schools are, at the very least, inferior.

According to Dorie Staley, author of an article in the June 2000 journal Roper Review, 99 percent of families have chosen homeschooling after realizing the school environment has been harmful to their child. School, she says, has become equivalent to prison. And in many ways, she's right. From the mandatory security checks to the elimination of backpacks in some schools, they are very much promoting an uneasy environment, where effective learning is far from a top priority.

Homeschooling not only helps kids avoid the violence in our public schools, it also offers a variety of learning strategies. Homeschooling offers a flexibility in learning and teaching styles unavailable in public schools. We can all remember the eight-hour days and having to schedule our appointments and things around school. In a homeschooled environment, this isn't necessary. The opposition may claim that this flexibility leads to less structure and effectiveness. But in reality, quite the contrary is true.

In the book Homeschooling for Excellence, written by David Colfax, a study relevant to this point was conducted. The study showed that a child spends an average of 1,100 hours per year in school. But only an alarming 20 percent of this time is spent on task and learning, whereas a homeschooled student who spends two hours a day, every day for a year, learning the basics spends over three times this amount on task. It's easy to see which style is more effective.

In his book, The How and Why of Homeschooling, Ray Ballmann cites an authoritative statement written by two attorneys. They enforce the constitutionality of homeschooling with provisions given in the First, Ninth, and Fourteenth Amendments. Each state is required to set its own recommendations for homeschooled families. According to homeschooled children in an article in the 1999 journal Clinical Pediatrics, parents of homeschooled students must document their attendance, either obtain a teaching certificate or use a commercially available syllabus, as well as review the child's progress with local officials periodically.

Not only does homeschooling offer a more flexible, yet structured, learning style, it also helps to build strong family and personal relationships. Family and personal relationships are greatly strengthened by homeschooling. Being in college, we start to better appreciate our families and those who love us. Once we set foot into that first class of over 200 people, we realize the value of one-on-one relationships. Critics of homeschooling say that this closeness within the family lessens the socialization of children.

In some ways, maybe they are missing out on the true American teenage experience, as Ian Hunter says in his article in the Alberta Report. "It's true: they're not learning the finer points of marketing drugs in the hallways or how to dive under a desk when one of their classmates shows up looking to kill."

In an entry written by Debra Jones in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, a homeschooled family was analyzed. The family participated in several group learning activities, such as field trips or recreational sports. Many families form support networks and cooperate their learning techniques. The main basis for homeschooling is specialized instruction. It individualizes learning and addresses the different learning styles more effectively than public schooling. More attention can be placed on what's truly important-the child's education. These attentive relationships built through homeschooling are just one of the many advantages it has to offer.

The advantages of homeschooling certainly outweigh the disadvantages. Homeschooling avoids the violence in our public school systems. It provides a flexible and convenient learning and teaching style, and it helps to build strong family and personal relationships. So if you find yourself asking your child, "What did you learn in school today?" and get a tearful reply, homeschooling might be just what you're looking for.

a. What conclusion (or primary claim) did Dixie make about home schooling?

b. Outline the premises or claims Dixie has established to support to her conclusion.

c. What hasty generalizations did Dixie make about public school?

d. Dixie compared public school to prison. What reasoning fallacy did she commit, and why?