Ask anybody involved in homeschooling why they made the decision to to homeschool their children and you will find that there are just about as many answers to this question as there are people involved in homeschooling.

Some parents want to remove their children from the public schools because they see the public school system as failing, or as being positively harmful for their children. In other cases, parents want to teach their children at home on religious grounds, or because they want to instill particular values into their children which they see as missing from the public school system. Whatever the reason for schooling children at home, there can be little doubt that most parents choose homeschooling because they believe that it is the best choice for their children.

For the majority of parent there are two sides to homeschooling comprising those positive things that it brings to the child and those things that it removes from the child's environment. Peer pressure and bullying are widespread throughout the public school system nowadays and frequently places children under considerable pressure and, on occasions, even place them in danger. Teaching your children at home permits you much greater control over exactly who your children come into contact with and the influences they are subjected to.

In terms of a child's academic development and growth there can be little question but that, in most cases, homeschooling leads to superior results and this is seen in things like homeschooled children winning the National Spelling Bees and the number of homeschooled children attaining degrees (frequently Master's degrees) at some of our finest universities and often at remarkably young ages.

Naturally many people hold that these children are simply gifted and that their success is due to their natural genius rather than to homeschooling. However, if this were the case then it is certainly true to say that we are blessed with an abundance of geniuses amongst our younger generation. The simple fact of the matter is that the numbers simply do not support this view.

The numbers, which are produced not simply by advocates of homeschooling but by bodies such as the US Department of Education, clearly show that homeschooled children do much better than their publicly schooled counterparts with homeschooled children a grade ahead by the time they reach the age of 12 and as much as four grades ahead by the time they reach the equivalent of the 8th grade.

Although the majority of people think that homeschooling is a fairly modern phenomenon it has in fact been around for many hundreds of years and is a tried and tested system which has certainly stood the test of time. Of course homeschooling has changed considerably over the years and much of the philosophy behind homeschooling today stems from the work of supporters of the system during the 1960s.

Homeschooling is most certainly not an easy option and is extremely hard work for most parents, particularly in the early days, but there is little doubt that it works and the rewards for both parents and children make it more than worth the effort.