As I said in the beginning, from this point on, we are dealing with minor reasons for homeschooling (all these reasons apply to Christian schools as well as government public schools). So keep in mind that if they seem like minor things, it is because they are. That said, they do add up.
This reason will use a lot of math, so be prepared.
The second reason I have is that these schools are incredibly time-inefficient. At the end of the day, it takes longer for schools to do less. We see this both within the individual classroom, as well as the standard class day as a whole.
One note: For the sake of comparison, I am treating homeschooling as though it is lecture-style. While it certainly does contain lectures, homeschooling is much more flexible (to which we will return).
Let's think about the average classroom. Each class is given one hour. But anyone who has attended a public school class knows that all of that hour is not learning new material. Before and after class, a number of time-consuming activities occur.
5 minutes typically pass before the class settles down enough to actually teach.
Another 5 minutes is usually taken up to take class roll.
Another 5 minutes are usually taken as recap for previous lessons.
Finally, after the lesson is done, it takes 10 minutes to go from one class to another before the whole cycle starts over again.
If you subtract all that time from the hour designated for learning, only 35 minutes of that class time is spent learning new material. That is scarcely over half! How is that not extremely inefficient?
Compare this with a lecture-style homeschool class.
With less children in the room, it takes less time for kids to settle down, but we’ll still give 5 minutes just to be conservative.
No time is needed to take roll because the teacher knows all the students extremely well (being their parent, and all).
We’ll still give 5 minutes to recap previous lessons.
After the lesson is done (again, presuming that you’d even be taking another class immediately after the first one), since the class would be in the same room in a much smaller building, all that is really needed is 5 minutes for a bathroom break.
Subtracting all that, you are left with 45 minutes learning new material. At face value, that seems like a small gain, only 10 minutes. But after four classes, you would have accumulated 40 minutes of extra teaching time, more than the functional time of one public school class! Time-wise, teaching four homeschool classes has the value of teaching five public school classes.
Having looked at the individual class, let’s look at the child’s schedule at school. Again, we will limit homeschooling’s flexibility for the sake of comparison.
Typically, a high school student has about 6 classes per day.
We have seen from above that since only 35 minutes of each hour is allotted for learning new material, the 6 hours spent at school boil down to 3.5 hours of new learning.
Add in an hour for lunch.
Remember, children don’t teleport to school; most often, they take the school bus. I lived at the absolute edge of my school district’s zone, and it took me about 30 minutes to get to school. I think, then, it is fair to say that 15 minutes of driving time is a reasonable average.
Adding everything together, let’s set a hypothetical itinerary for a child, from the moment they step out the door to the moment they walk back in.
Child wakes up at 6:15 am.
Gets ready for school, and leaves the house at 7:00 am
5 minutes waiting for bus
15 minutes bus travel
10 minutes to get off bus and get to class
7:30-2:30 School time+ lunch
10 minutes to get on bus
15 minutes bus travel
Leaves house at 7:00 am, gets home at 2:55 pm
Just shy of 8 hours to get 3.5 hours worth of education.
That's less than half!
How does homeschooling fare?
Each class takes an hour to get 45 minutes of learning.
Total that is 4.5 hours of learning.
30 minutes for lunch, because you aren’t feeding hundreds.
6.5 hours of total time.
No need to get on or off the bus, because you live at school!
An itinerary for homeschooling can go like this:
Child wakes up at 7:15 am.
8-2:30 school time + lunch
2:30+ is non-school time.
The homeschooling child gets up an hour later, gets done 25 minutes earlier, and gets an entire hour more time of learning new material than the public school child!
While an hour seems like a small gain, let us look at a week, and a month, to compare.
The public school child spends about 45 hours of time in a week to get 17.5 hours of learning. The homeschool child spends about 32.5 hours to get 22.5 hours of learning.
The public school child spends about 160 hours of time in a month to get 70 hours of learning. The homeschool child spends about 130 hours to get 90 hours of learning.
Put another way, in order to get 100 hours of new learning time, it will take the child enrolled in public school 28.5 school days. The child who is homeschooled will need only 22.2 days to get the same 100 hours of new learning time. In other words, the homeschool child could take an entire week off for no reason and still beat the public school child to 100 hours of new learning time.
Public schooling simply is not efficient.
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