Tea at Trianon: New Harvard Study about Homeschoolers

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Wednesday, December 8, 2021

New Harvard Study about Homeschoolers

From FEE:

Researchers at Harvard University just released findings from their new study showing positive outcomes for homeschooled students. Writing in The Wall Street Journal last week, Brendan Case and Ying Chen of the Harvard Human Flourishing Program concluded that public school students “were less forgiving and less apt to volunteer or attend religious services than their home-schooled peers.”
The scholars analyzed data of over 12,000 children of nurses who participated in surveys between 1999 and 2010 and found that homeschooled children were about one-third more likely to engage in volunteerism and have higher levels of forgiveness in early adulthood than those children who attended public schools. Homeschooled children were also more likely to attend religious services in adulthood than children educated in public schools, which the researchers noted is correlated with “lower risks of alcohol and drug abuse, depression and suicide.”

The new findings offer a stark contrast to the portrayal of homeschoolers by Harvard Law School professor Elizabeth Bartholet, who notoriously called for a “presumptive ban” on homeschooling last year—just before the US homeschool population ballooned to more than 11 percent of the overall school-age population, or more than five million students, in the wake of the coronavirus response.

In their Journal Op-Ed, Case and Chen challenged their colleague.

“The picture of the home-schooled student that emerges from the data doesn’t resemble the socially awkward and ignorant stereotype to which Ms. Bartholet and others appeal. Rather, home-schooled children generally develop into well-adjusted, responsible and socially engaged young adults,” they wrote.

The Harvard researchers also discovered that homeschooled students were less likely to attend college than their public school peers. Some media outlets latched onto this finding in their headlines, while ignoring the Harvard scholars’ speculation that this could be due to a variety of factors. Homeschoolers could be choosing alternatives to college as a pathway to adulthood, and college admissions practices may create barriers for homeschooled students.

I reached out to Case and Chen for additional comments on their study’s findings, including how they think the homeschooling data and outcomes might have changed since 2010, when their data set ended.

“We are also glad to see that some colleges, including some top-tier colleges, have become more flexible in their admission policies for homeschoolers over the past years,” Chen responded.

Indeed, more colleges and universities have implemented clearer guidelines and policies for homeschooled students in recent years, and many are now eager to attract homeschooled applicants. In 2015, Business Insider noted that homeschooling is the “new path to Harvard,” and in 2018 the university profiled several of its homeschooled students. (Read more.)