What is the best way to educate American children - Essay Example

The individualism in this response makes it clear that there is no one right answer to the question and that choice is a necessary component to any functional system of education. For instance, the standards applied to one student may clearly fail to apply to another student of significantly diminished abilities, and for the latter child, special attention may be required. However, there are many proposed answers to the question of the best means to educate in our society, and many of them require universalizing a single means touted as the most effective or most efficient in all cases.

While not the best for all cases, home-based education does offer the best chance for the average student to succeed and thrive in a comfortable and beneficial learning environment. Other solutions to the problem of education, namely independent (or private) schools and traditional (or public) schools, do not offer the same kind of benefits as home-based education. Moreover, these alternative solutions are based on philosophically opposed assumptions and thereby forge a gulf through which home-based education passes through and asserts itself as the ideal solution.

Home-based education is superior with respect to two intellectually significant criteria. The first is educational performance, which, as identified in Henslin (2005), is demonstrably better in homeschooled children than in their peers educated in a public school system. In a testing scenario, targeting 21,000 home schooled children who had much higher proficiency on these tests than that of students in public schools, home schooled children outperformed their public school counterparts in every meaningful category of evaluation.

In this study, the students highlighted scored in the 70th and 80th percentiles, which is 10 to 20 percentage points higher than when these tests were administered to public school students (Henslin, 2005, pp. 512-13). The second criterion is moral and ethical in nature: how does the