One of the primary arguments against home schooling involves the lack of social interaction children have with other children while they're being taught at home. A home-schooled child simply will not have the opportunity to meet the same number of people as a child who attends school. She won't have the same chance to develop relationships and to learn more about herself by learning more about others. The argument is that children, even those who are specifically home schooled due to social anxiety issues, will only learn to interact with other people by having the regular opportunity to do so.
It is difficult to find current, reliable numbers that indicate the exact percentage of home-schooled students who go on to graduate from a university. Studies of this particular population tend to be published by groups hoping to further their own agenda. At the heart of the matter is the concern that a child who has been home schooled might have trouble adjusting to the strict routine of college life after years of a less exacting learning environment.
It is difficult to understand how a parent or parents can provide their children with the same level of academic opportunity as an entire staff of trained professionals. They must depend upon a self-planned curriculum or those they have found elsewhere. Each curriculum varies widely in efficacy and can lead to different levels of learning. A school setting offers specialists in each field, including music, art and speech. As bright and dedicated as a home educator might be, she simply cannot fill all of those roles.
Anyone who has ever worked from home knows the myriad of distractions that occur in a given day. One of the concerns for children who are being home schooled involved those same distractions. The question becomes whether a child takes his studies as seriously, given the fact that a parent is his teacher, and whether the everyday distractions of home life, from the family cat ambling by to the mail man ringing the door, are too much for his schoolwork to compete with.