First, students who are homeschooled may attain a greater degree of self-actualization because homeschooling is highly conducive to personalized instruction and enables students to be taught a consistent worldview. Second, the religious values taught in a homeschooling environment as well as in many religious private schools are consistent with political tolerance and other values necessary for a liberal democracy.

Contrary to the critics who argue that homeschooling makes kids insular and intolerant and that we need public schools to establish social cohesion, a new study has found that college students who had been homeschooled are actually more tolerant of people with different political views than are products of public schools.

A Brief Review of Does Homeschooling or Private Schooling Promote Political Intolerance?  (HT:  Doug Favelo)

New research on political intolerance will likely surprise many people, especially negative critics of parent-led home-based education. Some have wondered, Will the homeschooled end up being more, or less, politically tolerant?

On this point, one university professor clearly implied several years ago that homeschooling cannot properly prepare children to be good adults, good citizens. Dr. Rob Reich wrote in his article, “The Civic Perils of Homeschooling,” the following:

….. [State-run/public] Schooling is one of the few remaining social institutions – or civic intermediaries – in which people from all walks of life have a common interest and in which children might come to learn such common values as decency, civility, and respect.[1]

In other words, he claimed that children, under the educational guidance of their parents, friends, and churches or synagogues, cannot become what they should without the oversight of the State and institutional schooling.

Dr. Brian Ray recently explained that those who are pessimistic about homeschooling (e.g., Dr. Reich) do not base their worries on solid evidence. Ray wrote the following:

Regarding the four categories [of negativity toward homeschooling] just mentioned, it should be noted first that none of those persons proactively oppositional to homeschooling or promoting significant state control over homeschooling offer any empirically based evidence that home education is bad for the children, families, neighborhoods, or the collective good.[2]

 Scholar Albert Cheng’s just-published fascinating and provocative study provides one of the first solid portions of empirical evidence about whether the homeschooled become more or less politically intolerant than others.[3] The researcher’s purpose was to compare college students from different school types – public school, private school, and homeschool – by analyzing political tolerance outcomes. That is, are students from any particular school background more or less politically tolerant than others? Political tolerance is “… defined as the willingness to extend basic civil liberties to political or social groups that hold views with which one disagrees” (p. 49).

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