Curious about homeschooling vs mainstreaming

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As a former child, allow me to tell you first hand what to expect:

If you homeschool, your child may learn better but at a cost: without peers, the much lacking social skills typical of AS will have an even more difficult time developing. And colleges do not, from my understanding, particularly care for home schooled kids. Mainstream will give children much needed social interaction witch can be a very positive experiance with the parents guidance. They might struggle academically but this is not always the case; I was mainstreamed and I made it into one of the best liberal arts schools in the country. Consider the strengths and weaknesses of your child before making this decision.

phr33ky, I don't know where you are from, but in my part of the country there is a fair amount of homeschooling and the local colleges are just fine with homeschooled children. They do an assesment test for basic math, reading and writing skills before you start. Usually the homeschooled children do very well. I know my son has had no problems with the college being unhappy with his homeschooling. I'm not trying to be critical or anything, just pointing out my experience with homeschooling and college.

Also, there are plenty of opportunities to allow homeschooled children to interact with their peers. There are sports, music courses (our schools will take homeschooled children for individual classes if the parents want), children's groups like Boy and Girl Scouts or Awana, and most places have homeschooling associations that get together to allow their children social interaction. The options are greater than many people think. And I found school to be social torture, so I have a definite bias against public education being a good place to learn social skills. Pretty much all I learned socially was thaat I didn't fit in and I wasn't every likely to.

I don't even know where to start in refuting Phr33ky's comments. I can't add to any of the good comments already made by RebeccaL except to say that maybe you just had a bad homeschooling experience? That's too bad because it is a real and beneficial alternative to traditional public or private school to many, many NT and Aspie kids (including my own).

I'm an aspie and I did fine in public school. Of course if the local school system has poor accomadations for special needs, this could be a problem. By explaining what my conditions were most of my peers were able to accept my conditions, and my parents guided me on how to successfuly deal with bullies and they worked extensivly with the school system to find a solution that worked for me, which was, during middle school, a full time aide to assist me.

I am not trying to start an argument, I am merely stating my views as someone who went through the system with positive experiances and am reporting my own account. I am not saying that my views are the only ones, I am merely saying that they are my views. I meant not to offend anyone.

I'm not offended. Of course there is a big difference between your school experience and mine -- when I went to school my only diagnosis was "that's the weird chick". I just recently found out why I'm weird, so I didn't get any accomodations at all. In fact, my parents still deny I have Asperger's. (I'm 45 years old, back when I was in school dyslexia and some ADHD were pretty much the only recognized learning disorders. Classic autism was still being diagnosed as Mental Retardation most of the time.)

Given my grandson's experience so far I completely agree with you. When the school is actively working to help the child succeed it can be a very rewarding experience. If all remains the same for him we will probably keep him in the public school system. However, his experience with the school working so hard to meet his needs isn't typical in my experience. For children who are being failed by the school system homeschooling is a reasonable and generally very effective resource. There are others, however, such as charter schools, contract based education and things like that.