138: “Your Homeschooled Kids Will Never Get Into College”
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: RSS
A Farmish Kind of Life is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com. You can view our full affiliate disclosure here.
People used to tell me my kids wouldn’t get into college if they were homeschooled—especially if we went the “unschooling” route.
I homeschooled them anyway. And we “unschooled” the majority of the time. And I never really paid attention to the “they won’t get into college” clause because I didn’t know if they would even choose college as their route.
As it turns out, they decided to do college as “high school” juniors and seniors through the PSEO program in our state, which basically means they are full time college students who haven’t graduated “high school” yet. They had to do the college entrance exam and other things to get into the program.
But, you know…
“Your kids will never get into college if they are homeschooled.”
Yeah. Okay.
But (sarcasm aside) that’s not even the point of this post. This is:
A couple weeks ago, our oldest read us an email he got from a professor regarding a paper he’d written a few days prior. It said, in part—
“You have single handedly restored my faith in students. Before I got to your paper, I had read no less than five plagiarized papers and the rest were full of errors.”
Now, this is NOT to brag on my kids. There’s plenty of stuff they don’t know, screw up, can’t do, or are still learning — like all of us. I bring this up more to ask the people who told me that my kids would never get into college: were my kids not gonna get into college because my kids can write a well-researched paper without plagiarizing, or was it the lack of grammatical errors (because they know how to take the time to change things that have squiggly lines under them), or was it something else?
I’ll wait.
Listen. I don’t think you have to be able to write a decent paper to prove you’re smart. I know geniuses who couldn’t put their thoughts down on paper if their life depended on it.
The fact that my kid can write a paper isn’t the point.
The point is that we were told ever since we made the decision to homeschool that our kids wouldn’t be able to handle college because it would be above them, too hard for them, and they wouldn’t know what to do.
I guess we should have worked more on blatant plagiarism and how to ignore grammatical errors that are usually pointed out in the program you’re using to write the paper in question?
I mean, is that actually what we’re up against in (gasp) college?
To tell me for the last 20 years that if I homeschooled/unschooled my kids, they would never get into college, like it was some holy grail of knowledge where only the smartest kids in the world get the golden ticket in?
Come on.
Maybe we could stop holding stuff up on a pedestal that it doesn’t need to be on.
— Amy Dingmann 4-23-21
Resources:
My new book! Make Friends with a Dog: 18 Tips to Live a Good Life
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/farmishkindoflife
My Odysee channel: https://odysee.com/@AFarmishKindofLife:8
My TikTok account: https://www.tiktok.com/@farmishlife
Find my Farmish Kind of Life podcast wherever you stream your podcasts from or find episodes right here on the site: https://afarmishkindoflife.com/farmish-podcast/
Email me: [email protected]
Just read “Your Homeschooled Kids Will Never Get into College”.
When we took ours out of public school many long years ago, the superintendent of our school district (whom we knew) said to me, “They will probably get a better education.”
When the older of our daughters was a college freshman, her English teacher asked how many had ever diagrammed sentences. She and 2 others raised their hands. She asked each one what private school they had attended. My daughter replied she had been home schooled.
Three of our four children graduated from college. The other one had no interest in a college degree (but he is not uneducated).