I've been trying to find the time to blog about my experiences at the North Carolina Homsechool Convention. Rather than try to organize them all and write one big blog post, which I might never get around to, I'll blog them in bits and pieces.

Above all, I think the educational effect of homeschooling is to increase the variance of outcomes. I'm not convinced it increases the overall mean of education, but that's probably OK. Many people live in areas where the mean value of available education is very low, so increasing the variance is probably a good strategy. Societally speaking, in an age when technology allows us to leverage the efforts of a few to the benefits of many, increasing variance is probably also a good strategy.

Curiously, although it homeschooling may increase variance on a societal level, it could be argued that it decreases the variance of possible outcomes for many homeschooled students a great deal. This depends greatly on the parents, and probably is not the case for many of the homeschoolers on our site. But I could see that homeschooling, improperly done, significant narrows the educational experiences a student has instead of broadens them. So, whereas regular school puts all students in a pretty narrow band, homeschooling for some kids offers a very wide band, but for others offers an even narrower band (that may or may not be a subset of the band offered by a regular school).

Of course, I didn't talk to many of these narrow-band homeschoolers at the convention. They don't tend to be the types who would flock to a booth for high-performing math students. But they're unquestionably out there. I guess this is my long-winded way of saying that I'm all for homeschooling, but it's not an unmitigated good.