A response I wrote to a piece published by a Homeschoolers Anonymous contributor about the difference between data, philosophy, and stories, and when to use any of the above when discussing child maltreatment issues in homeschooling.
Heather Doney is the Executive Director of the Coalition for Responsible Home Education and blogs at Becoming Worldly.
As someone who has been studying and working on homeschooling issues from an academic as well as personal angle and who recently co-founded the Coalition for Responsible Home Education (CRHE), I want to say that Benjamin Keil makes some good points in “A Call for Precision”. He makes good points about the plural of anecdote not being data and also how we want to avoid confusing different types of arguments or reasoning for one another. I also think that Sarah Henderson made some good points, too.
We are talking about, within, and to a group of people who often suffered educational neglect. I know I did. Some people have been able to largely overcome it. I too have a masters degree today. Some have not. We want to be very…
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Becoming Worldly 
I remember this lady named Kathy ad the most percent homeschool mom I’d ever met in the homeschool circle I was involved with. She had lesson plans, stuck to a curriculum, had fun teaching her kids, and even organized field days that were unforgettable . I was just muddling thru homeschooling, fussing and fighting like a fool with my extremely strong-willed first born who’d wanted to do everything else other than sit still and do school work. Finally, after the birth of my last child, I enrolled all four older ones in public school. The first day of school I noticed the silence and the sanity of having time to ourselves for at least a few hours. Somehow, my husband and I had forgotten what that was like. Years later I saw Kathy at the gym where she told me that she was teaching at a local school… She’d had a teaching degree the entire time she homeschooled her kids. I felt played. All those years I had admired her admirable skills as a homeschool mom, feeling like a failure as I compared myself to her only to find out that she’d gone to college for four years to actually learn how to teach young children. No wonder I’d failed so miserably To be as effective a teacher as Kathy. I simply didn’t have the know-how to copy her professional results as a homeschool mom. My oldest is now 26. He forgave me for using him as a Guinea pig and as a social experiment during those five years of attempted home schooling. Teaching kids is a lot harder than most beginning home schoolers think, and not until I went back to college myself just a few years ago, I realized the importance of a solid primary education. If you don’t get the basics in education early on, it becomes an uphill climb to catch up to your peers. Luckily, my kids did get a decent education in spite of my mistakes. And yes, as a home school parent you should have at least a high school education to teach. Otherwise, you can’t even begin to know what your child needs to learn in order to succeed and compete in the employment world as an adult. It’s every child right to get a decent education and it’s every parents responsibility to make sure they get it. Anything less is unacceptable.