How do home-educated students perform at the college level? Find out from someone who’s taught there—Patrick Henry College President Graham Walker, who joins Michael Farris on today's Home School Heartbeat.
Michael Farris:
My guest today on Home School Heartbeat is Dr. Graham Walker, who is the new president of Patrick Henry College. Welcome to the program, Graham.
Dr. Graham Walker:
Thanks for having me.
Mike:
We want to talk to Dr. Walker about his experience with homeschool students as a professor. He’s taught at the University of Pennsylvania, which is in the Ivy League, he was at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., and for the last several years he was at Oklahoma Wesleyan University, where he was the dean of the university. Dr. Walker, I’d just like to ask you some of the strengths and some of the weaknesses that you've seen of homeschool students in the collegiate ranks.
Dr. Walker:
Well, at all three institutions where I taught, I did encounter some homeschool students, and over the years more and more as the movement has grown, as God has added to the numbers of homeschooling families. As a group, homeschool students obviously excel. In fact, as a group, they surpass the students that I had in my classes on almost every level. Occasionally, I ran into a student who because of some homeschooling experiences had become accustomed to going entirely at his own pace, and while for homeschooling at the K-12 level, that is a great virtue—in fact, we benefit from it in our own home—when you get to the college level, you’ve really got to go at the pace set by the professor. But as I say, that was a pretty rare problem. On the whole, I found that homeschool students could write better, they could speak better, they could reason and analyze better than any of their counterparts.
Mike:
Next time, we’ll talk with Dr. Walker about his experience as a Christian in the Ivy League. I’m Mike Farris.
