2009
02.04

Homeschooling Isn’t For Everyone

Category: Education / Tags: no tag / Print

Just this title is probably enough to get me kicked out of the inner circles of homeschooling. But that’s ok. I’m not in the inner circle anyway so it’s all good. Yes, we homeschool our kids and are passionate about it. I’ll work three jobs before I send my kids to public school. It’s an absolutely no compromise issue for my wife and I. So why, then, would I say that it’s not for everybody? Well, I’ll answer that by first giving the reasons that we homeschool our kids and then contrasting that with the reasons why some don’t. I think you’ll see that the reasons some don’t homeschool are enough of a deterrent to prove my point. Firstly, the reasons we do:

Homeschooling

  1. Nuturing Environment – The home is the best place for a child to learn because the teacher (mom, dad or both) has the greatest incentive to make sure the child’s education is successful. Nobody cares about the mind of their child as much as his parent. When she’s at home, little Janie is not just a number, or a letter grade on a grid in a teacher workbook. Lots of people like to talk about how “Billy’s teacher is so sweet. She really cares about those kids.” I don’t doubt that there are some teachers who really care about education. What I find universally illogical is that anybody else (teacher or not) cares about your child more than you.
  2. Class Size – We always hear in the news about how “reducing class sizes” and “lowering the teacher:student ratio” is a priority. The difference is we actually take that seriously. If a class size of 25 is good, then a class size of 2 is fantastic. A teacher that is responsible for 150 kids per day is incapable of spending the needed attention on those 35-40 who really need some one-on-one help. It’s just not possible to do that. And if one-on-one is so beneficial then why not maximize it to it’s fullest in the home.
  3. Safety – It’s a fact that bullies can make life a living hell for children. How would you like to wake up every day knowing that when you got to work you would get made fun of, and then threatened with being beat up in the bathroom by your co-workers? I think you would quit. I’m amazed that so many kids are forced to endure things that we as parents wouldn’t tolerate for 5 minutes in our own lives. You can’t learn when you are in a state of fear and anxiety. Saying things like “boys will be boys” or “it’ll make them tougher” is the biggest load of tripe. The only people who say that are people who weren’t bullied or bullies themselves. The true victims of school violence will face behavioral problems for years to come as adults because of it.
  4. Peer Isolation is Wierd – Think about this for a minute. When you go to your job, do you have to sit with the 30 year olds? No. That would be wierd and very inneficient. Real life doesn’t work that way. So how come we isolate our kids from older and younger boys and girls? There is only one reason: ease of administration. When dealing with thousands of kids, it’s easier to track them when they are grouped that way. But it creates an alternate reality where nobody is better or worse than anyone else. Nobody is at the top or bottom of the food chain. Inevitably, what happens in this type of environment is that kids begin to feel a need to set themselves apart from the rest. That desire shows up as rebelliousness(that goth dude in your class who supposedly doesn’t care what people think), bullying(I’m better than you cause I can beat you up), cliquishness(i’m in the so and so group and you’re not), etc. When there is a natural mix of older and younger kids it makes for a healthier environment and allows the kids to express their natural inclination to care for younger kids and look up to older kids. It gets rid of a lot of the manufactured competition.
  5. Curriculum – If you go to public school, you get a boilerplate curriculum and teaching style that was approved by some board that you have never seen. In the home, curriculum and method can be custom tailored to each child. My wife for instance started out teaching our kids with a packaged curriculum that incorporated all the subjects in a grade delineated fashion. Some parts of it had a lot of just busy work though, and it was driving my daughter batty since she doesn’t learn best that way. So she scrapped most of that and changed to a Charlotte Mason style approach where most of the teaching is achieved through reading great books and being more physically active with narration and games. She also changed the math program to an abacus based system and my daughter’s math skills have just taken off like a rocket. In public school she would have been stuck with whatever material went to the lowest bidder or whatever the friend of the head of the school board/teacher’s union bribed for.
  6. Activness – Kids have so much energy. Putting them in a desk for 7 hours a day is almost a crime. They learn so much by exploration and just running around and trying things out. In this age of TV ads imploring your kids to get off the couch, we probably need some ads imploring them to get out of their desks. But seriously, most of the time kids spend in school is administrative. Add up all the time going from one class to another, calling roll, home room, etc. You can boil the three R’s down to about 2 hours if you cut all the fat out. Homeschooling allows you to really get down to business on your core subjects and then let the kids loose for plenty of free play and exploration.
  7. Flexibility – Homeschooling gives you that extra time to take lots of field trips, meet up with other kids to play or take an off day when you need to. Not just when the school board says it’s ok. Law in Alabama only requires 160 days of school each year, so starting this year my wife has scheduled her lesson plan so that our kids will do school year-round with plenty of breaks in there that coincide with our families schedule and with field trips. For instance, they will take days off when I take vacation. And if something unforeseen shows up like one of the kids gets sick there is plenty of padding in there so you don’t have to scramble for a makeup day. As far as field trips go, my kids have already taken more field trips by ages 5 and 7 than I did in my whole k-12 education. They’re getting to actually see, touch and experience what they are learning about. There’s something about signing on the dotted line to send your kids to a government program that implicitely gives aways your rights. It makes me uncomfortable to hand control of my children’s daily life over to the government.

My goodness, I have to stop. I could go on and on about this topic. At this point you’re wondering why the title of this post is about homeschool not being for everyone. I’ll just have to get to that tommorrow since this post is getting long. There are tradeoffs that go along with having this much direct control over an institution that has become so sacrosanct in our culture and I’ll show you what I mean.

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