My Truth about Homeschooling

I'm always a little taken aback by people's responses when I tell them that we homeschool the boys.  Sometimes people seem to feel a little guilty, as if I would judge them to be less dedicated parents than we are.  Sometimes they act as if I must make a tremendous sacrifice by teaching them myself.  Sometimes they imply that we're neglecting our kids by keeping them at home.  I've been asked for my qualifications and been told that the state will test to make sure I'm doing a good enough job.  (As if, statistically, the state were doing a "good enough job"!)

The truth is that I don't judge anyone for whatever educational choices they make for their kids, or for whatever lifestyles they choose for their families.  Different families have different economic, emotional and social needs.  They have different priorities than ours -- and I don't mean that they have inferior priorities than ours, just different.

As I did with the circumcision decision, I questioned the norm rather than assuming that "what everyone does" is necessarily the best thing for us to do.  My question wasn't, "should we homeschool."  It was, "is school the best place for our kids?"  We decided that it wasn't, and here are some of the reasons why.

Kids are more fun when they're school-aged.  
(Why give them to someone else to enjoy all day?)

I truly enjoy my boys' company.  If I didn't, then I think I'd want to know what should change so that I would.  And if Rhob and I didn't enjoy their company, then how could sending them to someone else make them more enjoyable?  And if we don't enjoy having them, then why did we start down the parenthood path at all?

I didn't really enjoy the boys when they were little -- not only because wasn't I in the best of places emotionally myself, but also because they're so so so needy.  At five and six years old, though, I'm not breastfeeding or changing diapers or mixing formula or even picking out clothes for them.  They can be told to find a game to play, and I can pretty much rest assured that what they're doing is playing a game.  It's not as if I spend all day with two toddlers.

We do fun stuff like playing card games (math), going to museums (science, history, art, whatever), reading books, cooking, planting, experimenting, etc.  They blow me away every single day by coming up with something new and that I (okay, I'm biased) think is brilliant.  I wouldn't miss that for the world.  

Our kids are learning social skills all the time.

The social skills they learn are by interacting with people of all ages, all day, every day.  They haven't learned that their social status depends on their video game score, on what kinds of clothes they wear, on where we live, on our race, on our economic status, on which kids are their friends, on which kids they can pick on, on whether their teacher likes them (she does!), on whether they're too smart or not smart enough.  

Instead, they learn that there are lots of people who have lots more stuff than we do, and that that would be true no matter how much stuff we had.  And that there are lots of people who don't have stuff like a place to live, food to eat, or clothes to wear.  They learn that by watching us help other people, all the time.  Being watched by your children constantly -- even during the day -- forces you to try harder to be a person like the one you want them to be.  

They learn that there are some manners that a person can use with his friends -- like whose belching is the loudest or whose nose has the most boogers -- and others that you use at the grocery store, and still others that you use at the library or at church.  I can't think of a situation I've been in since leaving college where I was in a room full of people exclusively of my own chronological age.  I don't know what advantage there is to grouping kids together in that artificial way other than teaching them to compete with one another..

Our kids are untrammeled.

I'm not kidding myself about the boys.  They're healthy, active boys.  If they were in school, maybe they could learn to sit still all day, but it wouldn't be easy.  In fact, I'm pretty sure that it would be at a considerable cost to them emotionally and spiritually.  

It's just as likely that they wouldn't be able to learn to do it.  I don't say this without experience.  Walker paces while he does his reading lesson, and we nearly never do a science or history lesson without some sort of exclamation or physical exuberance.   And what if they couldn't learn to sit still?  They'd probably recommend that we medicate them, and I don't think my kids need that.

In fact, and I mean no harm to anyone by saying this, I think it's absurd to expect a six year-old to sit still for an hour or fifty minutes or even thirty minutes.  That's not what they're made to do.  It's not that I don't understand the necessity of classroom order, and it's not that I didn't manage to sit still myself at that age.  I just don't think it's reasonable to expect that of our children, and I'm not willing to medicate them or punish them or make them feel like troublemakers or losers if they can't do it.  

I won't waste our children's childhoods by wasting their time.

We do school for two hours a day, maximum.  That's two kids, with reading, writing, math and either science or history pretty much every day.  It doesn't include trips to the library or to a museum or the zoo or whatever, but those are supplemental things anyway.  

I don't think you need to practice standing in line every time you need to leave the room to understand what standing in line is all about.  Our kids have pretty much mastered it without ever having to line up to go to the bathroom, just from going to the grocery store or the bank or the post office.  This is not a life skill you need to learn from school, but it's something that you spend an enormous amount of time doing in school.

You also don't need to learn to raise your hand before speaking.  It's just not that hard of a concept.  Admittedly, our sons think that if you raise your hand it compels people to listen to you, but they get the basic idea of it.  It's like waiting in line to talk, and we've already covered that.  But you spend a lot of time learning to raise your hand in school.

I don't take attendance, I don't grade papers, I don't rearrange desks, I don't line people up, I don't supervise them in the bathroom, I don't do all of the things that classroom teachers spend a huge amount of time doing every day.  

What that means is that rather than spending six or eight hours a day doing formal school, our kids spend a couple of hours in the morning learning in a much less formal environment, and then they're free to play.  They can play games, they can play imaginatively, they can read books, they can draw or paint or make things, they can ask to hear a story, they can help me with whatever I'm doing.  They're free to be kids, and I don't think that's true of kids in school.

I'm the most experienced, best qualified teacher my kids could have.

I used to say about my dogs, back in the olden days, that there were lots of people who knew more about dogs in general than I did, but no one knew my dogs better than me.  The same thing is true about our kids.  

No matter how motivated or well-meaning a teacher could be, she couldn't care as personally or as deeply about our kids and about their education as we do.  Because they're ours, no one else's.  We are motivated to make sure that they learn what they need to know in a way that no teacher's salary could ever inspire.

We've also been teaching our children since the days they were born.  We taught them to walk, to talk, to dress themselves, to feed themselves.  Compared to talking, reading is a breeze.  Teaching them academics pales in comparison to the other lessons we want them to learn from us.

And we know our kids better than anyone else does.  No one has to tell us about family situations or about how they did last year in their lessons or about what their hopes and dreams are.  We know how they learn, whether and when and why they're having a bad day, what excites them, what turns them off.  We know these things because we love them and because they're our kids.  They're all things that a teacher would have to learn and that she'd then have to keep straight in her head, because she'd also need to know those things about the other fifteen or twenty kids in her class.

We are outside the system.

I don't know what it's like to be in public school now, but I know what it was like to be there fifteen or twenty years ago.  

I remember the caste system that the schools imposed on us (as if the cliques and social hierarchy we created ourselves weren't enough).  I  was one of the smart ones, and I was allowed a lot of exceptions to the rules even for a smart kid.   

For lots and lots of other kids, though, they were being trained to become worker bees.  They were being taught to compete with one another for the approval of the "boss."  They certainly were not being taught to imagine themselves as the captains of their own destinies or that their options were limitless.  They were being taught, in a very real way, to accept their roles as followers.  They were, after all, not in the smart classes.  Lest they should forget their places.  

Below them were the kids banished to shop class or to some other vocational kind of curriculum.  I don't know exactly what went on in those classes, but I suspect that it wasn't terribly uplifting.  I doubt that they were being taught that they could change the world or shape even their own lives.  Fortunately, since those kids were somewhat outside of the system, they managed to grow up and do things like charge $100 an hour to come pump your septic tank or modulate the brake system in your car.

Public education began as a means of supplying factories with workers who knew their places.  It was not lain out in the constitution as a means of providing for an educated electorate.  It was not intended as a means of social improvement.  In fact, literacy rates have fallen since education became public.  The public school system was devised as a way of teaching Americans to admire and follow the leaders, rather than attempting to become leaders themselves.  It curbs competition with big business -- Johnny will work for you down at the plant rather than opening his own competing business.  It controls supply.  

I want our kids to think of themselves as full of possibility, and I don't want them ever to assume that someone else is better qualified to lead than they are.  (Certainly I want them to recognize when someone else is better qualified, but I don't think that's an assumption a person should take for granted.)  I can see infinite possibilities for them, and I want them to see those things in themselves, too.

Equally importantly, I want them to see those things in other people, too.  Not just in the people in the smart classes, but all people, in every line of work.  I want them to assume that other people have something to teach them, even if it's not something that they necessarily "need" to learn. 

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