Categories: Consider
      Date: Nov  7, 2008
     Title: So Why Do you Homeschool?

So why do you homeschool?” you ask. As if in two sentences I could tell you what is in my heart and soul. As if in three minutes I would lay out my deepest emotions and bare my spirit to your curiosity. Searching your eyes quizzically I try to gauge your intent. Do you really want to know?

We homeschool because we believe strongly in it.

There. For most people that is enough. It is the safe, comfortable, non-threatening response. We can part on an upbeat note and move on in our days. What? You want the real answer? No, I don’t think you do. The real answer takes time—time to listen, and time to love and understand me. The real truth is not so comfortable. It exposes my deepest beliefs and longings for my children, and may force you to look harder than you want to at your own decisions.   {$pullquote}

I know—you have all your responses to my convictions prepared. You do not have time, you have to have two incomes, and your personality clashes with your child. You would never have the patience. You would not know where to start. You believe that children should have social lives. To you my response is the same as before.

We homeschool because we believe strongly in it.

Strongly enough that we will do what we believe is best. Not a surface best; not the easiest, most comfortable best; not what wewantto be best; but the best that comes from deep, soul-searching conviction. The best that stands strong in the face of judgment, criticism, and misunderstanding. The best that is willing to go through anything to simply stand, even when sometimes deep inside I wish we had never started, that we had just been like everyone else from the beginning, had not taken this path of no return, of high emotions, of hurting our loved ones when they don’t understand our decision. How much easier it would be to go with the flow and give our children what they want.

No, you do not want to hear how I feel about homeschooling. Not really. You simply do not understand, and wonder what our motivations could be. I don’t trust your question. What are you really asking? Is it in judgment or just idle curiosity? Or are you actually interested?

Let us sit down. This will take a few minutes.

How do you take heart, conviction, belief, knowledge, God, thoughts, and emotions and put them into logical, understandable words? Do I start with the specifics, the physical things? Things like Cross-Dressing Day, a health video on how lesbianism is a good lifestyle “alternative,” and needing to get the principal to tell second- and fourth-grade teachers that it is legal to bring a Bible to class?

That might be too intense.

Why don’t we start with how fragile children’s egos are, and how cruel and mean other children can be. Children are vulnerable, with a freshness and innocence we want to protect. They have plenty of time to taste the real world. We want to grow children who are self-confident and strong in who they are, who feel free to be who God created them to be.

I could tell you of our daughter’s best friend who stood in the hall and called her a nasty and very demeaning name because our daughter wanted to include other friends during lunch. Our third grader changed his hairstyle and the ridicule was so great the teacher eventually had to intervene. No, no use going into details.

Our children now have healthy selfesteems and can hold their own in a crowd, are leaders in their groups of friends. They are willing to make counter- cultural fashion statements and be trendsetters, because we took them out before they were beaten down. In institutionalized school, public or private, conformity is the rule, and the biggest rule is that you must follow all the rules. No one can color outside the lines because you cannot control people who are individuals; they must be taught to think and move as one unit. As parents we do not want to raise a mass; we want to raise individuals.

You see, our vision of learning is different. We do not believe that learning is confined to the school building and consists of stuffing facts into brains for the prescribed amount of time. We happen to think that learning is 24/7, and that knowing how to find the information you need is more important. Learning should be focused on what the child is interested in. Not that children should only study what they like, but every aspect of learning can be of interest.

Everyone learns in different ways and at different rates. A child should be challenged at his level and in his direction without having to follow the demands that everyone learn at the same speed and by the same methods.

A child’s mind is fresh and new, ready to be impressed by whoever is raising them. We want our children to grow up with our morals, values, and standards. Would we not want our children to propagate what we deem important? So why would we want to give our children over to the government or to society to raise, teaching them their standards, morals, beliefs, and consciences?That in itself is enough to convince us we want to homeschool.

Children who are not squeezed into the same mold are creative, confident, and free to be themselves. An art teacher has talked about how she loves to have homeschooled children in her class. She will plop a chunk of clay down in front of everyone, telling him or her to make something, anything. The public-schooled children will sit staring at it blankly, waiting to be told what to do. The homeschooled students pick it up and begin shaping and working with it, not hesitating to dig in and start creating something. Public-schooled children are used to having others think for them. A college professor told me he could always pick the homeschoolers out from the crowd.

“They are the ones who raise their hands and ask questions because they are used to asking questions,” he said. “Another way I can tell is that they are the ones who come up and talk to me. The others have a hard time relating to people outside their peer group.”

In public school the pressures are intense. We had a middle school son who, between classes, had to get to his locker, get out gym clothes, change, and be on the bleachers ready for class within three minutes. The first day of school he did not make it and was written up with a tardy. He was shamed and embarrassed. Time pressures intensify all the other pressures. There is no time to go to their lockers between classes, so students have to carry heavy loads in backpacks that have been proven to cause back problems. The peer pressure wrecks self-confidence. Their clothes are not right, their accents are not right, their friends are not right. Then there are the academic pressures. At what point do we stop stuffing facts into children and teach them what really counts?

We want our children to have time to be children. Growing up is not meant to consist of spending five days a week away from home being raised by others. We did not sign up for weekend children, or to be part-time parents. We are not coparents with the government or anyone else. Spending time on the bus, at school, and doing homework, there is no time during the week to just be children. We used to do homework from after supper until midnight every evening. We could not start before supper as they were on the bus until 5:30. Then there were band or music lessons, sports or Little League, Boy Scouts, dance/gymnastics, church and youth group, and a myriad of other activities commanding our time and attention. It is becoming common now for teachers to assign homework during the summer. We want our children to have time to play, to create, to have down time, and—most importantly— time to be a family. Our daughter spent four days with her father visiting New York City instead of doing bookwork. Our son did the same with a trip to Los Angeles. Another son drove to Texas with his father to attend a conference. These are things they will never forget, experiences that build a life, a personality, an understanding of family and love that endless workbooks and textbooks will never replace.

Institutional school creates an unnatural world of peers that replace the family. The subtle message to children is that families are old-fashioned and outdated. Children are told that their parents will not understand them because they are misguided and stuck in the past—just humor them. Our children were given papers explaining that the less they told their parents the better. After all, the student is his or her own person and not answerable to anyone. Public schools now hand out phone numbers for children to call if they need advice on topics they are not comfortable asking their parents, such as abortion or birth control. Schools give children rights they are not capable of handling emotionally or with maturity. Is this what we want for our children?

Are you sorry you asked? I have more. You are now committed to hearing my heart, so hang on a little longer.

Life should be flexible—able to go with the ebb and flow of our days. When it is a good time for a vacation, we can take one. When my husband has to travel on business, we can all go with him, expanding our horizons, like when we went to the beach, stopping to see how cotton grows and watching the countryside change. When there is a family emergency, we are free to rally around and hang out at the hospital or wherever we need to be. If something special causes us to be up late, we can sleep in the next morning. Others do not command our presence and movements; we are a family unit, not a parent unit and a child unit. Our children are a direct part of the ebb and flow of our lives, moving along with us, not separately.

We know our children. We know what makes them tick, what their learning styles are, what they are interested in, and what motivates them. We are attuned to what the Holy Spirit is directing for their lives. What do others know of that? What could they possibly know of what is good, or best for our children? Why would we give someone else the most precious things in our lives, living human beings who are vulnerable and unprotected, to raise, teach, and mold intotheirimages? Whose image do you want your children molded into? Because if you think that it will be your image or God’s image, then think again. You cannot mold a child into the image you believe God has for them within the first five years of their lives. Many people do not even have that; they send their children off to nursery school or preschool from three months of age, on. Unless you homeschool, once a child hits kindergarten they are no longer yours to raise.

Okay, let me answer those tough questions everyone asks.

Are our children socially backward? No. They make friends easily and can relate with confidence and humor to others of all ages.

Has it been easy financially? No. We have been a one-car family for most of our married lives, and rented instead of owned our homes. We have done without the fancy things, the big vacations. We have trusted that God would help us as we do what we believe is right. For us, our children are our utmost treasure and responsibility, and in the end they will be all that matters.

Has it been easy emotionally? No. There have been times when our children did not want to homeschool. Times when emotions were so raw and bleeding over the subject that I shed tears daily. Times when I wish we had never started because it is too hard to hurt the ones we love by making them do what’s hard but the right thing to do.

Has it been easy socially? No. My mother-in-law is a retired eighth-grade math teacher and her husband was a public school superintendent for many years. Friends and family do not understand. Family, especially, can tear you up with their voiced and unvoiced opinions on how wrong you are. You only need to be in the presence of public school teachers or parents for them to be defensive. Even if you never mention it out loud they take it personally. To a great degree you stand alone. The different ones. The way-out ones. The non-conformists. The ones who are ruining their children forever.

“It sounds bleak,” you say. Not really. Hard, yes; rewarding, yes; worth it, yes; fun, yes. I love it. We have a good time. We enjoy each other and we are relaxed and content. Our days flow along pleasantly and happily. We laugh a lot, share our thoughts and interests, and learn how important other people are. It is about individuals who make up a family. On bad weather days I know my children are safely under my wings. The kids enjoy it when I read aloud. They give out spelling words to one another, learning much more than spelling as they interact. Our son spends an afternoon trying to make a toy figure parachute off the top bunk, learning more about aerodynamics than any textbook could have taught him. Our children have time to make up elaborate games for birthday parties, do scavenger hunts in the cemetery, go tubing down the creek, and learn to shoot a bow and arrow. They see us live our lives, modeling what we think is important and what our attitudes are about sex, money, God, and life in general. Humor ranks high in our household. Trust, love, and responsibility are in the atmosphere, not something that must be taught. Acceptance, diversity, consequences, and flexibility are the norm, not agendas to be pushed. Life in our house is good because it flows through a canopy of love, trust, and acceptance. Overprotective? If shielding our children from harsh reality until they are emotionally mature and have a strong foundation is being overprotective, then yes, we are.

So why do we homeschool? It’s hard to say. I guess it’s just because we love our children.

©2009 Homeschooling Today magazine, Nehemiah Four, LLC