Our homeschool is about to begin, and I thought it might be an appropriate time to share this article, one I wrote a few years ago.
I wasn’t going to be a homeschooling mom. My own education took place in
a private church school, surrounded by peers. Friendly competitions pushed my
grades higher than they might have been if I hadn’t had to announce my score to
twenty classmates. With happy memories behind me, I expected my future children
to attend a brick-and-mortar school with classmates, chalkboards, and teachers.
Not only did I have a positive experience to look back on, but a friend
shared horror stories of integrating poorly-educated homeschooled children into
her classroom. Fourth graders could hardly read. That clinched it. I would
never be a homeschooling mom.
But through the years, the “I will never”
was slowly chipped away. I met another kind of homeschooled children. Some were
annual winners of the local spelling bee and one child played piano like a
master when he was eleven. I met a homeschooling mom who tailored classes to
fit the needs of each child, churning out a dozen who knew more than I did. They
weren’t social misfits; they spoke comfortably with adults and easily with
peers.
I rubbed shoulders with die-hard homeschooling moms who touted the
benefits of teaching your children at home. To some, this was more than an optional
schooling alternative; this was a God-given mandate. “God gave your children to
you,” they said with their arms around their preschoolers. “It is your job to
train your children. It doesn’t seem right to place them in someone else’s care
for most of the day.”
“Plus,” they told me, “when you homeschool, you can tailor the education
to fit each child’s learning style, unlike a classroom where everyone is forced
to go at a pre-determined pace. This is where homeschooling shines.”
Other moms, pinning daisies in their hair, said, “I love the flexibility
of homeschool.”
That flexibility part made me wary. I heard of homeschoolers who mowed
yard, pulled weeds, and raked leaves for a day of school under the umbrella of
“studying agriculture.” I supposed that kind of flexibility produced fourth
graders who couldn’t read.
When my firstborn reached school age, we were in Ghana. I was going to
become a homeschooling mom whether I liked the idea or not. Then came the next
weighty problem: What curriculum should we use? Opinions rolled in.
“Using self-paced programs is like tossing a
pile of books in your child’s lap and saying, ‘Go educate yourself.’ But
homeschooling is much more than that. It is being involved in every area of
your child’s life, including their education. Plus, CLE is hopelessly boring.”
“Abeka is advanced academically but it is very patriotic.”
“ACE has a terrible writing program. The children are in, like, seventh
grade and can’t give speeches or write essays. Plus, ACE is much too easy. All
they do is fill in blanks.”
“Rod and Staff is far too narrow-minded. They even put Adam in a plain-cut
suit in the Garden of Eden in one of the illustrations.”
“If you use any curriculum that doesn’t share your values, you will lose
your children to the world.”
“The whole book approach is the only way to go. You retain information
through books you read, not by cramming for tests. Use a program where your children read living storybooks with guided discussions instead of
textbooks with tests. These books give your children a whole world education,
not one so focused on American history alone. Children need to learn about more
than just Christopher Columbus, you know?”
Using storybooks to educate my children appealed to me, but I sensed strong
feelings behind the opposition: “Sonlight recommends ungodly books that condone
or make light of sin, just because it is great literature. I would never allow
my children to read those books.”
Seasoned, build-your-child’s-educational-experience-people hinted that sticking
with a single publisher for every subject was an inferior way to educate
children. “Every curriculum has strengths and weaknesses, so your job is to ascertain
your child’s learning style, then pick textbooks based on that. For my oldest
son, I use Apologia for science, the Mystery of History for world history, and Saxon
for math. But my second child used none of these.”
And the final piece of advice: “If we are going to reclaim our
children’s education, we don’t need to model our days after the public school
system. One of the best things you can give your children is a love for
learning, and you don’t get that by giving them a stack of textbooks. Learning
is meant to be fun! We tried the textbook approach, but it did not work for us.
I am not going to have war in my home for the next twelve years trying to force
worksheets upon my crying child, so we switched to the whole book approach and it revolutionized our school days.”
I wasn’t the only one who was unsure about educating my children with no tests and textbooks. "I'd be wary of the 'no worksheets' idea," my cousin wrote. "Sure, Thomas Edison may have learned that way, but Thomas Edison was the exception, not the rule. I'd like to tell those moms that unless they are confident their child will produce the world's next lightbulb, they are safest sitting little Johnny down and having him endure the drudgery of storing information the boring way. I'm all into interesting and hands-on, but there's something rotten at the bottom of this they-don't-even-know-they're-learning approach. I'd say, 'Exactly. And furthermore, does anyone else?'"
By the time the barrage of opinions ended, we had already dipped cautious oars
into the waters of homeschool. I was surprised at how much I enjoyed it. But judging
by the Winds of Opinion, everything I had done so far was wrong, and my boat
rocked dangerously. What did it matter if my kindergartener could read simple
storybooks and write in cursive, or that my second grader could multiply and divide? I was guilty of being a textbook girl. Too
structured. My curriculum was flawed. And my children, in spite of my most
interesting diversions, were counting the days until summer break. I was failing,
in other words. Maybe sending them to a real school was my only hope of
redemption.
My sense of failure might have shipwrecked our homeschool had voices of encouragement not penetrated my fog. One of them was my husband’s
who listened to me process opinions endlessly and was still able to chart a
straight course.
“I’m not comfortable with the whole book, no-textbook approach,” he
said. “Let’s use a traditional curriculum, worksheets included, to make sure the
foundation is solid. Then, if you want to, add reading material to the side.
Our children will get the best of both worlds.”
“My children have been counting the days until school lets out, too,”
one non-homeschooling mom told me. “It is normal at this time of year.”
“This isn’t a perfect world,” someone else conceded. “School is what you
make of it, brick and mortar or homeschool. Curricula are good or bad depending
on the teacher. If it is working well for your family, don’t let the naysayers
discourage you.”
Encouraged, I filed my list of Sonlight
book titles (mom-approved ones, of course) so I can add them to our library
someday. I loosened up just a little until I can enjoy some of the flexibility
homeschooling offers. No, I still don’t call a baking spree as a full day of
Home Ec, even if they stir in the chocolate chips and press ‘start’ on the
timer. But instead of copying a recommended paragraph into a textbook for his
penmanship class, my second grader wrote a report on antlions he found on our
property. When he read about a blind child, we wrote his name in Braille on
cardstock and read a book about Louis Braille. That, in addition to his regular
work. He didn’t even know he was learning.
Indeed, school is what you make of it. For now, we are a homeschool
family, making the most of an imperfect curriculum with an imperfect teacher at
the helm.
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