This post is a re-print of a document I wrote for our homeschool group.
I share it here to answer of the questions of those who ask the question we often receive:
"Why homeschool?"
Listed below is just a sampling of some of the many and varied reasons families
choose homeschooling for their children—often through high school
graduation.
In our case, we homeschool for all these reasons and more.
No educational choice is perfect, but I can say through the eyes of experience
that homeschooling has provided us with certain perks
that we'd never find in a school system.
I am eternally grateful that we are able to educate at home.
History
Formal
public schooling did not become widely established in the United States until
the advent of the Industrial Revolution. At this time, the concept of mass
public education in our country was born, shifting away from the traditional
role of parents as primary educators of their children. (Read more about this in "Underground History of American Education" by John Taylor Gatto.) The Vatican expressly
supports the role of parents as primary educators, properly reflecting what has
been the norm in education through most of human history.
The Big Two: Faith and Academics
Perhaps these are the two most common reasons that families choose to homeschool. They are, arguably, the two issues
that a truly excellent school could help satisfy, although most homeschoolers would
note that we have yet to find a school that meets our standards in all aspects
of both these areas.
· Transmission of the Faith
Faithful Catholics
agree that it can be difficult to find a school that teaches the Faith in a
manner which is not watered down, in a manner which is in keeping with the
Magisterium, and in such a way that students are emboldened to rise up and
defend their Faith to a world that will try to shake it.
· Excellence in Academics
Homeschoolers, on
average, score significantly higher on SAT tests than do students in public
schools and in religiously-affiliated private schools. Homeschooling works
academically, which explains, in part, the high rate at which colleges are
recruiting homeschoolers over any other group of incoming freshman.
Beyond the Big Two:
The following are the areas in which many of us believe even
a spiritually- and academically-excellent school cannot compete with a good
homeschool.
· Moral Surroundings and Safety
Homeschoolers commonly site moral and safety reasons for their decision to
homeschool. Even in excellent Catholic schools where drug and alcohol use and
sexual conduct is minimal, negative peer pressure exists. No school setting is
immune from this, and for many families, it is not worth the price to place
their children in such an environment eight or more hours a day, in the place
of the alternative nurturing home environment.
· Family-Centered Education
Homeschooling
promotes living, learning, and playing together in a seamless way. Rather than
rushing to school in the morning, being separated during the day, dashing to
activities after school, and then overseeing homework before bedtime at night,
with little time leftover for family interaction, homeschoolers enjoy the time
to develop family bonds. For homeschoolers, evening time can be reserved for
family time, as school work is completed during the day. When families of
children at even excellent Catholic schools report that they have to “de-program”
their kids when they arrive home after school and try to get their children’s
heads in “family mode” after being away with peers all day, homeschoolers nod
their heads in understanding. This is part of why we homeschool—for that
continuity in family learning and that seamless nurturing of family
relationships, and so that we don’t have to “de-program” our children who have
been with peers all day. Commitment to family is simply more difficult to
nourish when students are running in different directions.
· Parental Oversight and Bonding
Even the most
diligent parent of a schooled child will not know everything that happens in
the classroom during the day. Even the most in-tune parent who establishes
connections with teachers will not always be on top of what his student is
learning, making homework oversight challenging at times. Homeschooled parents,
by contrast, know exactly what their children are learning. This close
educational connection between parents and their homeschooled children fosters dynamic
educational conversations and interactions that can occur at any time of the
day and results also in an ability to weave complementary educational opportunities
into the curriculum as they arise.
· FlexibilityHomeschooling offers flexibility unavailable in a school setting. Homeschoolers
may follow the standard school year, or they may choose to educate year-round,
taking substantial breaks for vacations or liturgical seasons and then making
up for those breaks by educating during the summer or at other times.
Homeschoolers can take advantage of lower travel rates during the traditional
school year, because they establish their own schedule, satisfying the required
number of school hours in a number of different ways. Homeschoolers can take
family time when a new baby arrives or a grandparent is ill, making up those
hours later in the school year, all while teaching the children the value of
family service. When homeschooling, education can happen at any time of the day
or week, a beautifully flexible system which is especially helpful in larger
families.
· Parental Influence
Studies indicate
that parents of school-age children typically have just a few minutes each day
for meaningful interaction with their children. With getting the children to
and from school, running them to activities, making meals, packing lunches, and
overseeing homework, it is no wonder. The school year is one big rat race. Yet
for homeschoolers, that rat race is minimized, while time with family is
maximized. Parents have such a small window of time in which to influence the
moral development of their children. Homeschooling maximizes that window to the
good of the child.
· Avoidance of Age Segregation
Placing children in
age-segregated classrooms teaches children, by implication, that peers are more
important than families. Indeed, students will spend far more awake-hours with
peers in this setting than with parents and family. In the course of human
history, the period in which children have been taught in age-segregated
classrooms is but a small blip, and it is not reflective of the wider world—the
world into which our students will graduate. Age-segregating children into
artificial subsets can stunt them socially and academically and perhaps
explains the results of studies which show that homeschooled students are much
better socialized and more mature than students who attend school. Most
homeschoolers feel that one of the great benefits of homeschooling is our
ability to avoid the artificial age-segregation typical in today’s schools,
helping our students become better socialized and comfortable with people of
all ages. Helping younger siblings and being helped by older siblings is one way
in which this plays out in a typical homeschool.
· Time to Do What Matters Most
Classroom learning
is, by its very nature, inefficient. This is simply due to the numbers of
students in the classroom. Homeschools with fewer students can finish school
work more quickly, allowing students to work at their own pace, and opening up
part of the school day for other endeavors, academic or otherwise.
Homeschoolers have famously excelled in areas like spelling bees, science
competitions, music performance, book authorship, and more. It’s amazing what
happens when education takes place efficiently, leaving time for students to
practice or pursue the subject areas and hobbies that they love. When a student
is not relegated to the schedule of the classroom, great things are bound to
happen.
· Spontaneous Opportunities to Learn
Because parents are the teachers, it is easy and natural for
homeschool parents to take advantage of spontaneous teaching opportunities as
they arise and to weave those teaching opportunities into the curriculum. In
this way, parents are able to capitalize on special interests on the part of
the student and strike while the iron is hot, possibly pursuing in-depth study
when a child is particularly excited about a particular topic. A teacher in a classroom
of fifteen or more children cannot do this for each student.
· Curriculum Tailored to the Individual Child
Homeschooling
allows the parent to tailor education to each specific child in a way that a
teacher cannot do for a class of ten or fifteen or twenty-five. This means that
struggling learners can have their special education materials researched and
hand-picked by the people who love them most in the world, while the gifted
learners benefit from parent-selected curriculum that reflects their specific
strengths. For families with exceptional learners on one end of the spectrum or
the other, the ability to pick and choose curriculum provides great motivation
to homeschool. Even for the average learner, great benefit exists in a loving
parent choosing the curriculum that best suits the child.
· Independent Learners
One of the stated reasons that colleges like (and heavily-recruit)
homeschoolers is because they are independent learners and self-starters. By
the nature of the homeschool environment, where the child does not have to wait
for the teacher’s lecture to begin his school work, homeschoolers tend to
become much more independent learners.
· Feeding the Love of Learning
The love of learning is not so easily nurtured in a “factory
model” of learning where a classroom of students learns certain things in
certain grades, keeping all students in lock-step. To the contrary,
homeschooling allows gifted students to advance at their own pace and allows
the fire for learning to be fed, rather than stunted in a classroom where the
brightest learner is often held back by the class pace.
· Opportunities Not Available to Traditionally-Schooled Kids
Homeschooling is unique in its ability to offer students
opportunities that are not available to traditionally-schooled kids. From our
own homeschool group, students have worked for senators at the Capitol,
interned at Relevant Radio, attended religious rallies, worked on political
campaigns, established their own businesses, engaged in mission work, taken
college courses, and much more—all during school hours. Homeschoolers are able
to take advantage of school-day opportunities that are simply not available to
students in a classroom during the day, offering homeschoolers a depth and
breadth of education unavailable elsewhere.
· A Vocation to Teach Our Children
Many homeschooling parents view homeschooling as a vocation
to which they are called, and they feel privileged to be home teaching their
children. For many homeschoolers, giving up the daily interaction they have
with their children—watching them learn to read, teaching them to write
persuasively, sharing in an intellectual discussion about the Catholic doctrine,
discussing the political issues of the day as viewed through the lens of
history studies—would be akin to torture. For many parents, they didn’t raise
their children for the first five years, only to hand them over to an
educational system, no matter how “excellent” that system and its teachers may
be. There are some parents who simply enjoy parenting and interacting with
their children too much to place them in school eight hours a day, five days a
week, thirty-six weeks out of the school year. To learn right alongside our
children is a gift and an honor that only homeschooling parents can truly
appreciate.
