Why We Homeschool
In a nutshell, here is a brief explanation of why we chose the homeschooling path for our family.
We believe that institutional schools are actually the artificial social setting. When my children finish there formal education, I highly doubt they will work at the 25 year old company, only interacting with individuals of their same age and status with perhaps one or two older authoritarian figures to supervise them. It is more likely that they will work in a career field that will require them to be able to successfully interact with people who are both younger and older than they are and they will have subordinates, peers and superiors of all ages. This is the environment an active home schooled child is socialized in and has always known through mixed age co-ops and activities. Talk to a public school teenager and a homeschooled teenager and see which one is more comfortable conversing with both adults and preschoolers.Institutional schools rarely ever finish their curriculum by the end of the school year and then spend the first quarter of the year re-learning what was forgotten over the summer. We have the freedom to school year round and continue learning without having to leave stuff out because the year is over. Also, with the No Child Left Behind program, more and more school systems are moving towards standardized testing as a measure of teacher success, linking things like promotions and pay raises to test scores and practically forcing teachers to teach the test as opposed to teaching higher levels of thinking like analysis, synthesis and evaluation. Homeschooling in a state without mandatory testing allows us to avoid this entirely and fully develop their critical thinking skills.After having read John Taylor Gatto’s work, we are sufficiently convinced that the aim of institutional school in this country is not to truly educate, free-thinking, compassionate and responsible adults, but to produce obedient culturally indoctrinated consumers who will ensure the survival and continued growth of the capitalist free market economy and a government controlled by the elite and wealthy. That’s not what we want for our children’s future. You can see this in the shear amount of advertising that is allowed in and even solicited by institutional schools. And by the design of history and government curriculums among others. We want our children to have a truly well rounded education and are using the classical model as our basis to achieve that goal.A lack of character/values education is a huge concern for us too, even though we aren’t Christian. Institutional schools have gone overboard sanitizing curriculum so as not to offend anyone that there is no morality education left. Teachers are paralyzed by political correctness and multicultural sensitivity to the point where respectful tolerant exploration of divergent opinions is down right impossible. This doesn’t allow for important moral issues to ever be discussed openly and honestly which pushes drugs, alcohol use, racism, sex, and violence into this mysterious and tempting abyss that naturally curious and adventurous teenagers can barely resist dabbling in since they cannot get any straight answers from anyone, much less even ask the questions to begin with.
We also have grave concerns about services available for gifted and challenged kids alike. Institutional schools are really set up to teach to the average. Neither the kids that are behind or the kids that are ahead get what they need from the system. So the kids that are behind, continue to fall farther behind until finally giving up and dropping out. And the gifted kids either start stiffling their gifts and hiding their abilities or get bored and start getting in trouble or keep getting skipped ahead and put into dangerously unhealthy social environments they are ill prepared to handle.
Lastly, a very personal and motivating reason for choosing to homeschool our children can be gleaned from a quick glance at the headlines. Quite simply, the final reason we choose to homeschool is that we believe in our hearts our children are less likely to be shot and killed sitting around the kitchen table than sitting in an institutional classroom.
