Home Education; Quality of Education and Time Management

For previous entries in this series see here.


I understand the struggles some people face when they consider homeschooling. We are blessed to live in a wonderful community, with a wonderful school, where the majority of teachers and residents of our community are believers. I can count on a few fingers the number of homeschoolers in our general area. It's not a place where you choose to homeschool because you are looking for a solution to combat negative social influence. And that is often how home education is regarded. As a solution to a problem. That was not the case for us. As a means to combat something negative. Or on the other hand, home education might *not* be considered because it is seen as having negative repurcussions, or robbing children of certain aspects of childhood.

While it's true we struggled with the "socialization" myth initially (this was years before our oldest dd was even school age, when we first started evaluating choices for educating her). We struggled with the knowledge that she wouldn't get to "hang out" in the halls and schoolgrounds with "the other girls", or play on the school teams, or just "be" with and like everyone else. Those are not easy choices to make. But in the end, we had to realize that the choice we were making, was a choice about EDUCATION. When we boiled it down to that, and deciding how and where our daughter would get the best education at our disposal, there was no debate. Home education won hands down, an official knock out. Alright, so I'm biased ;-) I won't pretend I'm not... I'm not saying a child can't get a good or even great education in public school, but I am convinced that however well a child does educationally in public school, they would have flourished even more in a devoted home education environment. There are just certain logistics that make this inevitable.

My kids don't have unintegrated "classes" exposing them to dates and general figures and unconnected geographical locations, and abstract grammar and vocabulary lessons completely unrelated to other topics of study. They are not exposed to people, events and dates in the context of a factual paragraph in a text book that they are required to memorize for a time and then forget. They don't waste half of their school time on the bus, changing classes, doing busywork while they wait for other kids to catch up, in assembly, etc.

With the time we save, we are blessed to be able embark on a much more exciting adventure in education precisely because we don't have 30 other kids at 30 different stages and with umpteen different learning styles to worry about. We also can funnel our money to buy the best materials available since we don't have to worry about funding and salaries and the cost of running public schools. So instead of text books chosen by a public school system we can choose "real" books that tell the "real" stories of the people/places/events we are studying. We have time to read great read alouds that correlate with our history studies, to watch movies and documentaries that bring to life the things we are studying.

For example, this past year our oldest dd (8) studied american history from Amerigo Vespucci to the civil war. After being exposed to this time period in elementary school I would have been able to repeat the names of Lewis and Clark, and the Erie Canal, have a most basal understanding of the american revolution (that the americans wanted to break free from the british, and the british wanted to keep America as a colony) and told you that Sacagawea was an Indian guide on the Lewis and Clark expedition. These facts I would have gleaned from a textbook paragraph and a few black and white line drawings. Whatever I learned was abstract, usually dry, relatively boring, and definitely disconnected from my real life and interests.

My dd on the other hand dresses her younger siblings up as red-coats or blue-coats and be-feathered indians to re-enact the french indian war. She recounts the story of the kidnapping of Sacagawea and Naya Nuki from their Shoshone tribe and they play act the escape and 1,000 mile journey of Naya Nuki (9 years old) as she finds her way back home to her tribe. She dialogues with Prairie Guy and I about the ins and outs of the American Revolution, and brings things to the table that even we find enlightening. She can trace out the path that Lewis and Clark travelled on their expedition and recount wonderful adventures and trials they met along the way. When she plays in the fields and in the bush she is able to envision the history that happened on these plains hundreds of years ago.

One of the biggest bonuses to home education in my eyes is the ability to integrate all areas of learning. We get to read great literature that captivates us and gives us visual to the time, place and event we are studying. We trace out routes and locations on the globe or map as they come up, bringing geography to life. We write out vocabulary words as they come up in the context of our reading, and practice spelling and grammar by dictation assignments (savoury sentences as I like to call them) taken straight out of what we are reading. When we learn about nature or elements in science, we don't sit at a table talking about it, we get out there and look for it and experience it in real live color and depth.

We sink our teeth in, we go deeper, we go farther, we study all angles, how did the indians feel when... how did the americans feel when.... what would it have been like to be an american soldier at the Battle of Valley Forge, freezing, starving, fighting for what you believed was right and fair. Dd writes stories and poems based on the topics we are learning about, she paints pictures, she reads books in her spare time that correlate. And all this, in less than half the time a child spends in and between classes in a public school setting, not to even mention the time they are required to work on homework.

I feel the need to stipulate that the purpose of this series was not and is not to bash public school education, it is rather a detailed outline of why we choose to homeschool for those who wonder, and for those who are considering the option for themselves. It is not an easy choice and there are so many elements to consider. To those of you who are tentatively standing at the crossroads, I pray that God will give you wisdom and guidance and courage to follow the path He has outlined for you, whatever that may be.

"I have chosen him. He must direct his children. He must see that the members of his family after him live the way I want them to. So he must direct them to do what is right and fair. " Genesis 18:19 NIRV