Why I love Homeschooling

This is re-posted from another journal of mine which is mostly friends-locked. I'm posting this here because this site gets a wider range of readers, and also because people outside my small circle of friends are more likely to feel comfortable commenting here, and I would, very much like to read your comments or blog posts on the subject of homeschooling.

I don't have an ax to grind against the concept of school in general. There are good ones and there are bad ones. There are good teachers and there are bad teachers. There are also schools and teachers that are good for some kids and not good for other kids. Education is not a one size fits all sort of thing. The thing that I do have an ax to grind against is the idea that all children need to be educated in one specific way. That idea is patently ludicrous and isn't even borne out in the world of public education within one given system, much less across the many different systems that exist on our planet today.

Some people think that you can't give your child as many opportunities to learn at home as you can in a school environment, and for some schools that may, in fact, be true. The vast majority of schools, however, suffer from the opposite problem. Each class has to teach to a specific level, not getting ahead of itself for the quick nor slowing down for the laggers. Most schools suffer from a lack of funds and resources, and so they have to do with whatever they have. In general, schools also suffer from time constraints that require subjects to be carved into specific time slots and attention blocks.

At home you are not constrained by the four walls of an institution nor by the scheduling issues of a corporate body. If you would like to study French by visiting a French speaking place on the off season, you can go right ahead and do that. If you would like to keep reading your book about Greek history past 10 o'clock at night, that's fine, too, as long as your own priorities for the next morning allow for a late wake up.

As a homeschooler, for each topic you study you can be an autodidact or you can seek out tutors from a wide variety of sources. Sometimes you will choose to take an organized class on a specific subject. Sometimes you will find an inspiring mentor to help guide you in a particular learning endeavor. Many times you will learn a single subject from a number of different people that you communicate with in different places and different contexts -- the librarian, a professional in the field, hobbyists on the 'Net, friends you meet at a supply store or event. Some of your teachers will be peers of your own age. Some of your peers in a topic you explore will be much older than you are, and will be learning as much from you as you do from them.

As a homeschooling parent I don't have to know everything that my children want to or need to learn. I never even took calculus, so how could I ever teach it? I can't. Instead, my kids can teach me, or we can learn together. I take immense pride in the fact that my eldest son taught me almost everything I know about marine biology and absolutely everything I know about cephalopods in particular.

Homeschooling builds a sort of tightly bonded family that is extremely rare today in the Western world. People notice the relationship that I have with my kids, and fellow homeschooling families say that they experience the same thing. One of the reasons that we are so close is that we talk to each other. A lot. About lots of different subjects. That builds familiarity, sure, but it also builds trust. How many teenage kids actually enjoy sitting and talking with their parents? For me, the teen years have proven to be the best so far precisely because of the great conversations, movies, books, and activities that we've been able to share.

Homeschooling also builds a kind of independence that is uncommon amongst regular-schooled kids. The homeschooled youth knows that he or she has power over their day, their life, and the things that they learn and do. They may be guided by adults, but they have a much stronger sense than most about the fact that they are ultimately in control. Whereas school children who study topics outside of the school curriculum or skip ahead in their textbooks are considered nerds and geeks, homschooled children who do the same are the norm. Whereas school children who decide to start their own business, write a novel, arrange an apprenticeship for themselves or volunteer independently at an organization they care about are considered remarkable, amongst homeschoolers any of those endeavors are just part of the package.

I love homeschooling because it is limitless, borderless, boundaryless, and immensely fulfilling.

When I was very young and impressionable, somewhere around the age of 6 or 7, my dad told me that school wasn't there to teach me all the subjects that I was supposedly learning. What it was really doing was teaching me how to learn. Learning, he said, is one of the most important things in life. You will need to do it all the time if you want to be able to compete in the job market, if you want to be able to keep up with changes in technology and science, and if you just want to be a better person. Reading and math are tools for learning. The scientific method is a tool for learning. The things you learn about social studies and literature are building blocks on which to build more learning.

The thing is, if that's true, then school may be the wrong tool for teaching what we most need. What percentage of 5 and 6 year olds start their school careers as curious and inquisitive little beings excited about the prospects of learning more, more, more? What percentage of people come out of school full of wonder and a desire to keep learning? I don't have exact numbers, but I'm sure that you know as well as I do that the majority of people finish up school feeling burnt out and not wanting to go back to that experience ever again. For many people, the idea of learning a brand new skill 5 or 10 years after they have gotten out of school is terrifying. This does not bode well.

There are a few things that I think that my parents did extremely well in my early life. One of them is that they helped me to separate between the concept of "school" and the concept of "education". When I was a kid the first was presented to me as a legal requirement, the second as a thing of great joy which, when you are lucky, you can glean from the first. Why hope for luck when you can squeeze education out of every moment in your day without school?

Can you say "unschool"?

Seth Godin wrote about what school is good for in his post on January 31st, and then followed it up with another post on February 8th in which he discussed the fact that many people just stop actively trying to learn the day that they graduate from school.

He points out that even among the people who are curious enough and interested enough in furthering their knowledge that they read blogs like his, very few read the most important non-fiction books. He guesses that less than 10% of the people who read his blog ever read one of his books. He says that for many people, the idea of books brings back bad memories of school, and even if they want to learn, they don't want to spend their spare time doing school stuff now.

He hits one of the reasons that I believe so strongly in unschooling right on the head. I didn't send my youngest son to a regular school until well after he could read and write. The base of his education started at home, and both he and I are looking forward to his days returning to home education again.* My eldest son did the school thing until he was 10, and then homeschooled on and off until he started at Washing State University a short while before his 17th birthday. Both boys are huge book lovers. Both boys study many things that are not part of their regular curricula today, independently and rigorously.

Why do they do this? Because they don't equate studying with strict authority, fear of consequences, or boredom in the classroom. Their curiosity has been tended like a plant, and it has grown along with their abilities to seek out answers. They have been given the tools to explore the world around them, and encouraged to reach out beyond their own boundaries.

There is nothing on Seth Godin's list of what you get from school that you can't get while homeschooling. Learning at home does not mean learning only at home or only with your parents. Unschooling in particular means learning from experience and the world around you and all of the many resources that you have available to you, from books and computers to neighbors and tutors and beyond.

My eldest son learned about business by starting his own small business at age 12 in the UK. And then another in Seattle at age 14. And another at college at age 17. Along the way he asked many adults for help and advice, learned how to do important research on his own and how to get other people to buy into his projects and dreams and to invest their time, their money, or their resources to help him build things. He didn't study in the framework of a specific course, but he did take some classes and workshops along the way.

My daughter goes to an excellent public school, and has been in that school system for most of her life. She likes going to school, and she thrives on it. During the one year that she spent here in Israel, she even shocked her 10th grade teachers with how quickly she learned Hebrew and how well she did on exams when they had expected absolutely nothing from her at all. However, when you take her out of a school-based learning situation, she doesn't reach further. She doesn't follow her own questions to see where they will lead. She barely ever reads fiction books just for fun, and she never reads non-fiction just for fun.

I fear that school squelches creativity and curiosity. It demands conformity and little more. It rewards you for doing exactly what you are assigned, no more or less. It treats tangential explorations as a waste of time.

I'm as proud of her as a mother can be. How could I not be? She plays the viola in the school orchestra, had a part in the school play this past Fall, plays basketball for her school, gets excellent grades and was even invited to a program where she can take courses at UC Berkeley while still in high school! My daughter, as they say, is The Awesome.

I know that she has wide open doors of opportunity because of her success in school. Still, I hope that once she gets beyond her school years she will learn, like I did, to unschool her self, and love the process of learning for its own sake.


* The young one is in public school currently because I've run out of ideas for how else to get him to learn the language of the country where we've been living for two years now. The deal is that when he can read books in Hebrew and understand them the way he does with English books, then he can come back to Homeschooling. Don't tell him this, but it's really only a one year experiment. If he doesn't want to go to school next year, I'm not going to make him, even if his Hebrew isn't at the level I'd like it to be. I'll just have to find another solution for that educational issue.