My daughter Margaret graduated at the head of her class last June. And her mother Katie was teacher of the year. Again. These were foregone conclusions: we home-school, and we've been doing it for 13 years.
More than 150 people came to Margaret's open house, and almost that many to a private graduation ceremony on a summer afternoon. After graduation—if you will indulge a proud father (and husband)—Margaret went straight into rehearsals for a community theater production of "The Sound of Music" (she played Leisl, the oldest daughter). Then it was on to Portugal and Spain for a three-week concert tour; she played her violin, sang in a choir, and practiced her two years of college-level Spanish.
This fall, Margaret plans to begin full-time classes at Spring Arbor College, the small liberal arts school in southern Michigan where I am a professor of communication. She will begin as a sophomore, having already earned 28 credit hours there during the last three years of her home schooling. She also earned a scholarship to Spring Arbor, mostly on the weight of her American College Test (ACT) scores.
Meanwhile, Margaret's 15-year-old brother, Christian, and a home-school friend of his, wrote a business plan and raised $8,000 from private investors to start a virtual reality arcade in the concourse of a local mall. Unlike his novel-reading sister, Christian devours books and magazines on science and technology. Our two youngest, Michael, 9, and Pilgrim, 7, haven't found their niche yet, but we are sure they will.
Mixed Emotions
I first considered home schooling 15 years ago. I was working on a master's degree in curriculum and instruction at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. Individualized lessons plans were all the rage (remember open classrooms?). But my instructors were careful to point out that while such planning was a great idea, it was impractical for a teacher with 30 or more students. So I went home and said, "Katie, why don't we just do this ourselves?" And Katie, who had left a college education program after three years when she realized she didn't want to be a teacher, said, basically, "Are you nuts?" It was a question a lot of people would eventually ask us.
Back then, the only people doing home schooling were back-to-the-land hippie types, radical fundamentalists, and others on the fringes. Although we hold deep religious convictions about our responsibility for our children, I was only dimly aware that this affected my decision. (I say my decision because it took me a couple of years to talk Katie into it.)
Katie and I knew and respected many capable and compassionate educators. I just thought—and eventually Katie agreed—that home schooling would be better. For one thing, tutorial instruction at home seemed more efficient. Once we got rid of all the classroom baggage like grades and tests, we could make more progress in less time, freeing our children to find and follow their own dreams. We also feared that our children could fall through the cracks in some institutional bureaucracy.
A Strong Defense
We've had no delusions about home schooling being easy. For one thing, it immediately became a political decision. We had to lobby for the right to do it, writing our state representatives and going to rallies. We started in Tennessee. When we finally got a decent home-school law there, we moved to Michigan where no law was in place, and we had to start over again.
We've also had to defend our decision at various times to school officials, in-laws, close friends (including some of those capable and compassionate educators), and even total strangers, all of whom were sure our children were destined to become social misfits. (They haven't. They are all reasonably well-mannered, with lots of friends.)
Our response is the same now as it was then. First, we never intended to keep our kids in a closet. They belong to the cadet orchestra; they play soccer and Little League baseball. They also get together with other home-school kids—there are 200 families in our local home-schooling support group. But there is another issue here. Our children have benefited from intergenerational social interactions rather than primarily age-segregated ones. They have helped to care for an aged neighbor, a dying grandmother, and for one another. They are not only socialized, but they are also civilized and sensitive.
Upholding Standards
Gradually, as legislators and neighbors began to see that the kids weren't maladjusted, the most frequently asked questions were about standards. Are they tested? Who should test them? How do we know whether it works? Different states have answered this question in different ways. Where we've lived, home schooling has been largely unregulated, so we've done what's made sense to us.
Every other year we've had our children tested with some standardized instrument. And every day, year in and year out, we've sat across the table from them and asked them questions or listened to them talk or read. We've watched them as they've grown and gained in understanding. The most unexpected result is that Katie and I have relearned some things that we had forgotten or perhaps never knew—concepts in science, algebra, and even religion.
Home schooling has come at a cost, however. We've hired tutors for subjects we didn't understand. We've spent a small fortune on private lessons in ballet, voice, violin, and art. We've paid for family memberships in museums and zoos. We've paid for the kids to travel with us on business trips. And I've worked two jobs for 18 years so Katie could be at home with the kids and make this work. We've also had to set aside time to plan together or pray together or cry together. We've yelled at one another. We've worried about whether or not we were covering everything that had to be covered. It would have been a whole lot easier to put the kids on the bus.
Part of the challenge is the range of ages of our four children. Like many home-school families, we've tried to solve this problem with unit study approaches. We all studied U.S. history the same year, for example, with each child pursuing research and projects appropriate for that age level. And we've shared the responsibility, cooperating with other parents in study groups on subjects as diverse as water ecology and Egyptian civilization.
A Sacred Responsibility
As a trained educator—one who has taught at every level from elementary school to graduate school—I have been gratified to see the home-school movement mature. If I sit in a room with home-schooling parents and close my eyes, I notice that the conversations are not unlike those I've heard in faculty lounges and graduate classes. People talk about lesson plans and learning styles, discuss theoretical constructs, and complain about reluctant learners. They talk about their seminars and workshops and magazines. They share their joys and their heartaches.
I realize that these parents, too, have their own complex motives—not all of them positive. I realize that some of their kids are falling through the cracks, just like some kids are in public and private schools. But for the most part, they are responsible, hard-working parents. A few who have only high school diplomas are doing a better job than Katie and I are.
I now understand that this is, essentially, a religious undertaking, and would be even if I were an agnostic. We have come to accept responsibility for the educational outcome of our children ("an heritage of the Lord," to quote Psalm 127). And we like to practice immersion education, as the ancient Israelites were told to teach the words of God "diligently unto thy children," and "talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up" (Deuteronomy 6:6-7).
Home schooling is a labor of love, pure and simple. No children will be the worse for having experienced the focused attention of a caring adult, especially their own parent.
