Homeschooling or Homefooling?

This essay is based on actual questions from an article titled "Homeschooling or Homefooling?" by Niki Taylor, which appeared in 2000 on the now-defunct Themestream.com. As the questions are fairly representative of those usually posed to homeschoolers, I quote them here as they originally appeared there (grammar and all) in italics. I appreciate Niki's comment, "I have reservations about public and private schools too. No educational system is perfect; this is just something that is based on what I've observed." I don't mean to attack her or anyone who questions homeschooling, but I do hope to answer some of these reservations and perhaps dispel a few myths about homeschooling for a few people. Oh, and I also have to say before writing this that both of my parents and my older sister are teachers (and my own degree as well), so I know first-hand that the vast majority of teachers are dedicated, caring people who truly want to help children learn.

1. The Education/Ability of the Parent/Teacher. In my state, home schooling parents don't need a teaching degree or even a bachelor's degree. I believe some states do require this. A person with a bachelor's degree is not necessarily smarter than a person without one, but there should be some kind of teacher's training especially for children with special needs. School teachers have to have degrees so that they know how and what to teach, and no matter how great the parent is, parenthood doesn't automatically make great teachers.

As the holder of a bachelor's degree in elementary education, I can unequivocally state that teacher training does not consist of "what to teach." Since the teacher trainee is in college, the teacher trainee is assumed to have the basic content knowledge needed to pass on to the students. Without naming names, I would like to state here that it was the extreme dearth of knowledge displayed among my fellow teacher trainees (the inability of many to write a grammatical sentence comes to mind) that first sent me scurrying to the library to find John Holt, a fellow educator who is often named the father of the homeschooling movement.

No, the truth is that teacher trainees are taught classroom discipline, and crowd management, and record-keeping, and tricks for capturing the attention of thirty bored pupils, and (a little) child development and learning styles, but zero content. Okay, learning about child development and learning styles has some merit, but it is amazingly easy to find the information on your own in your library or any halfway decent homeschooling catalog. In fact, it was my class on child development that sent me scurrying back to the library to find Raymond and Dorothy Moore, also fellow educators who are frequently termed the grandparents of homeschooling.

I was feeling a serious disconnect in my teacher training: from child development class, where I learned that children develop at different rates (what a shock!) and are cognitively ready to learn skills such as math or reading at different ages, I went directly to my elementary language arts class, where I was taught how to start all of my first-grade children on the same material regardless of their ability or development levels. The sad result of this is that a child who is ready to read at nine, but was unready at six, by age nine has been convinced by his educational experience thus far that he cannot read; his teachers and parents are convinced also; and he very likely has a mental block about reading and won't ever read beyond a second-grade level.

Parental education – or lack thereof – has absolutely no effect on one's ability to teach one's own children. The anecdotal evidence for parents successfully teaching their children at home is overwhelming. After all, when Stanford University admits more homeschooled than high schooled teens (relative to number of applicants), you've got to figure that those parents are doing something right. Desire to learn and love of learning has far more profound effect than a teaching credential; and those who choose to educate their children at home have this in abundance. Besides, every teacher and school administrator knows that the biggest predictor of a child's academic success is the level of parental involvement. And what is homeschooling but total parental involvement! The truth is, if you're clever enough to be online finding and reading things you want to find and read, you're clever enough to be your child's teacher. (And here you are, reading this!)

Completely apart from parental qualification, we place far too much credence in teachers' teaching credentials. (Remember the dismal academic performance of my fellow teachers-in-training?) Granted that the majority of teachers are people who care deeply about children and their education; but there are also quite a few who are there simply because they couldn't decide on a major; or couldn't qualify for a more difficult major (sad to say, in any given university the college of education is generally one of the easiest to get into, and has the fewest requirements); or thought they wanted to teach and discovered too late, after receiving their degree, that they didn't really enjoy working day after day with someone else's children, but lacking the time or money to get a second degree, they proceeded into teaching. So, simply "being a teacher" doesn't necessarily qualify one as a good educator.

2. Teaching one world view usually Christianity. Home schooling like private schooling is often designed to have a Christian-based curriculum. For home schoolers or private schoolers, basic subjects such as science and history have a Christian slant. In science, evolution is absolutely wrong, and creationism is absolutely right. In history, more emphasis is placed on religious groups such as the Puritans than on atheists. I'm a Christian myself, and I find nothing wrong with Christian teachings. But children should be given a wide world view of different cultures and different religions. Not everybody is white and Protestant, and an educational curriculum should reflect that. Teaching children a wide world view also gives them the chance to decide for themselves if they want to believe in evolution or creationism or become an atheist or a Christian. Parents shouldn't home school to brainwash their children into little versions of them.

Ah … and children should be brainwashed into little versions of whom? The state, perhaps? Okay, sorry, that's not where I want to go.

Let's just take the gloves off here. Public schools teach one world view: secular humanism. (And don't kid yourself, secular humanism is a religion just as much as Christianity is; it just happens to be an atheistic religion.) For public schools, basic subjects such as science and history have a decidedly humanistic stance. In science, evolution is absolutely right, and creationism is absolutely wrong. In history, the Puritans are written out of US history or at least their motives – which were entirely religious, of course – are strangely left completely out of the textbooks. I'm an educationalist myself, and I find nothing wrong with multicultural teachings. But children should be taught the truth about the motives of people in history; and especially in US history, belief in the Christian God was a major, if not the number one, motivator. How on earth can these people justify teaching about the first Thanksgiving and not mention that it was God being thanked? For goodness' sake, I recently read that one textbook teaches that the Pilgrims were thanking the Indians! Sorry, but I won't sacrifice truth in history for some vague notion of multiculturalism.

Homeschoolers do at least have to acknowledge that there are differing views out there, because their children will hear about evolution and how it is scientifically correct, and the parents have to answer that. Public schools are free to totally ignore or denigrate any other belief other than evolution – and they do. In fact, in my own elementary science class, our teacher took the time to tell us how to handle those "crazy" parents who would object to us teaching their children about evolution: more or less, she advised us to avoid and lie. Isn't it nice to know how your children's teachers have been trained to subvert parental teaching!

Anyway, the truth is that most homeschooled children meet with a much wider variety of people than do their school peers, cooped up with twenty-nine other same-aged children from their neighborhood all day. Homeschoolers, on the other hand, are generally out on field trips, doing public service projects, and just living in their communities – all of which give them access to a broader base of acquaintance than is possible in a schoolroom.

3. Separating the roles of Parent/Teacher. To me, my parents are my parents, not my educators. Although they have taught me many valuable life lessons, they have allowed me to be an independent thinker, learning from various individuals. I have learned something different from all my teachers, and I'm grateful for that. This is like the last point about the Christian world view; home schooling parents shouldn't impose only their point of views on their children.

Parenting is education. The Latin root of the word educate is educare, meaning "to rear, educate," according to my Webster. It is long past time to dispel the myth of the teacher as the sole holder and dispenser of knowledge, and the myth of education as children sitting in neat rows having knowledge poured into their waiting minds. Remember the old adage about leading horses to water? Well, you can stand in front of a classroom all day and teach and teach and teach, but if the child is not stimulated to learn, they he won't learn. True education is stimulating the child's interest in the subject and facilitating his deepening desire to know more. The best teachers know this and try to do it – often not as well as they would like, because it is nearly impossible to do it for thirty students at once. Some superlative teachers do sometimes manage to overcome this difficulty, as did John Taylor Gatto, twice elected New York State's Teacher of the Year – oh, wait; he's an advocate of home education as well.

In addition, home schooling diminishes the professional roles of teachers. Teachers are professionals like doctors and lawyers. Doctors don't normally operate on close relatives, and lawyers don't normally represent close relatives in trials. That's because there should be a standard of objectivity, and I don't see how parents can be objective when teaching their own children. Parents are going to be more likely to give their children more leeway than professionals. When John and Jane get jobs, unless it's in the family business, bosses are not going to be mommy or daddy. They're going to be objective professionals.

Not to be too free market here, but if "professional" teachers are not getting the job done to the satisfaction of the consumer (parent), then they had just better be prepared to lose the customer's business.

And what on earth does objectivity have to do with education? Where are the studies showing that "there should be a standard of objectivity"? There are none; on the contrary, the list of the successful home educated reads like the honor roll of American and world history. To repeat: all good teachers seek parental involvement because they know that is the best predictor of the child's academic success. Sure, a doctor might excuse herself from cutting her child's abdomen open, because emotion and anxiety would cloud life-and-death decision-making ability. But education has relatively few life-and-death moments; and unlike surgery, attachment enhances education. Knowing the child's interests and learning style can only enhance the child's learning experience; teachers have students for six hours, five days a week, less than nine months a year. Hardly enough time to develop an intimate understanding of an individual child when there are thirty clamoring for attention; besides the fact that statistics show that each child receives about one or two minutes of one-to-one adult attention in the classroom every day. Hardly the best situation for enhancing a single child's knowledge of a subject.

But I assume your concern over objectivity involves testing and grades. Not to worry! Testing and grades are really unnecessary in homeschools. Testing is to show what a child knows or doesn't know, and as a one-on-one teacher, the parent already knows what the child knows. Grades are to measure one child's performance against another, and there aren't any other children to measure against in homeschools. (To forestall the outcry I know will follow this statement, may I once again invoke the magical name of Stanford and point out that Stanford does not require nor ask for grades from homeschooled students.)

As for giving more leeway – obviously, you never knew my mother. I used to pray that I would never have her as my teacher – believe you me, she would have been twice as hard on me as the kid in the next chair! Unlike my father, of course, who would have been three times as hard. Seriously, parents teach their children to talk and communicate, to walk, to dress themselves, to behave socially … more learning takes place in the first five years than in the entire next two decades; so why are parents suddenly disqualified as their own children's teachers, simply because the child is six years old, only one day older than yesterday?

4. Being around different people. I'm shy so I can't say I was the popular girl in school. But I have vivid memories of the people I went to public school with, people I would normally have never seen in private school. When I went from private to public school, I saw more racial and socioeconomic groups. I learned there were people outside my sheltered white, Christian world. And that is what many home schoolers are in, a sheltered world. Even if they have siblings or belong to home schooling and church groups, they basically see more of the same. Personally, this is one of the reasons I'm glad I switched from private to public school. Home schooled children should be exposed to other people so they can be open-minded to people different from them. Although I have not been home schooled, I can relate to home schoolers because I made the jump from private schooling which is similar to home schooling to public schooling. Again, I'm not saying home schooling is a bad thing, but it does seem limited, and children deserve to be exposed to different people and different views. Children are too important to be made into clones of their parents.

With no disrespect meant to your own schooling experience, private school is vastly more like public school than it is like homeschool. I will concede that private school is more insular, isolated, and narrow in social scope than is public school, so it is natural that you were exposed to more when you left private school. However, homeschool is far wider in social scope than either. Granted that a parent who does not make efforts to get the child any further out of the neighborhood than the local grocery store will not be exposing the child to any wide variety of society; however, most homeschoolers I know make great efforts to do so. I know that one reason we have chosen homeschool is expressly so that our children will have a larger scope for their social growth. I hope that they will meet and become involved with people from babes in arms to nursing homes. As they grow older, I will encourage – require! – more service projects from them such as participating in soup kitchens, homeless shelters, indigent retirement homes, orphanages and group foster homes, and many, many other projects that children in school, whether private or public, simply do not have the time to undertake. And let's be honest: While public schools generally have a larger cross-section of culture than do private schools, they are still generally limited by the neighborhood. Ritzville Suburban Public School just isn't going to have a large number of minorities, much less people from a lower socio-economic stratum. Even within a school that has a wide variety of students, those students are generally tracked (college track, vocational track, etc) so that they have classes only with similar students; and when they're not tracked they fall neatly into cliques that stick pretty close to socioeconomic lines.

Anyway, just to stick my neck out for chopping here, this is America, and the last time I checked, parents are the ones responsible for their children. No, we don't own them – they are people, not slaves – but decisions regarding their rearing are up to us. My husband and I are the ones who bear responsibility before God for the decision to bear a child, and we bear the responsibility for many, many decisions in that child's life. Pray God we will make those decisions wisely, but still they are ours to make. Leftover hippies are free to rear their children in a commune; yuppies are free to farm their children out to childcare agencies; atheists are free to teach their children there is no God; KKK members are free to teach their children hatred. No, we don't agree with everything that various parents will teach their children, but the last time I checked it was Marx and Hitler who said children belonged to the state to rear as clones of the state. Far less than they are slaves of parents are children slaves of the state to "brainwash" and "clone".

Anyway … brainwashed clones, hmmm? I feel sorry for the kids you've apparently met in homeschooling families, and can only say that they have little or nothing in common with the home-educated children I have met. I have to agree with the homeschoolers who posted replies to Niki's original article: Do a little more reading on the subject, please. You might be pleasantly surprised.

Copyright (c) 2002 Carma Paden. All rights reserved. No portion may be reproduced in any fashion without express permission.

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