Why Homeschool?
Twenty-seven years ago, Ray and I were in the final stages of making the decision to start homeschooling. Our children were about to enter 1st, 4th, and 6th grades, and it was almost time for school to start. We went back and forth and back and forth. Should we or shouldn’t we?
We have known lots of people whose children have gone to public schools and lived wonderful lives. We’ve known people whose children have gone to private schools and done very well. But back in 1990, we were rethinking what should happen in our family. “What to do? What to do?” we wondered. We had to make a decision we felt good about.
Finally, with very little time left before the start of school, we decided to homeschool. These are the reasons why.
Problems at School
Although our children were doing well socially and academically in public school, we began to see some problems. The first time I noticed specific issues was when our oldest was in 4th grade. One red flag was an impression I got in a parent/teacher conference. It seemed that she didn’t really believe in concrete values.
This fourth grade teacher also introduced Eastern meditation to the children during a very creative unit study about Japan. On the first day of the unit, the children pretended to travel to Japan, where they “toured” during the rest of the unit study. Each day the teacher encouraged the children to join together for a moment of silence. I asked John if what they were doing was meditation. He said that the teacher didn’t call it that, but that that was what the monks did in the film she showed them. Those two red flags weren’t waving wildly, but I filed them away in my mama heart.
During the next school year, our youngest daughter was in kindergarten. During the year, she was harassed by a little boy. He ended up in the behavioral disorders program by the end of the year, but only after he spit glue in her face one day and kissed her on the lips another day.
When she came home with that second story, I asked her why she didn’t move. “I would have had to get out of line,” she said. I had a meeting with her teacher. The teacher and I both gave her permission to break the rules and get out of line if something not okay was about to happen to her. Our compliant kindergartener and I stood in our kitchen and practiced getting out of line.
That same year our fifth grade son came home with an announcement from the school that his class was about to start sex education. Ray and I went to the school and kindly told them that maybe they were, but he wasn’t. The school’s remedy was for our son to sit out in the hall while sex education class was going on. To our delight, he came home with the news that other children told him how lucky he was to get to sit in the hall instead of being in the classroom.
About the same time that we were experiencing these issues at school, Ray and I began to listen to Christian radio programs about issues Christian families were encountering in public schools. Those messages reinforced concerns we were having.
A Desire for a More Individualized Education
Another reason we decided to homeschool was that we wanted to give each of our children the best education we could, based on their own individual gifts and talents. For example, I had noticed that one of our children had shown exceptional abilities in math for her age. When I had mentioned that to her teacher, the teacher had seemed completely unaware of it. It seemed to us that homeschooling would give each child a chance to soar at his or her own pace.
A Faith-Based Education
The most important reason we decided to homeschool was that we came to believe that in our situation we could nurture our children’s faith better by teaching them at home than by sending them to school.
Every parent makes decisions about how to rear and educate and nurture his or her children. The important thing is to do what we do on purpose: to think and to pray and to act with purpose, making the best decisions we can in our own individual situations and, most importantly, to . . .
. . . bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.
Ephesians 6:4