We just completed the sixth week of our fifth year of homeschooling, and a rather funky one it was. (It wasn't bad, but I am so glad it's over!) Circumstances of this week brought to the forefront of my mind a question I've been pondering for some time. Is homeschooling just another educational option or is it a distinct lifestyle choice? I'm curious to hear what my fellow homeschool parents think on this matter. For myself, I think the two - educational option and lifestyle choice - are so intricately intertwined as to make a clear answer very difficult to find.
Our homeschooling experience started innocently enough with two young parents searching for the best school for their children. Our baby boy had learned his letters and their sounds and proceeded to full-fledged reading. I'm not being overly sentimental here. Andrew recognized the "M" of the golden arches before he'd savored a happy meal; when he was no older than eighteen months, a passerby, observing me asking Andrew to find the "e"s on a park sign, scolded me with, "A little young for that, don't you think?" He was a little young to know his letters, but, well... he wasn't. Andrew's preschool years were filled with letters, words, and books, but we were not the pushy parents the passerby (who happened to be a homeschool father) must have thought us. Our home had its share of ABC blocks and foam letters to play with in the tub, and we read a lot. We followed his lead, and his lead involved such a fascination with written language that he recognized letters and knew their sounds before the age of two and was reading at three. He was "a bit young for that", but neither Geoff nor I, and certainly not Andrew, really understood that. We were just having a blast exploring the world of letters and words and books and language.
Around Andrew's fourth birthday, when we began to research our schooling options in order to get him on school waiting lists in time, we had this kid who was reading competently, whom we expected to progress in reading skills, and whom we couldn't imagine sitting in a kindergarten classroom learning his letter sounds. I had a folder on homeschooling as a back up plan as I began to gather information from local schools. We didn't get far before we realized we might want to keep Andrew home for a couple years. We kind of figured we'd put him in school once the initial "learning to read" phase passed. We weren't particularly committed to homeschooling. We just thought it might be the best option for our family for the time being.
It was just another educational option. The public and private schools had their appeal, but homeschooling rose to the top of our preferences. After all - laying aside the small fact that the homeschooling parent actually becomes parent, teacher, administrator, janitor, nurse, bus driver, and lunch lady all rolled into one exhausted body - what parent wouldn't want a school that offers a low student-teacher ratio, individually tailored lessons, frequent field trips, and a literature rich environment - all designed so the child can progress at his own unique pace? ;)
In the meantime, I checked out Dr. Susan Wise Bauer's The Well-Trained Mind: A Guide to Classical Education at Home. Several aspects of this educational model appealed to me, but the main attractions were whole books instead of textbooks, chronological history, and a connection between history and science and literature. I felt, after reading The Well-Trained Mind, that I would forever regret not attempting homeschooling if we went the traditional school route. I was also a little scared that we'd start homeschooling and like it so much we'd never quit.
So here we are, four years later, with a brand new fourth grader, a second grader who has added his own special touch to my list of homeschooling's joys, and two preschoolers who keep our home busy and whom I look forward to teaching more formally in years to come. I still hold the view that homeschooling is just another educational option, as viable and as neutral as any other option. Viable, in that we (and most people who want to do it) can do it and do it well. Neutral, in that it's not a moral decision, making us "better" or "worse" than anyone else. It's just what we do. Sometimes when the subject of homeschooling arises, I want to roll my eyes and say, "It's not a big deal. It's just education."
It's just education, but it's not. Just as Andrew's interest in letters sprang from an indecipherable combination of his own inclinations and a letter-rich environment, and just as that interest determined the path we took in educating him, so homeschooling sprang from a combination of Geoff's and my personalities and philosophies and our established lifestyle and has shaped and continues to shape our lifestyle. What I mean is that pre-existing conditions made homeschooling appealing. Geoff and I, beneath our ultra-cool veneer (Go ahead, laugh. You know you want to!), are pretty hard-core nerds. We've also been known to forego marching altogether, to our own drums or to anyone else's. To top it off, we both remember being bored to death in school, and I had this crazy desire not only to instill in my children a love of learning, but to be with them and actively involved in their education. The ideas of letting our children learn outside the traditional school system and of exploring the world with them made homeschooling seem like an act of mercy, to them and to me. To clinch the deal, classical homeschooling was, to quote the friend who first mentioned The Well-Trained Mind to me before I'd even conceived Andrew, "how I wish I'd been educated."
Then we started homeschooling, and it has shaped our lifestyle undeniably. Sure, a lot of what makes us who we are existed prior to this adventure, but not all of it. I can honestly say I never imagined the quantities of books and masses of papers that sometimes accumulate in our home. We're on a first name basis with the librarians and have almost memorized the location of every book in the library. Well, not quite, but sometimes it does feel like the library is our second home. ;)
There are other subtler and more personal ways in which homeschooling directs the life of our family, areas in which we are more or less disciplined, according to our family's needs. Our schedule is a perfect example. Because we don't have to be anywhere by any particular time, we aren't morning people. We get up and get going a little later than a lot of people. On the other hand, we try to guard our evenings carefully. We try not to schedule too much in the evenings - and when we find our evening schedules full, we long for things to return to their normal, unhurried decent-hour-to-bed pace. I don't want to deal with cranks in the morning. I want my students well rested - and know all too well the hazards of attempting to educate exhausted students, especially if I'm exhausted as well. (Such days, combined with the "Emergency Home Recovery Days" that I spend rediscovering and cleaning the floor, probably account for at least 50% of our yearly days off).
I've talked with other homeschooling moms about how homeschooling affects our parenting, too. This subject could get dicey, especially if you think we're doing a horrible job raising our kids... (I also think a lot of our parenting techniques are pretty universal, regardless of school choice). The thing about homeschooling is that I'm with my children all day long, every day. It's a great thing, but it also throws an interesting screw into the battle-picking machine. The sheer amount of time we spend together means that we have a few more potential battles than we might encounter if the kids were at school seven or eight hours a day. Sometimes things slide that shouldn't slide - or that someone on the outside thinks shouldn't slide - sometimes because we are horrible parents, but sometimes because we are pouring our energy and theirs into growing and shaping them in some more basic or in some unseen area. Persevering through Saxon Math may be today's lesson, and cheerful perseverance tomorrow's lesson... or we may have decided that we're just going to hold on till bedtime and start afresh tomorrow because there's just no hope for today - except that our cranky kid might catch a glimpse of the depths and gentleness of true patience. Again, I'm sure a lot of this is common to parents in every situation. But as a home schooling parent, I feel like I'm always on duty and sometimes have to pace myself, which means some battles will go un-fought, some will be long-drawn out campaigns, and, because I also believe that discipline is a private matter between God, our children, and Geoff and myself, some battles will be secret missions that no one knows are even being carried out.
Of course, we have no way to measure exactly how much homeschooling has affected our parenting or any other aspect of our life, but I'm sure it has, even if it has only taken to a new degree pre-existing philosophies, practices, or what have you. As I think about how homeschooling has shaped our lifestyle, the urge to roll my eyes returns. It's the old chicken versus egg argument, with no way to determine how much of our lifestyle is us and how much is homeschooling.
So, homeschooling is a little bit lifestyle... a little bit just like every other educational option out there... and a lot us. We have chosen a path different from what we expected and different from what the majority follow, but it is a path in which we naturally walk. It does not feel foreign. It feels like us. And because it feels like us, it feels like just another choice for educating our kids... and nothing more noteworthy than that. It's as normal as we are...
(And that, if ever I saw one, is a statement which could spawn its own debate!) ;)
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