If you’ve followed my links under “On Education,” you might have noticed a certain theme running through them: homeschooling. I’ve developed a serious interest in homeschooling. I have one metric ton of book suggestions, if you happen to be interested.
I’ve been doing quite a lot of reading on education and educational theory over the past few months—if you want educational whiplash, read E. D. Hirsch’s The Schools We Need and Howard Gardner’s The Unschooled Mind: How Children Think back-to-back. The net result of all this reading has been that my ideas of what a good education is all about have changed radically. I used to say that the kids could never know until they were in their 20s that Daddy dropped out of college—now I’m all over the idea that they should make their own way in the world, pursue their own goals, don’t follow the beaten path!
And one of the educational ideas that I have found extremely attractive—in the abstract, of course—is homeschooling. I don’t know if we can do it: all of the personal accounts I’ve read about homeschooling families certainly make it sound like a gigantic investment of time on the parents’ parts. But on the other hand…isn’t that why we had kids? To get them ready for the world?
Pros:
- Darin and I are pretty smart.
I can’t imagine there’s any topic that between the two of us we don’t know something about. For example, one thing I’ve read over and over again about homeschoolers is that the parents have a fear of mathematics. Well, Darin and I both loved math in school. I was even going to major in math at Stanford (until I discovered that there are a whole bunch of people out there who were way better at math than I was).
- We know a lot of smart people.
Anything the kids need an explanation of that we don’t know? I’m quite sure one of our very smart, and extremely pedantic, friends will be happy to oblige.
- You get to take vacations any time you want.
Not that we’re taking tons of vacations now. But being able to take advantage of the off-season, should we ever take a vacation, has definite attractions.
- Being able to follow your interests is wonderful.
I know how I learn a subject: I dive in and go nuts. I would love for my children to have that freedom as well, whether it’s reading every American Girl book at the library or taking jujitsu classes or whatever. Without having to do the stupid crap at school that we all remember doing (and hating).
- I still love learning.
I want my kids to have that love of learning too. And studying some subject together would be a great way for us to have projects together—”Let’s go take a Latin class! Yeah, we can have a secret language!” “Mom, would you dial it down a notch? Do you have to be so excited about everything?”
Although Darin’s probably right: the kids will simply think the way their parents are is the way parents are.
Cons:
- Darin is a big believer in the public school system.
He and his brothers went through the wonderful public school system in Highland Park, IL, where they all got great educations. He still has friends he met from when he was in kindergarten. He had some amazing classes in high school he still talks about.
I am not a big believer in the public schools. I attended public school for one year: I started out in kindergarten, moved into first grade, and was about to move into second grade when my parents said, “No, perhaps not.” I attended parochial schools until my parents couldn’t stand the screaming any more, and after that I attended private schools, right up through my master’s degree.
Add to this living in California, where Proposition 13 and other forces have conspired to trash the public school system from the bottom up. Plus the “back to basics” and “No Child Left Behind” standardized testing—I don’t need my kids to be champion test takers, thanks. (And as a graduate from elite private schools, I know perfectly well that the politicos who are deciding that kids need to be tested constantly aren’t sending their kids to schools where they’re going to be tested constantly. Which makes me wonder exactly how important that testing is.)
- I’m sure our families wouldn’t think much of the idea.
Every homeschooling family I’ve read about reports that it took time to win over other members of the family, if, in fact, they could be won over. Darin’s mom was a teacher for years.
- I would miss out on the babysitting aspects of school.
I know, that’s kind of a sad thing to say, but school is the primary babysitter out there, the social construct that makes it possible for parents to work.
But school is what, six to eight hours a day? That’s crazy. If school were three hours a day, I might be more inclined to send the kids off, but eight? No wonder parents complain that their kids are strangers: their kids are strangers.
We had two weeks’ vacation from preschool and by the end I was counting the days until preschool started again. Preschool. What’s going to happen by the time she’s in kindergarten?
- I don’t know if I have the patience to be with the kids that much.
There are times—like, just this morning!—when I find myself thinking, “It’s me or it’s them,” and the fight music from “Gamesters of Triskelion” starts. My friend Mary, who has two kids who are slightly older than mine, says she knows exactly how I feel, because she was at this same place when her kids were this age. And the more time I’ve spent with the kids the easier it’s been to be with them. But sometimes I wonder if I could be with them all the time.
- I don’t hang with reactionary, right-wing, religious types.
Like everything else they touch, reactionary, right-wing, religious types are all over homeschooling, making it sound like a way of shielding kids from that godless secular humanism stuff at school. Actually, that godless secular humanism stuff, like evolution, is one of the things I like about the public school system. I don’t believe in shielding kids from the more difficult parts of life, I believe in teaching them how to deal with them.
One of the great secrets of parenthood—well, I didn’t know it, at any rate—was that a great portion of your social life post-children revolves around your kids’ friends’ families. You’d better like them; you’re going to be spending a whole bunch of time with them. If homeschooling means I’d be hanging out the Religious Right, well, thanks, I’ll pass.
I don’t know what’s going to come of all of this—Sophia may turn 5 and I’ll shriek in a crazed way, “Which kindergarten can we drop her off at?” But I like watching her discover things, learn how to do new things, and I’m not at all sure I want her to be off somewhere else half the day (and half her life) learning how to do them.
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Every parent I know is doing a lot of thinking about schools: asking every other parent they run into about which schools they like, what they’ve heard about various schools in our area, how much each school costs…
Something curious I’ve noted is that many of the moms I know have checked into LA Unified’s Gifted and Talented program. They know which schools are GATE magnets or have GATE programs. They know what the GATE programs consist of. They know that the GATE programs are the extremely good side of the LA USD. And they all assume their kids will be in the GATE program.
Now, it’s quite possible that I have managed to luck out and my kids just happen to hang with the most gifted and talented kids in Los Angeles. Or maybe we’re all so crazed about our children that we won’t accept any label less than “gifted and talented.” Of course, I do keep in mind that a friend of mine, who’s a teacher in the LAUSD, knows how to hack the system to ensure our kids get into the GATE program. She told me all about it.
Alfie Kohn, in his wonderful book What To Look For In A Classroom, discusses the phenomenon of gifted and talented programs and how they’re basically draws to keep middle-class white kids in the school system—albeit segregated from the Great Unwashed.
After reading Ellen Winner’s Gifted Children (did you think I was kidding when I said I’d been doing a lot of reading?) I know my friends and I have bright kids but so far none has shown any signs of being truly gifted. So I don’t know whether the LAUSD is just chock full o’ kids who are off-the-charts in terms of abilities, or whether they have a different measuring scale than Ms. Winner does.
But school is what, six to eight hours a day? That’s crazy. If school were three hours a day, I might be more inclined to send the kids off, but eight? No wonder parents complain that their kids are strangers: their kids are strangers.
Speaking as someone who went to public school 6-to-8 hours a day for 13 years, I don’t feel like I missed out on a big chance to get to know my parents.
My back-of-the-envelope estimate is that 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, 9 months a year (2 months’ summer vacation, 1 month random other vacations), works out to about 40% of their waking life. This is not a small amount, I grant you, but it’s also not a large amount.
Heck, by the time I was in kindergarten I was trying to spend vast amounts of time with my friends. Never mind when I was a teenager. I still saw a whole lot of my parents, though. (And even more of them when I decided to mostly stop watching TV when I was in 10th grade. TV: The great life-suck. Even today I’m still trying to get myself to watch less TV.)
As you can tell, I don’t think the hours that public schools keep are “crazy”. Indeed, my experience is that I spent closer to 6 than 8 hours a day in school. Yes, I vividly remember being dropped off for my first day of kindergarten by my Mom. It was tough; that’s why I remember it. I got over it pretty quickly, though.
Homeschooling has a lot of advantages – but one thing I’d pay particular attention to is to work really hard at networking with other homeschoolers so that a child will have as much experience with group interaction as possible (day trips, play time, group projects). Some folks that I know that were homeschooled as children have grown up with some tendancies toward solitary activities. They don’t “play well with others.”
Oh, and don’t assume that since your kid is in school you won’t have a chance to interact with them – especially in elementary school. If you go the public school route, every class needs a room mom, they need parents to go on field trips, and most schools will let you eat lunch in the cafeteria with your sprouts. Schools desperately need parental help and involvement and up to sixth grade or so your kids will love that (after sixth or so, of course, they won’t want to see your face anywhere near them).
One of my friends is beginning homeschooling for her daughter this year. Here in Florida, you actually register in the local public school to homeschool your child, and can take advantage of that school’s facilities (i.e., her daughter can go in for specific classes, etc.). I don’t know if California has any similar arrangement.
As a public-school product, with two siblings who are now teachers in public schools, I am torn on the issue. Granted, Florida is something like 47th out of 50 states in education, and that scares the daylights out of me. Our public schools aren’t in the greatest shape. On the flip side, the right-wingedness of homeschooling — which around here is often related to the religious right, and avoidance of exposing their children to concepts such as evolution — scares me too.
At this time, my husband and I plan to put our (currently unborn) daughter into public school, but we will also still “homeschool” by supporting her own self-learning efforts and offering all the help we can, as well as being involved at the school itself. We are smart people, we’re personally interested in lifelong learning, and not only will we model that behavior for our children, but we’ll also support and encourage their education both at home and through the school. I want to know all my children’s teachers very well. 🙂
As for the hours of separation — I don’t see school as being the problem. Around here, the biggest problem I see is that after school, the parents then schedule their kids for a million and one activities, so the kids are fed fast food in the car between soccer and ballet and piano and karate lessons, and come home only in time to do their homework and fall into bed. My husband and I are considering limiting afterschool activities to one per week (not that our daughter is here yet… one month to go! …but we do think of these things). Kids need their childhood, and they need time to play and learn on their own, without the “activity” structure.
One activity per week? We try hard to limit our kids to no more than two per day… each.
Seriously, we view the activities somewhat differently. We want our kids to be in the habit of having something to do all the time – in today’s society and environment you don’t want children hanging around the neighborhood without anything to do.
The idea of play time and independent time sounds good, but it quickly degenerates into playing video games and hanging out with kids that don’t do a lot of activities – and those usually aren’t necessarily kids you want yours with.
Homeschooling? Are you nuts??? Just kidding, of course. It’s been a great option for us but it’s not for everyone. I wouldn’t worry about the religious aspect, though. 10-15 years ago, HSing was strictly far-right fundie Christian. Now, we’re much more mainstream; there are support groups for every flavor of family- even Wiccan homeschoolers.
RE: Your other cons. A lot of fathers are wary about it at first. The best cure I have seen is to instroduce him to some teenaged homeschoolers. I’ll bet dollars to donuts that he’ll be so impressed with their poise and demeanor that he’ll ask you to homeschool.
Ditto other family members. Grandparents are the worst. Becasue, more than likely, they sent their kids (i.e., you and Darin) to school, they can see homeschooling as a rejection of their values. In that respect, it’s somewhat like breastfeeding. Our parents generation just plain didn’t (Dr. Spock and all that). When my wife wanted to nurse our children, particularly in public, it drove my mom crazy. She just didn’t understand why a bottle wasn’t good enough.
Babysitting is nice but you’ll find time for yourself and Darin, if he’s sold on HSing, will help by giving you time away from the house.
And as for patience, if you can deal with blogging, you have all the patience you need.
Regarding Bill Chance’s comments:
I guess every kid is different. I had a lot of unstructured time as a kid. I remember it fondly. I did spend a bunch of time watching TV and playing video games, though even that wasn’t entirey wasted. Some of it was just fun, and some of it resulted in some near-lifelong hobbies (I got into science fiction through TV, and I fondly remember all the Warner Bros cartoons I watched way back when).
On the other hand, I also spent a large volume of time creating my own little adventures. Building stuff, running around in the yard with my neighborhood friends, being generally inquisitive, etc.
And I don’t generally see that “today’s society and environment” is all that different from that of the 1970s.
I used to work with a very bright guy who had been home-schooled. He was ahead of other people his age and went to college at, like, 16 or 17 years old. Here’s (roughly) what he told me: 1. You don’t WANT to be in college that young. You can’t deal with everybody being older than you and you can’t hang out and make friends with them too well. They see you as a kid. 2. By never having learned in a group environment, he didn’t know important things about learning with a group. For example, raising your hand to ask a question–he had no concept of that. Or that you sit and listen to a lecture rather than have a dialogue with the professor.
This is not to say that homeschooling is bad. Just that you have to be careful with the transition between home and regular school, because the student hasn’t had shared-learning experience.
I’ve known a lot of home-schooling families and written about the phenomenon for newspapers through the years and it’s not an easy choice. Some children thrive in school and need the structure and would learn anywhere, others need more specialized learning than they’ll get in a big public school group. My model for a school is Louisa May Alcott’s version of her father’s Concord school, which is written up in great detail in Little Men and Jo’s Boys. I will definitely homeschool if that seems like the right choice for the child and I wish I’d been homeschooled from 5th grade to 9th grade. The peer-stuff at that period is ghastly, and you can get group activities happening at church or in community groups. Given that you’re living in SoCal, you will NOT have a problem getting a non-religious/smart group of families together — it doesn’t take many. I teach at an art museum in a small community and we offer MANY classes appropriate for home-schoolers, some of whom actually take them. HSing has to be the right fit for parent AND child, and there has GOT to be serious socialization that happens as well. But I’m sure you can find a good kindergarten — kindergarten is often the final frontier of a ps system that’s gone to hell in this test-crazed era. (it’s just another educational movement and will not last in its current incarnation, but we’ve got a few years to go on this…) I’d say go for it if the kindergartens disappoint….
Another argument for home schooling: http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html