Is it Right to Homeschool?

I am a leftist and a homeschooling mom.  My mother was a teacher and librarian for decades. I have also been a substitute teacher.

I firmly believe that all children should have access to a high quality education. Public schools are vital to that. Having that universal base knowledge is important to our cohesion as a society. But they are failing. Everyone seems to agree on that. But we disagree on why they are failing and what to do about it.

In my estimation, they are failing because professionals with years of education into how to teach are not permitted to do it. Teachers are being told what to do by administrators who have never been in a classroom. No matter how good administrators’ intentions are, they don’t have the knowledge base to be controlling the professional teachers. And then the politicians telling the administrators what to do are not catering to the kids and listening to the professionals, but rather to their base.

This is all aside from the clear problem of teacher pay. I totally agree that only people who are passionate about education and the well-being of children should be teaching. But if teachers cannot survive on their low wages, they cannot do it. If teachers are constantly being disrespected and told to do things completely opposite to what their education, instincts, and individual classrooms need, they will get burned out. If they are required to do extra work for admin that is unnecessary for the education of students, they will not have time to dedicate to the kids.

As a result of schools failings, many parents, myself included, have chosen to pull their kids out of public schools. Is that a solution? It allows parents the freedom to educate their children as they see fit. I support that freedom. But I support it not only for the parents and children privileged enough to be able to homeschool. The children left behind are still in those failing schools. And if voucher systems are used, those children left behind lose even more.

Homeschooling also has the consequence of enabling indoctrination. This is the downside of that freedom that I am taking advantage of in my own children’s education. If there was a standard curriculum or tests it would undermine that self-directed part that I find so vital. But without some accountability, some parents intentionally limit their children’s exposure to ideas.

I hate that when I tell people that I homeschool my kids, they assume that I’m a Christian Conservative. This is the public view of homeschoolers. They have been the driving force behind having the legal right to do so. I’m glad I have the right to homeschool, because I want the best for my kids. But for many conservatives, the fate of the students left in public school classrooms is of little concern. Or if it is a concern, it’s about limiting the knowledge those students receive. (Critical race theory, Sex Ed, evolution, etc.)

For students that are given all the advantages that homeschooling can provide, whether from self directed learning or high parental pressure, there are some amazing homeschool success stories that show it can be a very effective model of learning. But how do we scale that?

Pulling kids out of schools is not a permanent solution. We need to fix the public schools. We need to make sure that kids have the autonomy to be engaged and pursue what interests them, while providing a standard level of education that everyone in the country has, especially regarding government and history. We need to make sure that the experts have the flexibility to do their jobs to the best of their ability.

There have been many solutions presented to solve the education crisis in this country. But the things that have actually been enacted have only served to exacerbate the problem. (Testing, punishing low performing teachers and schools, increasing professional development, universal curriculum, etc) Things that have been shown to work in other countries have, for various reasons, never been tried here on any mass scale. (Later start ages, later start time, shorter school days, longer recess, higher teacher pay, student led projects, etc)

For this reason, I’m starting a “school” type thing. The goal of my school is to create a model of a better school, where kids direct their own education. They learn things when it interests them. They are given the tools to study a subject, evaluate sources, understand the scientific method and evaluate the study accordingly, understand the math given, and communicate the results of their research clearly.

To make sure that this is available to all kids, teachers are paid by the sale of things made and donated by the community. Students do not pay anything. And students are not segregated by age. Adults can learn with kids, and kids can teach others. By allowing students to learn at their own pace, we encourage personal exploration. By combining ages we address some of the differences in gifted and learning disabled students. By allowing adults to learn with children we encourage lifelong learning. By allowing children to teach we are showing that their ideas and insights are respected.

Financial Literacy is NOT the Answer

How many times have you been told you need to save up for retirement? Or have a rainy day fund? Or balance your budget? While these are all good goals, and well meaning advice, they are hopelessly out of touch with a huge segment of the population.
Who am I to talk about this? Well, I have been the sole wage earner for my family of 4 working for minimum wage. And I was always able to find a way to make it work without having to choose between food and rent. But let me be clear. That is not because I took financial literacy classes, or am smarter, or more determined. It is luck and privilege.
When my husband left the military, we had money in savings that allowed us to get a foothold in a new city (privilege).
I was lucky enough to get a job on my first day putting in applications.
Also, minimum wage where I moved to was higher than the national minimum (luck). When my family rented a two bedroom apartment, my son was less than a year old, so we got a roommate to help with rent. That is not a decision that everyone can make. It is also a decision that a lot of people do make, and still struggle.
When we bought a house, I deliberately looked for a house with as many bedrooms as possible to rent out. We found a 5 bedroom house on a short sale (luck). We went through many attempts at financing it. We were planning to use my husband’s VA benefits (privilege). I have good credit, but I don’t use credit cards, so they wouldn’t recognize the credit scores, so I might as well have had no credit. My husband at the time had no credit at all. So we had to have my mom co-sign (privilege). And the seller was extremely patient to drag out the selling process for six months (luck). And the whole thing would have been thrown off if it had dragged on any longer. Two weeks after we moved in our second son was born. All of the numbers would have changed, and wouldn’t have worked with a second dependant (luck). And you can’t use roommates as income for these things.
Ok, enough background. What happens without luck and privilege like I have enjoyed? Spoiler alert: It’s not good.
Let’s explore my story in an alternative universe. If we did not have that little nest egg, we would have been stuck in the city where he had been stationed. Not the end of the world, but in my personal opinion, unpleasant. Even though I know this would be harder for someone who was not white, college educated, healthy, and had already worked in the hotel industry for several years, let’s talk about what happens if one of us got a job. The minimum wage was 25 cents more than the national minimum wage. We lived in a 400 square foot mother in law apartment before we left, but within a few months, when our son turned a year old, we would legally have been required to have a second bedroom, doubling the cost of rent.
What if the place we rented had rules against roommates, or required the child to have their own bedroom, like our previous did? The take home pay from working full time for minimum wage, was literally less than the cost of a two bedroom apartment. I know that is not unique to that city.
So, what if we chose to buy a house instead? If we did not have someone who could co-sign for us, that would have simply not been an option. We would have had to build up credit in order to do that, meaning that we would be required to rent for many more years. But how do you build up credit if you aren’t earning enough to pay the bills?
Ok, what if both parents got a job? Great! Problem solved. But who takes care of the child? Child care costs more than rent, so we would actually end up with less money in the end instead of more. Unless, we staggered our schedule so that one of us was home all the time. I worked graveyard for years, most other jobs would easily fit in the off time. But then each parent ends up watching the child while they are supposed to be sleeping. That doesn’t bode well for anyone’s health. And many businesses have an actual policy that employee’s schedules change each week. There is some sort of businesslike rationale for this, like making sure that each employee gets the same opportunities or something. As a result, many businesses are unwilling to hire people who do not have ‘open availability’ which makes second jobs extremely problematic. All of this aside from common business practices like only hiring part-time employees. So, there are no benefits with any of these jobs either.
So where did this leave us? Most of what people would call ‘choices’ that I have made that helped me get by would be completely inaccessible in this situation. They are impossible, so there is no choice to be made.
Let me be clear: If you have no choices, you are stuck where you are. If you are making less money than you need in order to pay for absolute nessesities, you can’t put aside some for later. Every time I call my credit union, (a privilege) I hear a message that says that women aren’t saving enough for retirement, especially latina women. This is a true statement. They aren’t saving enough. But then it goes on to tell us that the credit union offers free financial literacy classes. On YouTube I get ads for products that ‘make saving easy’. I get that these things are well-meaning, but they are hopelessly out of touch. They make it sound like the reason people aren’t saving is because they are being frivolous. Granted, for some people, this is true. But the people who need that savings the most, the people those statistics tell us are at risk, are not being frivolous. Minimum wage earns you around $10,000 /year. A cheap 2 bedroom apartment 10 years ago, when this situation starts, would have cost nearly $12,000 a year in an inexpensive backwater city. And yet, the story we are told is that it is the fault of the people in poverty. They should just buck up, be responsible, and make better choices. This is a completely naive approach to this problem. No one chooses to be in poverty. No one chooses to work for minimum wage.
Before you say that these people should have gotten a better education so they could get a better job, look at the statistics of how much college really costs today, and how many graduates are still working for minimum wage. That was me. I have 2 degrees and I still worked for minimum wage.
Before you talk about how people should stop having too many kids, you need to find out how many kids people in poverty are actually having. And this enters a discussion about personal choice, and costs of birth control that I am not getting into today.
Before you talk about how lazy poor people are, you should find out how they live. They are the hardest working people by far. Because they have to be, just to survive.
I hope that this look at what benefits this type of privilege and luck can actually have on real world outcomes has been enlightening.

Homeschool or Traditional School?

When I talk about the possibility of homeschooling my children, many people are skeptical. Stereotypically homeschoolers are anti-social religious zealots. But is that the reality? As with many stereotypes, there are people who meet that description, but many do not. I would venture to say that most homeschooled kids do not meet that description.

When looking up information on line I am having a difficult time finding any support at all of the stereotype. I like to have information from both sides, but it seems that the only people who find it worth talking about are either homeschoolers themselves or have some reason to be biased. The information that I am finding cite numerous studies that support the idea that homeschooled children are better socialized than children in traditional schools, and have an easier time getting into college. I would like to know more about these studies, and I wish that they had larger focus groups. I also would like to know how these students were found.

If the children for these studies were found in homeschool support groups, they are already part of the homeschooling community that actively engages in the community. Many of these kids are also active in other clubs and activities. I hesitate to trust the statistics completely because of this possible bias. It is possible that there is an unrepresented amount of children who are at home, isolated from people whose beliefs do not agree with their parents’, perhaps even homeschooled to avoid discovery of abuse. This is obviously a worse-case scenario, and I doubt that there are very many of these, but the scenario just points out how biased the studies may be.

So far this sounds like a real downer on homeschool, but that is far from being my intention. I simply want to point out a few holes in the research. All of that said, I would like to homeschool my children because I do believe that it can be beneficial. The key word is ‘can’. Because the parents are in charge, the parents have control over how homeschooling turns out.

Many homeschool parents choose to have their kids learn through the community, which means that they built relationships with people from all walks of life, in many different settings. This is the type of thing that traditional schools have great difficulty with. Students spend most of the day with children their own age, learning social skills from people who are no more skilled than they are. Once they get out of school, so much time is spent on homework, that doing anything outside of school is a great challenge. There are many studies out right now about the levels of stress on students, even in elementary schools.

The differences between how homeschoolers and traditional students spend their days has a huge impact on their social skills as well as their maturity and goals. Homeschool students have more time to pursue the things that interest them rather than only focusing on the things that are chosen for them. This gives them a greater sense of personal identity, and a love of learning. I believe that everyone is born innately curious about the world, but the way that schools have traditionally taught takes all the fun out of it and makes it a chore. While homeschoolers may gain more in the way of study skills, I believe that it is this love of learning that contributes more to their success after school.

Many people who think that homeschool is a good thing, but don’t want to deprive their children of some part of the school experience, be that the rites of passage like prom, or the perceived social benefits, decide to supplement traditional school with home based education or outings. That is a great idea, and I wish that more people would do that. There is one flaw, however; doing this does not give all of the benefits of homeschool and traditional school together. You end up with all of the ups and downs of the school environment and end up with very little time to spend on this type of enrichment. When it is possible, it can help to negate some of the negative associations that students can get to learning, and give them access to more information, which is certainly better than nothing. Many people though choose to homeschool not because of the perceived benefits, but to avoid the common downfalls of schools.

Schools foster a very specific type of social outlook. Students are pressured to fit in, which makes it more difficult for them to ‘find themselves’. This is supposed to happen during the growing up period, but in our culture there is a struggle for people as they leave school and adjust to the real world, only to find that the person they were trying so hard to be has no place in that world, and they don’t know who they are underneath that. Homeschoolers on the other hand, never experience that massive peer pressure and, provided that their parents allowed them freedom, they already have all of that figured out, which gives them a head start in their post-school lives.

Teachers in traditional schools can try their best to study things that their students are interested in, and to share their own passions, but despite this, much of the time students are studying things that they have little interest in. Not all students are interested in the same things, and it is impossible to cover everyone, someone will be interested in everything, another student may find that his interests are never discussed.

What are some other reasons that parents choose to homeschool? In general it is to have more control over the things that your kids learn. This can be behaviors (bullying, maturity, study skills), ways of thinking (religion, tolerance), or really anything. There are some things that kids can learn in public school that they do not want their kids learning, whether that is evolution or intolerance of others, homeschool allows parents to teach their children what they want, for better or worse.

Many of the benefits that I see to homeschooling are really just logic, whether or not the studies are trustworthy, one can see that spending time with many different people means learning to communicate effectively with different types of people. It makes sense that if you are able to study the things that you love, you will love learning. But this does bring up a conundrum. How do you teach the things that a child needs in life but has no interest in?

That really depends. To me it seems that in order to be well-rounded, you do not need a high-school level education in every subject. More important than certain subjects is the ability to acquire information. First up is reading – this one is easy – let the kid read about things they find interesting. My mother is a librarian at a middle school. Every year she meets many students who tell her that they do not like reading. So she asks them what they are interested in and sends them to that area, or suggests something they might like. Even if that ‘I don’t like to read’ idea does not go away, they usually leave with a book or two and will come back – even if it means sneaking away from their friends to do it.

Study skills, like learning about quality sources, looking for differing opinions, and different ways to present the information (formal presentation, written paper, power point etc.) can all be taught, like reading, in the context of any material the child is interested in.

It is not so much the material that we need to know in today’s society, but the skills we use to acquire information and interact with the world. If you are not an engineer, math is only so helpful your day to day life. But you do need those basics. And those basics can be taught in fun ways. I will not even try to delve into that here, just run a search on ‘hands on math’ and you will find hundreds of ideas, even into middle school level.

In the interest of understanding quality sources, I would also put learning the scientific method in the category of life skills. Many people seem to misunderstand what science is. Science is not a collection of infallible facts, it is a system of best-guesses. Science gives us a way to consistently improve our understanding of the world by providing a framework with which to come up with new ideas and narrow the possibilities nearer and nearer ‘the truth’. All with the understanding that we will probably never know the full truth.

Beyond that, education can largely be child-led. As much as I think that people need to understand history, this is more about learning about cause and effect. The people who make decisions need to be well versed in the past so that they can use that to make informed decisions. That said, if history is taught in fun ways, and focusing on a child’s interests, everyone should be able to find some sort of history to teach. After all history is just a collection of true stories, and what child does not like hearing stories.

The other thing that I would like people to have more knowledge of in general is different religion. There is a great emphasis on learning one’s own religion, and I think that is fine, but in order to have an understanding of others, we need to understand a little about their beliefs. I understand that this may not fit into everyone’s interests, but as a protection against the dangers of acting on a misunderstanding, if the lessons of forming an opinion only after doing research, which can be taught with any subject matter, I think that the worst aspects of ignorance on this can be negated.

So homeschool or traditional school? That decision rests largely on the type of people the parents are. If they will use homeschool to isolate and indoctrinate their children, I do not believe that is good for the children or society, but if homeschool will be used to give the children the opportunity to learn to love learning, and find their place in the world then if you can do it, go for it!

That said, from a practical perspective, how do you make it work? Unfortunately, no matter how much the parents might be amazing teachers, or might benefit their children, if they cannot afford to have one parent stay home with the kids, homeschooling is usually not an option. Some people might be able to find a way to have each parent work opposite schedules, or have the child in the care of others for some of the time. This takes a very large commitment, and often rests on a delicate balance.

Homeschool can be an amazing experience, and that I wish everyone could have, but not all parents are suited for it, and even more cannot fit it into their lives. It is unfair that something that has so much potential is only an option for so few. It is also unfair that the stereotypes may prevent people from ever trying something that could be so beneficial.