35

THE KITCHEN-TABLE SCHOOL: WHY HOME-EDUCATE?

Over the next decade, up to 2 million children, or 5% of the total student population, could be home schooled.

—Denise G. Masters

The perfect school is a myth. Rather than trying to do the impossible by attempting to duplicate the perfect (and imaginary) school experience, be realistic and diligent about what you can do well. Offer personal, individual tutoring; use your time efficiently; control the child’s social and moral environment until she’s mature enough to make wise decisions. Your aim is education, not the duplication of an institution.

Remember, you aren’t alone. Home schooling is now legal in all fifty states for one reason—parent activism. The beginning of the modern home-school movement can be traced to the alternative schools founded in the 1960s and 1970s by parents who defended their right to choose from among educational alternatives.

These alternative schools tended to be politically liberal and activist.1 Parents without access to these schools or who saw themselves as more conservative followed the trend of parent involvement by choosing instead to home-school their children quietly. By the 1980s, increasing numbers of Christian Protestants were taking their children out of the public school systems, which they saw as culturally and spiritually alien to their values. Catholic families had done this years before, as had orthodox Jewish families; now there are Jewish, Muslim, Mormon, and secularist home-school support organizations as more and more parents decide to exercise their option to choose an alternative to the public school system.

The reasons for making this choice are varied: unhappiness with academic standards, a wish to avoid negative social pressures, frustration with oversized classes, disagreement with the philosophy of education held by local schools. What all these parents have in common is a single belief: the right of all parents to choose how to educate their children. And all of them are actively, not passively, involved in helping their children learn.

WHY SHOULD YOU HOME-SCHOOL?

Over the years, we’ve heard a number of reasons why parents choose to take their children out of school. They include

• Boredom.
• Fatigue caused by long bus rides or unreasonable schedules.
• Frustration and academic failure.
• Lack of academic challenge.
• Constant travel.
• Health problems that prevent the child from taking part in a regular school-day program.
• School pressure for conformity, rather than flexible programs that enable children to develop their own strengths and solve their own problems.
• The need for one-on-one instruction, individual attention, time, and encouragement to develop special talents or strengths.
• Negative peer pressure. The child starts to adopt the standards of her peer group and reject those of her family.
• The need for quiet. The child doesn’t mentally operate well where there is confusion and noise.
• Learning problems that aren’t being solved. The child isn’t being challenged to overcome weaknesses.
• Peer or faculty intimidation. The child is being intimidated, teased, or abused verbally or physically by classmates or teachers.
• The need for more or less time per subject. The rate of instruction (too fast, too slow) doesn’t match the child’s rate of learning.
• Too much emphasis on nonacademic activities. Extracurricular activities usurp necessary time from academic excellence.
• The waste of a gifted student’s time. The gifted child is used by the teacher to tutor slower students, rather than being challenged to press forward.
• An emphasis on popularity rather than on academic achievement. The child becomes popular, but not productive and literate.
• The “pariah” status of the gifted student. The quick student feels discriminated against because of giftedness—often jealousy and resentment from classmates, sometimes even from teachers.
• The ostracization of the student who is different. The child with a mild problem or difference (lisp, shyness, or even slowness in doing work because she’s unusually careful) often gets placed in a special-education class and is then negatively labeled by both classmates and teachers for the rest of her school career.2

• 

  Conflicting family schedules. The parent may have a work situation that doesn’t allow him to spend time with the child except during school hours.
• Loss of academic self-esteem. The child is losing confidence in her ability to learn. (Jessie once worked with a sixteen-year-old girl who was unresponsive and discouraged. Jessie kept on with one-on-one instruction, basic phonics, remedial math and writing, and lots of encouragement. Eventually the girl returned to regular school, graduated, and completed nursing school. She came back for a visit after she had worked as a nurse for several years. “Thank you,” she said, “for making me believe that I could learn.”)
• The parent is shut out of the educational system and wants back in. A December 8, 1996, article in the New York Times tells of a peer intervention program in the New York City public schools. Instead of being dismissed, incompetent teachers are allowed to enroll in a remedial program for poor teachers “in which a teaching coach works one-on-one in the classroom for as long as a year…. Parents whoask,” the article continues, “are generally given the impression that the extra adult in class is a teacher’s assistant.”3 In other words, these parents aren’t told the truth. The article goes on to describe a first-grade teacher who yells at the children and humiliates them. The teaching coach corrects him privately, but the parents are never told what’s going on in the classroom.

These are reasons to home-educate.

ENCOURAGEMENT FOR PARENTS

Don’t be intimidated because you can’t reproduce a classroom environment or school activity. Remember, programs, multiple aids, and group activities are designed for groups. Tutoring is probably the most efficient method of education since the teaching is tailored to the individual child’s needs and rate of learning. You can supply this.

And as teaching progresses, parents can teach not only academic subjects, but life experiences as well. Home schooling allows time and space for the teaching of practical skills; older students especially have the flexibility to learn painting, papering, carpentry, woodworking, electrical and plumbing repair, food preparation, car repair, gardening, yard care, and so on. We’ve listed a few high-school electives to help you teach these practical skills at the end of this chapter.

Parents also serve as models and guides for acceptable, productive behavior. When you teach your child at home, you’re training her to work hard and to be disciplined. Help her set goals with a plan for reaching those goals—this gives a reason for the hard work. Teach her how to manage time and schedule tasks. Work on gradual improvement, keeping records of progress and planning rewards for increments of achievement. Don’t spend time only on the tasks you like, but form a plan to improve weaknesses. Take rest and recreation breaks when you become nonproductive. All of these are principles for success in any endeavor, not just in home education.

In classical education, the teacher isn’t a never-ceasing fount of information from which students continually drink up answers. Instead, the model of the classical teacher and students is that of leader and “disciples,” meaning that the teacher and students are united together in the same task, learning an inherited body of knowledge together. “The teacher’s true competence,” writes classical headmaster David Hicks, “is not in his mastery of a subject, but in his ability to provoke the right questions and…[in his] peculiar eagerness to explore new subjects and new ideas with his students.”4

Given the time and the resources we suggest, any dedicated parent can do this.

Plan ahead, of course, but don’t panic, when your child is in first grade, that you won’t be able to do eighth-grade algebra. Take one year at a time. You’ll study and grow and learn with your child. Jessie says that she learned more when she was home-educating her children than she did in college.

The home-school environment prepares children for the “real world” better than identification with age-segregated peer groups. After all, the typical workplace contains a number of different ages and abilities, not a single peer group. The home, with its mixed-age, mixed-ability environment, is much more like this workplace than the single-grade classroom.

A special encouragement to the parents of high-school students: you don’t have to teach everything. If your child were enrolled in a large, well-equipped high school that offered many courses, time would still allow only so many selections. Jessie has observed that in larger schools with more courses, students often end up with less-than-desirable schedules—courses fill up, guidance counselors are overworked, students are given too much freedom to take easy courses. We know of one student at a big, prosperous high school who was allowed to sign up for four art courses—not because he was interested, but because he thought they would be easy. By the time his mother saw his schedule, he wasn’t able to sign up for a better-balanced year because the other classes were full.

FIRST STEPS

If you have decided to home-school, start by contacting your state home-schooling organization. It can give you information about the laws in your state. (Different states require different types of notification: some want you to submit a general plan of study; others are happy with a photocopied college diploma.) We’ve provided a list at the end of this chapter. They’ll also give you advice on the best way to remove your child from public or private school, if she’s already enrolled there.

Look at all the material out there. Write for catalogs. Gather together what you’ll need to start the year.

Plan schedules for your family. (See Chapter 38 for suggestions.)

Visit a home-school support group. Your state organization will give you a list of local groups.

Two cautions. Jessie has found that for ongoing support and a social outlet for yourself and your children, you may choose not to join the group closest to you. Local support groups, of necessity, take on the personality and philosophy of the leadership. Some are inclusive; some are exclusive and make those who don’t agree uncomfortable. You have to find the one that best suits you.

Also, you may find that your local home-school group is populated mostly by “unschoolers.” Classical education is not easily compatible with “unschooling,” which is immensely popular among many home schoolers. “Unschooling” is child-centered. It assumes that the child will learn all that she needs to know by following her natural impulses and that any learning that is “imposed” on the child by an authority figure will prove unproductive.

Classical education is knowledge-focused, not child-focused. It attempts to teach knowledge in a way that awakens the child’s interest, but the child’s interest is not the sole determining factor in whether or not a subject should be followed. How does a child know whether something will interest and excite her unless she works at unfamiliar (and perhaps intimidating) material to find out what it’s all about?

Unschoolers may also tend to denigrate “book” learning in favor of “real” learning. Many unschoolers claim that the day-to-day realities of family life provide plenty of opportunities for learning. For these unschoolers, taking care of the house, grocery shopping, cooking, car repair, working in the family business, writing thank-you notes, and so on provide enough opportunity for children to learn real-life skills without “doing school” in a formal way.

While this may be true, a child’s education shouldn’t be limited to “real-life skills.” Classically educated children should be able to cook, write thank-you notes, and tie their shoes. They also know where their country came from, how to construct a logical argument, and what puella means.

Unschoolers sometimes claim that students who aren’t forced to learn the mathematics tables in third grade can pick them up in a day once they hit sixth or seventh grade and get interested on their own. In our experience, the student who doesn’t learn the math tables in third grade will never be comfortable enough with math to get interested in sixth or seventh grade.

If you end up in a local group of unschoolers and you want to follow the curriculum we’ve outlined in this book, you may need to switch groups.

TAKING YOUR CHILD OUT OF SCHOOL

If your child has been in a bad situation—destructive peer relationships, discouraging classroom experiences—and you’ve brought her home to rescue her, expect a period of adjustment. Be understanding but firm in your decision. Fully explain what you are doing and why. Your confidence in the decision that what you are doing is best for her will be communicated. So will indecision, which will make her resist the change even more.

Any radical change can cause “culture shock.” Children generally prefer a known situation, no matter how flawed, to an unknown one—structure and routine are always comforting. Expect a period of adjustment. But use common sense. If you see depression and anger that doesn’t adjust in six weeks or so, take your child to a trusted counselor so that you can both talk out the problems.

LEARNING CHALLENGES

More and more frequently, parents of children with learning challenges—ranging from mild dyslexia all the way to severe autism—are deciding to bring their children home for school. While some of these children do well with the extra stimulation and expertise of school-provided therapists, others flourish and progress more rapidly at home.

In the decade since the first publication of The Well-Trained Mind, we have talked to many parents who are home schooling children with dyslexia, processing difficulties, seizure disorders, autism, Asperger’s, and other difficulties. Many of these parents have chosen to use classical methods. From them, we’ve heard scores of success stories. We’ve also heard one message loud and clear: I wish someone had told me I was working on a different timeline than everyone else. Too often, they’ve told us, they pushed children too quickly from one stage to the next, feeling that they would fail to be “classical” educators if they didn’t move into critical thinking or into rhetoric during the age windows that we’ve described in this book.

Each learning challenge has its own set of difficulties, and we encourage you to make use of the specialists who can offer you specific teaching help with your child. But one principle holds true for almost all struggling learners: You will need to spend more time in the grammar stage before introducing critical thinking, and more time in the critical thinking stage before gently pushing the student toward rhetoric-level skills. Severely autistic or developmentally disabled children may never reach the rhetoric level—but they can benefit enormously from careful, patient instruction in the first two stages of classical education. Although this subject is obviously beyond the scope of this book, we encourage you to examine the grammar-and logic-stage methods of teaching and think about stretching them out over longer periods of time—six years, eight years, or even more. Teach patiently, within the child’s own time frame, and you will begin to hear them move forward.

Many parents of learning-challenged kids post on the Special Needs forum at welltrainedmind.com/forums. Visitors are welcome to read their stories and ask questions.

THE REALITIES OF HOME SCHOOLING

While we think home education is wonderful—we’ve seen children and parents thrive at home, we’ve heard hundreds of success stories—you must go into it with your eyes open.

• Home schooling is time-consuming, hard work.
• Housework suffers. Books and science experiments and papers are all over the house.
• Everyone wants to quit at some point during the school year.
• The kids aren’t always perfect, and you can’t blame it on school or on their friends.
• Academic schedules are frequently interrupted by sickness, family needs, and life in general.
• Children often “just don’t get it”—that is, they may experience plateaus or have difficulty with a new concept.
• Grandparents may think you’re ruining your children.
• The neighbors will probably tell you that you’re crazy.

A PERSONAL WORD FROM JESSIE

I was often tired and sometimes felt overwhelmed by what I had undertaken—that is, home-educating my children. And if I’d had a perfect school available, I would have enrolled my children in it. But I looked at the academic and social options, and concluded that, in spite of my failures, my children were doing better under my tutoring than they would have done in a group situation.

Personally, I decided to put on hold some of my goals. But I held on to the wise counsel given me when my children were toddlers: “Live your life in chapters. You don’t have to do everything you want to do in life during this chapter of rearing children.” This advice provided the cornerstone of my plans for personal goals.

I wanted to write. I wanted to make a hand-braided early American–style rug. When my three children were toddlers, I had a whole stash of wool, all stripped in preparation for braiding. Since toddlerhood wasn’t the right time to start such a large project, I stored it in boxes “until the children are in school.” Instead of sending them off each morning while I quietly braided the rug, I was even more busy with home schooling than I had been with three preschoolers.

I have time to write now. My rug-in-waiting is still in boxes, although I can almost see the time approaching to start it—thirty years later! But my children are the most creative project I have been involved in. I can’t compare the relationship I have with them to a relationship with a rug, no matter how beautifully hand-crafted. And my crafting of their education has been life-enriching to all of us.

There were times when I longed for a magazine-beautiful house instead of a house with “projects” all over it. Housework wasn’t always done on time. Every October and March, I wanted to quit. (I learned to take a week off when that feeling came over me. Rest and change of pace renewed my focus.) When my children needed correction, I had to take the responsibility and not blame it on bad friends. Academic schedules were sometimes interrupted by life. My father had a brain tumor. My son had allergies. But looking back, I can see that even when we took off from school for the necessities of family life, we had a long-range goal in mind. We were able to get back on track and continue with our plan, taking up where we left off.

The most discouraging thing I encountered was the lack of support from family and neighbors. When I started home schooling, I worried a lot. I worried I wouldn’t be able to keep up with my children’s grade levels. I worried that their social development would suffer. The neighbors said, “They’ll never get into college.” The grandparents cried.

But as I look back, none of the worries materialized. My children did get into college. They have careers and relationships. And even the grandparents, seeing the academic progress and the better-than-normal social development, eventually admitted that they had been mistaken.

RESOURCES

For a list of home-education organizations, see Appendix 2.

Resources for Practical Skills

These high-school practical courses are produced by Christian Light Education, a Mennonite company, but are usable by all home schoolers. Order from Christian Light Education.

 

Beginning Woodworking.

Textbook. $42.00.

Student pack (workbook and study guide). $15.00.

Teacher pack (guide and answer key). $3.00.

Car Care.

Textbook. $77.00.

Student pack (workbook and study guide). $15.00.

Teacher pack (guide and answer key). $5.00.

Carpentry.

Textbook. $83.00.

Student pack (workbook and study guide). $38.00.

Teacher pack (guide and answer key). $5.00.

Home Repair and Maintenance.

Textbook. $59.00.

Student pack (workbook and study guide). $13.00.

Teacher pack (guide and answer key). $3.00.

Modern Residential Wiring.

Textbook. $53.00.

Student pack (workbook and study guide). $25.00.

Teacher pack (guide and answer key). $3.00.

Small Gas Engines.

Textbook. $56.00.

Student pack (workbook and study guide). $22.00.

Teacher pack (guide and answer key). $4.00.

Magazines and Newspapers

Home Education Magazine treats home schooling as a lifestyle; it tends to lean toward unschooling and to be somewhat anti-curricula, but has much of value (even for parents who like curricula). Write them at P.O. Box 1083, Tonasket, WA 98855-1083; visit their website at www.homeedmag.com; or call 800-236-3728.

 

The Link is a national home-schooling newspaper designed to be nonsectarian—accessible to home educators of every persuasion. Articles, reviews, and ads for dozens of home-school resources in every issue. It’s a free publication. Write them at 741 Lakefield Road, STEJ, Westlake Village, CA 91361, visit the website at www.homeschoolnewslink.com, or call 804-497-3311.

 

The Old Schoolhouse Magazine is a comprehensive home-school publication: reviews, ads, interviews, and articles that appeal to a wide variety of home-schooling philosophies. Visit their site, www.thehomeschoolmagazine.com, or call 888-718-HOME.