Why We Home Educate

It is a common question to hear, if not explicitly, then at least in people's facial expressions and intonations.

Why do we, or anyone, choose to home school?

The reasons, as any parent will tell you, are many and varied, and never quite the same for any two families. I do try to refrain from criticizing "other" educational means, even though I am sorely tempted, because I've experienced just about every method known to modern America, either myself or through my children, and I can say with some measure of authority, that there are advantages and disadvantages to them all. Period.

No, rather than belabor any flaws of traditional schools, I will focus on the positive (and maybe some potential negative) aspects of home education.

At the moment, I have one in college, one who's a nearing the end of high school, one in elementary school and one just starting out in kindergarten. We have, at various points in the past, home schooled them. Early and mid-elementary school was the time when we had the older ones home for about three years, and the one who is now finishing high school is at home, earning her diploma through an online high school. She much prefers it to walking down the street to the local school.

When the two oldest were younger, we found ourselves moving from one state to another, renting in one location with the intention of buying a house in another. At first, we had them in a parochial school in the northeast, and when we moved south, we wanted to keep them in a similar situation to that which they'd left behind, so we chose another parochial school. Only problem was, I was spending two hours on the road and waiting in the car line every day, and halfway through the year my children were still not approaching the material (math, specifically) that they had been doing the previous year. We were repeating old information without any evidence that we would even reach the previous year's material.

We withdrew them from the school and decided to do it ourselves. As I said, we knew we would be moving, so to put them into the local school for half a year before moving them to yet another school the following fall just didn't seem like the right thing to do.

Fast forward a bit. What we found with home schooling was that we had better oversight of just what our children were learning, and we knew what their homework would be because we were the ones assigning it, so we knew immediately how to help them when they needed it (unlike our recent experience with an "institution", but I did say I wasn't going there, didn't I?).

We also found that we could do a lot more hands-on learning through field trips, not that we went crazy on them, but they were always an option, and we had the flexibility to take advantage of some of them when they arose on the spur of the moment. We attended plays, visited museums during the day, attending scout meetings and sports practices and games at times that were actually convenient (i.e. NOT during rush hour), we could have dinner at a reasonable hour and consistently in the evenings.

We were also able to plan our getaways. our vacations, when it was convenient in our schedule instead of having to forgo opportunities simply because the authorities wanted it that way—simply because it works better in their system. One October, for two weeks, we traveled to Japan to visit for the first time since moving back to the U.S. The weather was perfect (not sweltering like the summer would have been), and it worked with my husband's work schedule. Another year, we traveled to Paris and London for three weeks, piggybacking on my husband's business school "field trip". We traveled to different cities, and his trip was only ten days, so we spent the last week-and-a-half together puttering around London and loving life, for the most part.

A long-term benefit of having our children at home for their education was, and always will be, the closeness that developed in our family, between the siblings themselves, and between our children and us. If there is one thing that I think could make a huge difference in the state of the American family it would be to keep children home and learning with Mom and/or Dad for more years than we do. Is it all peachy and wonderful all the time? Absolutely not! Did we have our share of bad days and exasperation with one another? Of course!

But did we learn how to compromise, share, and take turns? Yes, we did. And we still do. We learned to talk things through in a civilized manner, and I can say without any hesitation that we have never (so far) had a "typical teenager" living in our house. We have largely avoided the strife that appears to have become the hallmark of the average American family, at least if you read the newspapers or watch television.

Now, there are other variables at play in our family life, too. We are Orthodox Christians, we attend church regularly, and our closest friends tend, by and large, to be people we know from church (with similar values and a like-minded approach to the importance of the family in society). We have chosen to forgo a second income (a decision we made long ago, before we had children), in order to have the relationship that we have now with our children. I realize that this may not be possible, or in some cases even desirable, for every family, but it's simply the way we have worked ours.

Home schooling, or home education, as I would prefer to call it, is not something that can be pushed at anyone. It is a de facto lifestyle change for anyone, child or parent, who is used to having the kiddies in school for seven hours a day, five days a week, so it is a decision not to be undertaken lightly. Many households are dependent on two parents working, out of necessity or habit, and to change that arrangement requires quite a bit of soul-searching and preparation. As for the expense, home schooling is not the least expensive option, though with school fees and fundraisers, even public schools are more expensive than I recall them being when I was a child.

Doing it yourself, however, is a truly viable means of educating your own children if you're up for it. It's not the strange, freaky thing that it was painted to be for so long. Will there be problem cases that appear in the news from time to time? Yes. There are bizarre happenings all over the world, most of them not involving homeschool families, and plenty about kids who are or were schooled by traditional means.

At its best, home education is a joy. At its worst, it's  . . . "Eh, we had a bad morning. Let's take a break and get back on track."

As my five-year-old likes to say, "I can live with that."