Home Schooling, Are You Nuts?

I started home schooling back in 1996 when my daughter came home from first grade and asked me this question. She said, “Mom, if I were a gypsy moth, would you kill me?” I was rather disturbed by her question and for the next few days I wondered what on God’s green earth would lead her to ask me such a thing. After careful listening and doing my own questioning I determined that her school had a curriculum that over-emphasized the “badness” of human actions on the planet and “humanized’ animals to the extent that my daughter had made a value judgment that humans and animals were on the same level.

Maybe some people think that animals and humans ARE on the same level. That isn’t my point. My point is that I didn’t think what they were teaching was appropriate for her age as she didn’t have the ability to prioritize her values and what she had internalized was very disturbing to her. 

I mulled over teaching her at home. I was in the process of finishing my undergraduate degree at U-Mass Boston and I was all on fire with learning myself about ancient civilizations and the English Renaissance. I decided that I could do a better job teaching her than they could. I didn’t just think it, I KNEW I could. 

Now the funniest thing is that the response that most people give when you talk about home schooling is one of concern over “socialization.” As I look back, and if many of you will care to remember, we learned many good things in public school. But we also learned many BAD things from our peers. 

We learned to swear, to be rude, that you can get attention by talking back to teachers and that the "cool kids" wear hip clothes and are often very naughty after school. All these things are so very important in being a successful person in life, yes?

Exactly. So I went to her principal and told him that with or without his blessing I was determined to do this. He was kind, polite and offered me all the help I wished for in terms of textbooks and even offered to let my daughter attend specific classes that she wished to at the school. I was grateful. We cooperated and she attended art classes and sometimes gym.  

Then we moved to Attleboro. Attleboro wasn’t so cooperative. I couldn’t send her to specific classes and the principal in our area was rather cold towards the idea of home-schooling. Still, I persisted. And for the next few years we learned about ancient civilizations, diagrammed sentences for English and so on. When her brother got old enough to go to first grade I decided to try sending him to the public elementary school. 

He came home with little to show for what he had done daily. For two weeks there was no math. I grew concerned. Finally, two other little boys started picking on him at recess and lunch time. He had stomach pains because he was so nervous to go to school. One day, as he lay crying in bed because he didn’t want to go, I told him to never mind. We would have school at home. 

And we did for the next few years until we decided to send them to Hamilton Country Day School where they learned Latin, French, Algebra and to play the violin, along with other basics. 

Mr. Hamilton, who was the headmaster, was a genius when it came to math. And he introduced very complex processes to the children at a very young age.  The school was rigorous and I remember there were times when my daughter would stay up till 10 p.m., and once in awhile 11 p.m., doing homework. But she seemed to really enjoy it and the challenge that it afforded. 

My son was not so diligent. He was much more concerned with being social. In fact, he was asked to leave Hamilton the following year because he loved to talk so much. It drove Mr. Hamilton to distraction. To my son’s face I was very disappointed in him.  But inside I was laughing because it was just so “him." So we home-schooled some more and eventually he went back to public school and was very successful in challenging his teachers (that’s another blog for another day).

So why do I tell this story? I tell it because I think so highly of home schooling and home-schooling parents. That’s not to say that it is for everyone. I know of one family who failed miserably at home schooling, but it was more of a situation in which the parents were afraid of the public school system, but then didn’t provide any good alternative. They simply abdicated their responsibility and left the kids home to their own devices. I would not advocate this type of approach.

But one of the reasons I write about this is that I think there are serious misconceptions about home schooling that the general public has. For the next few days I will focus on this issue and hopefully will be able to change some of those ideas as I have done a combination of home/private/public schooling over the past 16 years.