About six months ago, Valorie wrote a blog called You Call That Homeschooling. It’s excellent. Go read it. Well some messages from the last couple of days have me in a place where I am defending my mode of homeschooling. While it is a bit odd to turn someone else’s post into a series, this discussion was only fitting to put under the same category.
If you read my post from this morning, Homeschool Resource Review: The Masters Academy of Fine Arts, then you know that someone has challenged the way I homeschool my kids as not really counting as homeschooling. I have been accused of not practicing what I preach. I feel like I was called a fraud.
But here’s the thing. Homeschooling means so many things to so many people.
- To public schools, homeschool can be their competition or their new online answer to keeping kids in school.
- To Grandparents homeschooling can be the way their kids are destroying their grandchildrens lives (of course this does not apply to all grandparents).
- To the teacher’s unions, homeschooling is a cancer that must be stomped out.
To homeschoolers, homeschooling can mean:
Unschooling,which loosely means allowing a child to learn on their own terms.
A literature approach to learning as in the Charlotte Mason Approach
Unit studies where children learn all disciplines while covering one topic at a time.
A Classical approach to education, learning in the same way our forefathers were taught.
An eclectic approach that combines some or all of the previously mentioned methods.
Homeschooling can be done in the home, in a classroom built in the home, sprawled across the living room furniture, or under the dining room table which has been draped with a sheet to resemble a tent. (My daughters favorite place to get her work done.) Homeschooling can happen in a park, at the parents workplace, or at Grandma’s house when mom and dad are working. Homeschooling can be done with the use of Co-op classes, by taking classes at the local community college. Homeschooling can also be done with the help of an online high school that parents pay for, or a local once, or twice, or thrice a week program where kids get tutored in their courses.
It is bad enough that strangers who are not involved at all with homeschooling put restrictions on what homeschoolers are supposed to look like and do. But, I have also noticed that fellow homeschoolers also try to put all homeschoolers into the same box they fit in. I think it is really unfair to ask a family who has escaped from the square shaped box called public school to jump into your round shaped box, when they clearly belong in a heart shaped box.
This is what I call homeschooling folks. To each his or her own!