I have to say that I really respect my pastors and their decision to home school. They were doing it in the 70’s and early 80’s when educating your child wasn’t considered a parental ‘right’ but rather a social and legal taboo. They both have stories about being visited by truancy officers and one of the pastors wives jokes about the days when their kids were told to hide under the bed in case someone came in. Homeschooling was akin to educational neglect back then, and they really needed to forge their way through. There were no curriculums or helpful websites and yet their children still came out really well educated. They were, in essence, pioneers.
We’ve Lost Our Pioneering Sense
It seems that our new generation of homeschooler has lost that pioneering sense. We have resources at our fingertips and websites galore. As a result so often we talk about following this curriculum or using that. We all of the sudden ’need’ video textbooks to teach higher level curriculums and heaven forbid we just make something up on our own. That would be radical.
I’m somewhat of a rebel within our homeschooling group because I reject formal early childhood learning and I consider my curriculum guide a mere suggestion. I still feel like I am the best equipped to teach my children and that includes higher level math and science too. If I don’t know it, we learn it together–simple as that.
No doubt about it, since homeschooling is a largely ’accepted’ (and by that I mean legal) practice in our society, we parents feel like we need all the help we can get. Our generation of home schooling parents have not yet really forged anything.
The New Genre
It’s not bad to not have to forge your way through. I’m definitely not criticizing people for using curriculums. I am making observations though about the homeschooling movement and it’s up to you to decide whether we’re moving in the right direction. But as a result of homeschooling becoming mainstream, and as a result of our generation having the resources that we need readily available, we’re giving birth to a new genre of home schooling parent–and this new genre does concern me.
The new genre of homeschooling parent considers homeschooling ’mainstream’ enough to “homeschool” for just preschool and kindergarten. This new genre considers using public school programs at home and then calls it homeschooling when in reality it is not. This new genre considers it acceptable to pull a kid out one year, and put them back in the next.
None of these ideas that have become ‘mainstream’ recently are good ideas. The homeschooling movement was birthed out of a fundamental ideology that children learn best from their parents at home. Now the ideology seems to be: children learn best as long as their parents have the right resources, and support groups, and their kids have to be in activities for the socialization, and let’s not get carried away. . .we’ll have to do something else for high school because we’re not qualified for that stuff.
If we’ve gone from pioneering, to being dependent on curriculum to using public school curriculum at home and considering it the best–I’m wondering what will be the next step.