As with any decision that needs to be made for our children, one must weigh out the pro & cons. I did this very thing back in 1996 when I first started to homeschool my children. At the time, my daughter was in the 2nd grade, and my son; a newborn. At first suggestion to homeschool, made by my husband and daughter earlier that year, the answer was a hard “NO”. After all, my perspective was that homeschoolers were those weird families that didn’t leave the house, didn’t know how to socialize, didn’t play sports, all the children mastered the piano & violin and the moms only wore jean denim skirts, no makeup, hair in a bun and made their bread from scratch, actually everything from scratch.
That’s not ‘me’
My Pro/Con list was pretty easy at this point … everything was a ‘con’ to homeschooling. The person I saw in my mind that homeschooled just wasn’t me … not even close. While I respected those families, even admired their commitments, I had my plan, my budding career, and being a teacher was not one of them. I didn’t even like school when I was in it, so why would I go through that again? But … one day. It always starts with ‘one day’ doesn’t it? One day, my very artistically talented daughter came home from school frustrated with her reading assignment. She may have been a little behind according to the ‘experts’, and even though I didn’t think it was that bad of a problem, I decided to go and meet with the teacher at her school. In that meeting, I requested to see the current reading material and the list of books for the remainder of the year. I honestly was just looking at the difficulty of the text. I was shocked when she told me she didn’t have a list of the books they were going to use that year. The book selections were made by the ‘board’ and I would need to talk to the principal if further information was needed. Well, off to the principal’s office I went.
Shocked & frustrated
There in his office, I was shocked. As I said, my intent was really to evaluate the difficulty of the material my daughter would need to accomplish, not to have to evaluate the content of the material itself. All my trust in what my daughter would be ‘learning’ in school was shattered when he showed me just a few of the books they would be introducing to my very young, very impressionable baby were now gone. These books not only under minded my authority as a parent but they taught beliefs that were in direct opposition to my Christian values. From there, the principal and I engaged in some pretty heavy dialogue about what the role of the school systems was and was not. We were accused of not being diverse and open-minded. Being paralyzed since the age of two and confined to a wheelchair, at that moment I looked down, sarcastically, at my wheelchair and told the principal that wasn’t going to be an issue in my family. And with that, I left.
What now?
What to do next seemed to just flow in the following days. Come to find out, my daughter who was only 8 at the time had been praying, along with her dad, that God would change my heart and give me the desire to homeschool. Sneaky … but it worked. My heart was changed, my eyes were opened and I never looked back at the public education system again. That was in 1996 … many years ago now.
A dear friend from church, who also homeschooled, introduced me to different curriculum choices available at the time and was a huge encouragement to me on those tough days, and yes they did come. I am not going to sugar-coat anything, homeschooling was hard and many days giving up seemed an easier and better decision but now that I look back as my last of 5 children (yes 5) just graduated high school and headed to college like the 4 before her, I am so thankful for the simple prayers of my 8-year-old baby for God to change my heart. Home-educating my children was one of the best decisions I have made.
Today there are so many reasons why families are choosing to homeschool. It is by far the fastest-growing form of education nationwide. Some homeschool because of religious reasons, others because of bullying. Some will homeschool because it is best suited for their sport or academically gifted or handicapped child. Others will homeschool because of the material being taught in public schools or the lack of parental involvement allowed. I think after we went through 2020 and Covid-19 protocols forced students home with an expectation to homeschool, many decided to stay on that path. Still, others see how homeschooling draws their family closer together and decide to home educate for that reason alone.
Home educating was the best decision I could have made for our family
2021 marks the year my last child graduated high school as an all-homeschooled student and headed to college like the four before her.
