Why We Home School

Every parent has the right and responsibility to determine the education of their children. I don't intend to denigrate anyone else's decision, but my children are among the 2 million k-12 home school students in this country (the figure is provided by the National Home Education research Institute). We would not consider any other method of educating our children because it works.

A recent poll showed that more and more parents are leaving public education, fleeing a system that undermines their values yet fails to educate. That's understandable. In spite of well meaning educators, the system itself is the problem.

We have a system that crams up to thirty kids in one room and treats them as if they were all the same. It doesn't recognize that boys and girls are different, and doesn't accommodate the difference. These children spend most of their waking hours for five days a week within four walls where every aspect of their day is programmed. Students are expected to do and learn the same things and at the same pace. It's a place where dreamers like Thomas Edison, who was labeled addled by the school he attended, don't fit. Anthony Esolen has called the schools human warehouses where any act of imagination is dangerous.

No wonder they turn out bland uniformity. Like at McDonalds, anywhere you go in this country, every Big Mac is the same. Shopping malls all look the same. The same brands are in every grocery store. And we mass produce mediocre students. Now there is a push for a nationwide standardized curriculum to assure even more uniformity. but children are not all the same. That's why for many of us, we home school out of a simple desire for a better education for our children.

This desires includes wanting my children to be good citizens. The National Assessment of Educational Progress reported a couple of weeks ago that only one in four high school seniors scored at least "proficient" in knowledge of U.
S. citizenship. History is just as bad, and the older the student the worse the results. It showed 20% of sixth graders, but only 12% of high school seniors could demonstrate a grasp of our nation's history. That is scary to think about these kids getting old enough to vote. I want my children to know why our country is the greatest on earth.

I want my children to have a rigorous and broad liberal education. Bruce S. Thompson, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford and professor of classics and humanities at Cal State, surveyed the educational offerings of colleges. His bleak conclusion,

"No longer do they provide students with a grounding in the best that has been said and thought, as (Mathew) Arnold put it. What they do provide is a poor substitute: vocational training and unexamined left-wing orthodoxy."

According to Thomas Sowell,

"Unfortunately, an increasing proportion of American education, whether in the schools or in the colleges and universities, is closer to the baton twirling end of the spectrum than toward the nuclear physics end. Even reputable colleges are increasingly teaching things that students should have learned in high school."

Sowell continues,

"Too many of the people coming out of even the most prestigious academic institutions graduate with neither the academic skills to be economically productive nor the intellectual development to make them discerning citizens and voters."

That's not good enough. We want better for our children.

What is an educated person? Robert Heinlein, the noted sci-fi author, defined it like this:

"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."

I couldn't agree more. As home school parents, we try to give our kids a wide variety of experience. Our children have helped butcher pigs and chickens. They have written poetry. They have followed the Oregon Trail and explored Civil War battlefields. They have taken boards and nails and made elaborate tree houses. They have taken years of Latin. They have compared the Code of Hammurabi with the Law of Moses. They have read Eusebius and Plutarch's Lives - not snippets, but the whole books. They have practiced fencing with home-made swords. And they are thoroughly grounded in the Bible.

Someday, I want my children to be the leaders in their communities, not followers. I want them to be able to think and use their reservoir of learned knowledge, not follow blindly anywhere the so-called elites take them. And above all, I want them to be grounded in their faith. That is why we home school.