Please be advised: this is going to be a LONG post, and if you are not at all interested in homeschooling, I suggest you go read
Pioneer Woman's recipes instead. (Smile.)
In the short 5.5 years David and I have been parents, we've made LOTS of decisions. Some of our decisions have been on-the-spot ("Mommy, can I watch TV?" Ryan asks daily. "No, you may not," I respond 50 times a day), while others have been carefully thought over and prayed about until an agreement was reached (to vaccinate or not to vaccinate, for example). The decision to homeschool is one of those carefully-thought-out, praying-lots-of-prayers, having-heated-debates decisions.
In case you haven't figured it out from reading my blog (or from knowing me, if you do), I'm a planner. I like to know when, what, who, why and what to bring on just about everything from playdates to church to what I'm going to do next year. So, right around the time Ryan turned three, I logically thought, "Oh my goodness! It's time to start thinking about school!" I mentioned in a previous
post how, when I was holding the just-hours-old Ryan in the hospital, I thought of the day when he would turn five and I would lovingly pat him on the back as I walked him into his first day of Kindergarten. I don't know why that thought came into my head; but like I said, I'm a planner, so maybe that has something to do with it. There were times in his first few months of life, when I was sleep-deprived and my shirts wouldn't go over my milk-enlarged chest (sorry, men), that I thought about how wonderfully nice it would be to send him off to school so that I could have some much-needed time to myself.
After his third birthday however, I thought that thought again, and realized that was the wrong reason to send my child to school. It was then that I seriously began examining the possibility of home educating my children. Was my sole motivation for sending them to school selfish on my part? I had to ask myself that question over and over until I was finally able to give an honest "yes" as the answer. If I were to send my kids to school, the whole reason behind it would be so that I could have days and days to myself. What they would learn or rather, not learn, never crossed my mind as a deciding factor.
Secondly, I read Dr. James Dobson's book
Hide or Seek. It was originally published in the 1970s and has nothing to do with homeschooling. God used this book, which talks about the brutality of the school environment, relationships of young children with their parents, and why children don't thrive in unhealthy environments of either, to completely change my mind about home education. I suddenly realized that I could not pat my kids on the backs and send them into that competitive, peer pressure-filled, standardized testing-driven environment and expect them to flourish.
And speaking of standardized testing... This, too, is one of the major deciding factors in our reasoning for home education. There are so many interesting things that children aren't able to study or learn about in school because it isn't going to be on the TAAS/TAKS/TEKS test. Our teachers don't even get to teach what they enjoy anymore because their job performance is rated on how well or how poorly their students score. Many schools aren't able to receive much-needed and well-deserved funding unless a certain percentage of their students perform well on these tests. I can remember studying something in school, and before I even felt like I had scratched the surface, the teacher informed us that we would be studying something else. Why did we only scratch the surface? Because that's all the knowledge you're allowed when teacher and student are forced to stay on a standardized testing schedule for lesson plans. How much knowledge are children being cheated out of because our government regulates what they must or must not know? David and I decided that we want our kids to have a deep knowledge of many subjects, not just surface-level, textbook knowledge.
Another main, and probably most important, reason for our decision to homeschool is regarding our spiritual beliefs. First of all, I want my children to be taught about the Lord and the Bible and have a deep knowledge of Him and His Word from an early age. I don't want them to learn about their Creator only from Sunday School; I want them to live it, breathe it, see it in action every day of their lives. They're definitely not going to get that in a classroom. In fact, they get the exact opposite. Even several private schools no longer place a strong emphasis on God's Word, Jesus and the Holy Spirit. There is one Christian school right here in the Panhandle that only has chapel services for its students once a week! If I want my kids to get a Christian education in a private school, I would expect them to have chapel every single day, especially since I'm paying big bucks for that "private, Christian education." Of course, even if my kids were in school, we could still have family Bible-reading and prayer time in the evenings, but I also want the Bible to be a school subject in our homeschool. Additionally, there are hundreds of things going on in all schools that we flat out don't want our kids exposed to. All other reasons aside, the immorality in schools today is enough to convince me that homeschooling is the best choice for our family.
Our next deciding factor has to do with classroom size and student-to-teacher ratios. I cannot imagine how overwhelmed teachers are today with anywhere from 25-40 kids in their classes. It's no wonder kids are graduating high school without being able to read; their teachers never had a chance to spend one-on-one time with them to teach them! It makes me uneasy to think about all the kids out there with tons of potential and ability waiting to be coaxed out of them, if someone simply had the time to help them use that potential and ability. How many kids are put into "special" classes simply because their learning style requires individualized instruction rather than group teaching? How many students are desperately struggling in school because they are kinesthetic or visual learners but are taught with an auditory style? Recognizing that my children are different and therefore learn differently is extremely important to how I teach them. A school teacher can't possibly teach something five different ways, although the odds are great that she'll have five different learning styles amongst all the kids in her classroom.
Those are a few of the main reasons we have chosen home education for our children. Although I believe this is the best decision for our family, I do not believe it is the best decision for all families. Like ministry, homeschooling your children is something the Lord must call you to do. You can't just wake up one day and say, "Hey, I think I'll homeschool." I also think that having godly children in public and private schools is so important. Please don't feel condemned if you're a parent whose kids are in school--their school needs them to be shining lights for Jesus! Their friends need them to be godly examples. Maybe, if you're considering home education, this post has given you some more to think on, or even some confirmation for or against your decision. No matter what your decision is for your children's educations, I pray they are happy, flourishing, and learning whether that's in their fourth grade classroom or at the kitchen table!
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