| The Home Schooler A Biblical Light on Education - With Special Emphasis on Home Schooling |
A s each school year comes to a close,
my husband and I sit down to evaluate how we are doing as a home
schooling family. In our house, everything is not always neat
and tidy. Projects and papers are sometimes left on the floor
or table. Laundry and dishes may pile up. Supper is sometimes
cooked at a restaurant. Frustrations occasionally popped out of
nowhere. We are not the model home school family where kids are
up at the crack of dawn with all their chores done, ready to begin
school by 8:00 a.m.
Perhaps, like you, we wondered if this was the path God would
have us take for another year. We looked at alternatives and doubted
ourselves as home schooling parents. Then God began to work on
us and in us (or perhaps we finally started listening to Him).
Conversations with friends and the sharing of this article by
the wife of the president of HSLDA made us stop and re-re-evaluate:
1. You get to see the completion of your efforts. Something is
lost when you turn over your home discipling to others.
2. You can customize your children's education to provide motivation
for their gifts and abilities. No one else will be able to provide
the consistent and loving support that you can in weak areas.
3.You can direct them to early college entrance. Even public high
schools realize many students are ready for college level courses
and have cooperating programs with junior colleges.
4. You can continue the family building process. The teen years
continue to be impressionable and formative. This is an invaluable
time to cement family relationships.
5. You can be sure that your teens are learning, if they are at
home. Studies have revealed that public high school students average
2 hours and 13 minutes of academic work a day.
6. You can continue to have influence over their peer relationships.
Teen rebellion is not in God's plan for the family, but it is
the humanist agenda for the public schools.
7. You can protect them from pressure to conform to what the other
kids are doing. This pressure is so strong in the public high
school. You won't need to spend time de-programming.
8. If you send your teens to high school, there will be a diversion
away from the academic focus, as well as spiritual priorities.
Be aware of the many distractions that won't parallel the home
life you have maintained.
9. Your young people will be thrown into things like boy/girl
preoccupation, focus on clothes, and pressure to conform in appearance
and music.
10. Vast amounts of time separated from the family will affect
their relationship with you. We have all put great amounts of
our heart and time into our home-schooling years, and we want
those efforts preserved.
11. Home school is the best preparation for college studies. The
home education "style" is closer to college-type instruction.
12. There is greater flexibility for work/study opportunities.
13. The institutional method of public education is designed around
"crowd control," not learning. If and when they learn,
it will be a by-product of other priorities to maintain class
room order.
14. Home educators have the best available curriculum and greater
selection. Public schools offer revisionist history and science
that promotes their humanist perspective. The godly commitment
of many great Americans has been deleted from public text books.
15. Age/grade isolation or segregation inhibits socialization.
Public school children are behind their home school counterparts
in maturity, socialization, and vocabulary development, as demonstrated
by available research.
We thank Ed & Carol Burke for sending this article to us
Dr. Paul Cates at Faith Christian Ministries
864 Poplar Creek Road, Oliver Springs, TN 37840 (865-435-6185)
E-Mail: Dr. Paul Cates <pcates@worldnet.att.net>
From: Crystal N. Smisor
Subject: An opportunity to have your voice heard
Dear Home-Educating Families, Supporters of Home-Education, and
Friends,
In a recent issue of Parade magazine, dated February 24, 2002,
the "Ask Marilyn" column's feature question was on home-education.
Marilyn vos Savant, who is respected by the world because of her
listing in the
Guinness Book of World Records Hall of Fame for "Highest
I.Q.," answered this question in a manner that deserves a
response from us. What kind of view of home-education are we giving
to the world? Please prayerfully consider dropping Marilyn a letter
or e-mail giving her reason to believe that home-educating parents
are not wasting their lives...rather they are laying down their
lives for the very most important work in all the world--training
and raising the next generation! She issues a challenge at the
end of her answer for us to prove to her we are a success. Will
you join me in taking the challenge?
Here is the question asked and her response:
"My husband and I are thinking of home-schooling. Do you
recommend it?"
-S. B. E.
California
"I believe that traditional home-schooling (one parent stays
home to teach all children in the family up through the high school
years) can be a fine alternative to an unacceptable public school,
but I would not recommend it broadly unless most schools were
inadequate and most parents could teach everything from English
literature to physics. And I don't believe that either is true.
"If home schooling were institutionalized, half of the youthful
potential of Americans would go unfulfilled. Say that a bright
young parent sacrifices a rewarding career to stay home and teach
the children. When those children grow up, would half of them
(one parent from each married couple) also sacrifice their potential
to stay home and teach their own children? If so, much of the
result of home-schooling would be the creation of more home-schooling
parents for the next generation, and so on.
"Maybe home-schoolers can justify this loss. If so, please
write. I believe that home-schooling is a noble experiment done
for the right reasons, and I hope to hear why it may prove to
be a success."
To contact Marilyn write to:
Ask Marilyn
PARADE, 711 Third Ave, New York, N.Y. 10017 < marilyn@parade.com>
(please include name, city, and state)
I encourage you to forward this on to other home-educators and
supporters of home-education!
For Christ and for Liberty,
Crystal Smisor (a 20-yr.-old home school graduate!)
Valley Center, KS. csmisor@onemain.com
Before I reproduce some answers below, let me make a few points
from Marilyn's statement. [Bro Need.]
First, since when do people need to know everything about
everything in order to teach anything? There are more than enough
available resources to teach what is required by young people
in today's world.
Second, "sacrifices a rewarding career to stay home..."
Sadly, Marilyn verbalizes the world's opinion, an opinion that
should motivate parents to get their children out of the "public
schools." God's word is clear older women, mothers, are to
teach their daughters to be keepers at home, good, obedient
to their own husbands, that the word of God be not blasphemed.
(Titus 2. See article, "Teaching Daughters to Blaspheme,"
July, 1994. Download the article from our web site.)
Third, for Christians, the purpose of home-schooling should
be to equipt the next generations to please God in all they do.
Bro Need
I have been directed to a challenge
you issued in the 2/24/2002 issue of Parade magazine regarding
Home Schooling. In that challenge you stated the concern that
home educators might be in danger of draining the talent pool
in this country by encouraging more and more talented parents
to stay home to teach their children. This is a very intriguing
question. Most often Home Education is attacked on the premise
that children will not receive an adequate education and will
not be well "socialized" with their peers, both claims
which are easily debunked through many current studies. The question
you pose, however, strikes into new territory for me.
I am 27 years old and I was home educated from the third through
twelfth grade and proceeded on to receive a BS in Physics. Naturally,
I have quite a bit of bias about the results of home education
and its benefits. I believe the possibility of draining the talent
pool in America is not one we should associate with home education,
but rather more properly belongs attached to public education.
Public education in this nation has steadily eroded the number
of top scientists and engineers we produce compared to other countries.
I have no studies to cite off hand, but I believe it is well established
that the youth in our country are struggling educationally compared
to the youth of other first world nations.
Rather than draining from the talent pool by producing more stay-at-home
parents, I believe home education is adding to the talent pool
by creating more self-motivated, ambitious students who are more
likely to pursue higher education and the sciences. On averaged
home educated students score higher in all areas compared to public
educated students, including math and science. Even students whose
parents were not able to teach Physics, Calculus or Advanced English
in high school learn such a great degree of self-motivation and
self-training that they often pursue those courses without much
teaching needed from their parents. I was in that situation. I
wanted to pursue math and physics and my parents were unable to
directly teach the courses. Rather than look for a cooperative
of some kind to aid in these courses I taught myself Physics and
Calculus I. Imagine my trepidation upon entering college when
this knowledge was put to the test. I ended up with straight As
in all my college Calculus courses and all As and one B in my
Physics major.
Perhaps I'm just smarter or brighter than the average citizen,
but I don't believe so. I had to work hard for those grades. What
home education gave me was a high level of self-motivation. I
worked and worked at problems until I understood them. My parents
might not have known Calculus, but they taught ambition and motivation,
something severely lacking in today's "self-esteem"
driven public education.
Rather than draining the talent pool in America, home education
is likely adding some of America's brightest stars to the talent
pool. Might many of these home schoolers go on to teaching their
own children? Of course, but even if half of all home schoolers
"kept their talent home" the percentage of the other
half that are adding to America's talent pool will likely outpace
the percentage of publicly educated students doing the same.
I haven't presented any raw data here, mostly feeling and conjecture
based on modern studies, but we could easily move on to the data
itself and the vast number of studies showing the great success
of home education in training men and women for even the most
technical and high-level fields. I hope you will seriously investigate
the data backing up home education's success in this nation.
Sincerely,
David Ethell, Front Royal, VA
I appreciate the fact that you've
asked homeschoolers to "prove why [home education] may be
a success." I'd love to do just that!
My parents began home educating their three children back in 1982,
before homeschooling was even legal in the state of Virginia.
Because my mother had been a certified teacher before she was
married, she was able to register to home school us under the
Tutorial exemption of the law at that time. It was only one year
before home education became legal for all parents in Virginia,
and we witnessed the "boom" in this educational alternative.
My mother is a bright, talented woman who has never felt that
she was "sacrificing her potential" by staying home
with her children and teaching them. Indeed, she had chosen to
stay home with us before any of us were born, so your belief that
one parent staying at home with children is a "waste"
applies to homemakers as well as home educators. As a stay-at-home
mother of three (the eldest of whom I am currently home educating),
I feel that I am using my talents and abilities to the fullest
and not "wasting" one bit of my education, talent and
ambition to train my own children! My parents were able to take
their children all over the world during our years of homeschooling,
and we had the opportunity to visit England, Germany, Africa,
Mexico and Canada. Our lives were enriched by these experiences,
and we broadened our educational horizons immensely as we observed
other cultures and got to know people of all different age groups
instead of being peer-restricted all day in a classroom setting.
All of us graduated from high school at home early and earned
scholarships to college (I graduated summa cum laude with honors,
as did my brother). But the real benefits of homeschooling were
not strictly educational (although those benefits were fantastic).
What I treasure most about my homeschooling experience and hope
to give to my own children is a sense of familial closeness and
the joy of knowing your parents as your best friends. I became
very close to my mother and father and served three years as my
father's research assistant (he was an aviation historian and
published 60 books and over 2,000 magazine articles in his 49
years). I would never have had this opportunity had I been confined
to a public school classroom or the public school routine for
12 years. My time at home allowed me to grow closer to my siblings
and enjoy their company and their different viewpoints. I also
had time to visit at length with grandparents and enjoy their
teaching for many years.
I am now teaching my 4 1/2-year-old at home and am thoroughly
delighted to see him respond with great enjoyment and eagerness.
He is already reading and has progressed to 1st-grade math --
without any "pushing" or prodding on my part. He just
finds learning a complete joy -- as my parents taught me. Staying
at home with my children means that I am not "wasting"
their childhoods pursuing a career that gives my talents to others
and takes away the only time I will ever have to mold my own children,
see their imaginations grow and watch their horizons expand under
my tutelage. What greater privilege could I ask? And being at
home doesn't rob the world of my talents, if, indeed, giving my
talents to the world is supposed to be my goal. I run a successful
fashion and pattern design business out of my home (see the URL
below) and do freelance writing for several newsletters and magazines.
My first book was published in 2000 and comes out in paperback
this June ("Hot Shots" from HarperCollins). But these
"outlets" aren't what give me my greatest joy. I find
that in passing on what my own parents invested in me: time with
my children, joy in teaching the next generation and the great
delight of having a close family life and the time to share with
the community around us.
Homeschooling is far from isolating -- for the parents or the
children. It is a way we can open our eyes to the world around
us and find that we actually have time to share with others instead
of running the "rat race" and finding at the end that
we missed what was most important.
Respectfully,
Mrs. Jennie Chancey
Enterprise, Alabama
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
- - - - - -
Sense and Sensibility Clothing and Patterns
http://www.sensibility.com
winsome clothing with an old-fashioned
appeal
Thank you for issuing a challenge
to home educators to "prove why [home education] may be a
success." I am referring to your 2/24/02 issue of Parade
magazine.
After my frustration in teaching more than 25 students in each
class in public schools before my own children were born, it was
a great joy to teach my own children at home. There I could adapt
my teaching to their distinctive learning modes (auditory, visual,
hands-on, etc), and experience their excitement as they learned
something new.
The closeness we developed as a family is something I will never
regret! Being a stay-at-home mom (as well as a home schooling
mom) gave me opportunities to shape and encourage my children's
learning and creativity in ways I never imagined when we first
began to home educate them.
We taught them through high school, including some college correspondence
courses as part of their curriculum. Our oldest two children graduated
summa cum laude from college. Our youngest daughter designed her
first booka World War II 400+ page book with color photoswhen
she was 15. When she was 16, she designed another book for her
dad. By the time she entered college at 17, she was so advanced
in her abilities as a graphic designer, that after one semester
at college, we all realized that the challenging courses would
be available to her only in her senior year. So, we agreed college
was not for her!
The academic benefits to our children are common to most students
who are tutored one-on-one, so bragging on their "brilliant
brains" is not applicable. They were ordinary students who
enjoyed learning, and were given the wonderful opportunity to
explore knowledge in the safety and warmth of a loving home.
The maturity benefits were the most astounding. Our children were
not subjected to same age peer dependency. As a result, they enjoyed
being with people of all ages, and especially liked listening
to and interacting with adult conversations. "Hanging around"
adults and mature people of all nationalities and ages as those
people came into our home, gave our children a broader perspective
on the world than "hanging around" at the 7-11 or the
mall with the local teens.
We did not experience the pains of "teenage rebellion,"
nor did we as parents feel we were alienated from our children
as "old fogies." Our children became our best friends,
and they remain that to this day.
As I watch them becoming successful family-centered entrepreneurs,
rearing polite, happy children, and educating them at home, I
am well rewarded for all my parenting and home education efforts!
Sincerely,
Bettie E. Need
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