homeschooling
Homeschooling as "normal"
When our oldest daughter turned 6 and we finally had to make a decision about school, we decided we’d try our hand at homeschooling. She was already ahead of the game in many academic areas, our local elementary school is, sadly, near the bottom of the heap for Iowa elementary schools, and, frankly, I didn’t see a lot of value that could come from sending her off to school for seven hours a day every day, so it was a fairly easy decision. (I should say it seemed easy for me - my wife may have wrestled with it more, though to my perspective it was more trepidation on her part than resistance.)
I have a bit of a history with homeschooling; I attended a public kindergarten (well, two of them, actually, since we moved mid-year), but after that I was homeschooled from first grade through twelfth. Homeschooling was not exactly legal in Nebraska when we started back in the early 80’s; there was much legislative wrangling and several parents were in jail. Even after the laws were changed, there was a strong defensive mindset that was pervasive in the homeschool community, and probably rightfully so. My memory of it now, 25 years later, is that we were afraid. Afraid of the school truant officer who might show up at our door. Afraid that having a kid running around in the backyard during the school day would prompt an anonymous tip from a neighbor to social services. Afraid that something, somewhere, would go wrong, and that we’d be in legal limbo, with parents in trouble and kids in protective custody.
That feeling of fear was encouraged to an extent by those well-meaning organizations who were out there to help protect us. Organizations like the Home School Legal Defense Association did good, useful legal work; their newsletters, though, were full of horror stories of parents who’d run into legal trouble with homeschooling, and it seemed that only the families that were HSLDA members had happy endings to their stories. There were pages of helpful tips on protecting your family (“don’t open the door if they knock! Only talk through the locked screen door or step out onto the porch!"), and while they may have been useful to certain people in certain cases, to me they only seemed to add to the fear and to, of course, prompt us to renew our yearly membership in the protection plan.
Homeschoolers in those days, even through the late 80’s - early 90’s when I was a teenager, remained largely a fringe element. For every “normal” family who homeschooled, there were a half-dozen “weird” homeschoolers. Some parents were motivated to homeschool because they believed it was their God-given responsibility, and that they could do a better job than the public schools; some others, I’m sure, just used the freedom to homeschool as an excuse to keep their kids under their thumb in whatever twisted home life they had. (I remember one homeschool family who kept their kitchen cabinets locked… to keep their teenaged children out of them. Yikes.) My family teetered on the edge of “weird-homeschooler-ness” from time to time; in retrospect I believe that dalliance was driven not by an attraction to the weirdness but simply by the desire to have fellowship with people who shared some key beliefs about family.
Since starting homeschooling this year we have been very pleasantly surprised at the amount of support we get from all directions. Neighbors and people we meet around town don’t even blink when we say we’re homeschooling. The homeschooling oversight (required by law in Iowa) is provided by a homeschool assistance program that is funded by state tax dollars and run out of the basement of a local elementary school. (That sentence right there is probably enough to make any 1980’s homeschooling parent’s head explode.) The teachers who provide the oversight are full-time dedicated to helping homeschooling parents succeed in educating their children. Our daughter “goes to school” for 5 hours, one day a week, to do science and art and music and be with friends. It’s a really excellent arrangement all the way around.
The other pleasant homeschooling surprise has come as we’ve been at our church for two years now. Come in on a Sunday and you likely won’t see any families that stick out as obvious homeschoolers. But start visiting with folks and getting to know people and it seems like every time I turn around I find out that some other family is homeschooling. Sure, I knew about the one family, because their daughter goes to school on Mondays with our daughter. But that elder’s family, with the high-school-aged kid who’s always helping out somewhere? Yep, homeschoolers. The pastor with a couple of young kids? Homeschoolers. The family who keeps the kids' club organized on Wednesday nights? Yep, homeschoolers again.
And they all seem so normal. I don’t want to go overboard on the value of “seeming normal”, because if it’s the right thing to do, it doesn’t matter whether we seem normal or not - we need to do it. But in this case it’s such a blessing to have progressed over the past twenty-five years to the point where homeschooling your children is an accepted, normal, even encouraged thing to do. I can only pray that it remains so.
What we all, as homeschooling parents in 2010, should recognize, though, is the debt that we owe to my parents and the thousands like them from the previous generation who blazed the trails for us. It was their civil disobedience, their prayers, their legislative lobbying, and their steadfastness in homeschooling when it was definitely not normal that has enabled us to come to our current state of normalcy. Thank you, Dad and Mom.
Now, friends of my generation: let’s take advantage of the opportunities we’ve been given, and not mess this up.