BrianAndPamela.com

Everyone has some topic in their life where they can carry on both sides of the conversation.  It's that thing where someone finds out something about you and then the next five minutes of conversation follows pretty much the same path every single time.

For me, that conversation usually happens when people find out that Pamela homeschools our kids.  At some point, the same question always comes up.  Oh they phrase it differently sometimes, "How do you account for socialization?" or "Are you concerned about what they are missing?" or other less direct phrases.  What they are really asking is, "Aren't you concerned your kids are going to turn out to be socially inept freaks who have no clue about the real world?"  At which point I feel like shouting, "Have you seen public schools these days?  Aren't you worried that the kids there are going to turn into materialistic under-educated peer mentality zombies?"  But most of the time I just smile and say, "Not at all." 

There are plenty of surveys and studies about how homeschool children on average equal or surpass their traditional counterparts.  In academics, socially, pretty much in any way you can measure and several that are tough to measure.  I'm not going to get into it here, but go ahead and look up homeschool on Wikipedia.  It has links to several good academic sources, or just Google it and find your own.

But studies aside, I think it will be MUCH easier to raise the kind of people we want our kids to be if we don't feel like we have to fight the influences that are inherently present in Public School.

I feel that the educational standards in our public schools are really very poor.  Curriculum there tends to target the lowest common denominator. I also feel that some of the social interactions that so many people think that our kids are missing are tacitly or even explicitly encouraged by the institution and are harmful.

Children that attend public school are around teachers and other students more than they are at home, not counting sleep. I'm not confident that, especially as young as they are now, we would be able to effectively counter the attitudes of materialism, cynicism and precociousness that so many children come away from public school with.

We've watched children just a few years older than ours start out school as bright and shiny little treasures and in even a few years their personalities are forever altered.  They come home trying to act like the snotty older kids they see in school, or having been told they are not as good because they don't have the right color shoes.  Where is the educational value for a child in that?  Can supportive parents help their children through it?  Sure, but why subject a child to that if there is another option?  No child can come away from that unscathed.  "It toughens them up," a critic might say.  Does a first grader need to be toughened up?  To me that just seems like needless cruelty.  Children that young have no context to recognize that it's a stupid thing some kids do, they just know that it hurts.     

Are these attitudes something they need to see and be exposed to? Certainly, but in a controlled manner, not one where they are subsumed by it. In my view, it's not good for a child to be infected by the pop-culture "I want that" mentality. How many kids have you known or heard about that are so drawn in to that world that they get devastated when they don't get the right toy for Christmas?

Our kids are genuinely excited to get new books, new pajamas, and things they made for each other. I can't help but believe that is because we have sheltered them from the culture of materialism as much as we could. And now that they understand the basics, we can expose a little more… they have more context so we can teach them about advertising and it makes sense now, and they can see that just because something looks cool on TV or the net doesn't mean it is.

They can make judgments about what they see and are usually pretty good about saying, "that toy looks like it might be fun, but it really only does one thing, so maybe it's not worth it after all."  I almost guarantee that would have been harder if they had been exposed to every new kid fad since kindergarten.

I mentioned academics as well, because it's not just the social aspects I care about. I want our kids to be as knowledgeable as they can. Notice I didn't say "smart" because their biological capacity for intelligence is only tangentially related to how we teach them to deal with the fire hose of knowledge.

Our kids know about ancient history (ask them about Alexander, Ancient Greece, Marathon, the Persians, Pharos). Or Science (plate tectonics, volcanism, electro-magnetism and why motors work, the difference between hibernation, torpor, diapause and estivation). I'm not trying to show off about how smart my kids are because I believe ALL children are capable of and should be learning these things.  But there simply isn't time to give them all of these things in a public school setting with thirty other children.   

Languages, Literature, Poetry, Psychology, Philosophy, Public Speaking, Computers, Journalism, Photography, Martial Arts, Dance, Music, Sculpture, Painting…. these aren't things you should suddenly have tacked on to your education in high school if you decide they might be interesting and you have a free period, they are fundamental parts of ALL education. I've never seen a public school, especially a public elementary school, offer children that sort of exposure.

So some people say, "You homeschool? Aren't you worried about how they will turn out?" To which I reply, "Not nearly as much as I would be if they were in public school."