I’m attendig the CHEA conference right now (despite the fact that the Sharks are playing right now – and I’ve been putting off a post about homeschooling for a long time, and I’m kind of realizing it’s overdue. My wife and I decided to homeschool our kids.

A little background is probably in order – I graduated from high school and went to college for a couple years, but it didn’t take. I finally came to a realization at one point in my ‘school career’ where I realized that going to school was really getting in the way of my education. I was also headstrong and a pain in the butt, thinking that a degree was no more than a piece of paper. My sister is a teacher. My mom was a teacher. I can barely remember teachers that I liked.

– Continued Saturday
I was mentally interrupted last night and I’m going to continue what little thoughts that I have. Today’s keynote is by someone who deals with protecting homeschooler’s rights by monitoring legislation and legal issues that could reduce or remove a parent’s right to educate however they want. I’m a proponent of homeschooling, but I’m even more a proponent of civil rights. I sincerely believe in our right to educate how we want, speak how we want, and most especially critisize and congregate and protest however we want. I read an article some time ago about Bush’s visit to somewhere, in Ohio I believe. Some protestors arrived, wanting to exercise their right to assemble and their right to free speech, and were moved by the police and secret service to a ‘designated free speech area’. if that doesn’t frighten you to your very core, then, sadly, I feel that it’s too late. I feel like our rights have been abused and reduced and removed and the blind, toothless majority of people stand by, cheering, as we move more and more to a despotism, or socialist state.

OK, /rant.
back to my thoughts on homeschooling. When we (my wife and I) first started to discuss the possibility of homeschooling our (then) child. At first I was very against it, much more traditionalist than probably you would think. I didn’t enjoy school, I had a bad experience for most of my elementary and high school career, both academically and socially. Looking back, I think that my real fear about homeschooling was more a responsibility thing – that we, or more personally *I* was responsible for my daughter’s scholastic upbring, her educational well-being and her academic acheivment. Wow, that’s a really big responsibility. At least if she goes to public school and does poorly or gets really fucked up, then I can internally absolve myself of guilt, but if we homeschool her and something doesn’t go according to plan… well there’s no one to blame, and nowhere to point.

That’s a lot of pressure. I guess there’s something about not wanting that much responsibility, but when you think about it, we’re going to be the biggest impact on our kids and our kids’ schooling, regardless of whether we send them away to school, or do it at home. Once I had fought my fears down (or had my calm and collected wife fight them out of me I realized what an amazing opportunity this was, to be able to instill a love of learning in my kids. To teach them what’s really important – freedom, honesty, compassion, tolerance, and, I suppose, academics.

The really big resistance that most people have, or at least what they bring up is the socialization aspect of homeschooling – they feel that homeschool kids won’t be socialized as well as other kids who go to school. To this I throw out a question: When you were in school, did you like your social interactions there? Were you teased? Berated? Hit? Taunted? Sure, there were some good times, but personally, the bad far outweighed the good. This isn’t to say that this is the case for everyone, but for some kids, school is torture.

As to the socialization issue, we take our kids on field trips with our homeschool group. They play with other kids every day. They talk to people, they interact, and they socialize. The only thing they don’t get is the negative impact stuff.

More to come.

—–
COMMENT
AUTHOR: Jason [Visitor]
DATE: 05/01/2006 01:05:35 PM
When you shield your children from pain and suffering you are shielding them from the world. Yeah its a nice and rosy thought but eventually they are going to have a rather sharp adjustment when they learn the world outside isn’t so peachy. Its like the amish, they send their kids out into the world for a year to determine if they would like that or amishness. Give your kids over to public school for a year and then let them decide whether the public school experience is better.
—–