Friday, December 24, 2010

Wednesday, December 22, 2010

Why You Should Homeschool Your Child

Any parent who presently homeschools could probably write books just listing reasons for removing their children from the public school system. This essay will attempt to elucidate just a few of those reasons.

It seems that only a little time needs to pass between controversies regarding curricular content in public school districts across the country. Whether the topics are evolution vs. creation or sex education vs. abstinence, school boards are constantly embroiled in heated confrontations about one issue or another. Homeschool parents can thank God not only for the certainty of teaching their child the right side of any such discussion, but also because they can completely avoid the exhausting emotional battles that their coreligionists, still trapped inside the government school system, must undertake in vain attempts to save their children from the dominant paradigm in our prevailing system of education.

Adjunct to preoccupation about curricular content in the classroom is concern about the quality of that content. Once upon a time, children in school read the classics. If a more modern work was to be read, then it would be chosen from a corpus of work that had survived some modicum of competition and criticism through the years, from authors such as Charles Dickens, Rudyard Kipling, T.S. Eliot or Ernest Hemingway. Now textbooks are crammed with stories and poems that agree with whatever politically-correct gospel is presently espoused in universities and teacher certification programs. Homeschool parents, armed only with a library card, can rest assured that their child will only learn from the greats.

Homeschool parents not only save their children from undesirable content but also from undesirable peers. It’s not news to anyone that there are a number of real, physical dangers present every day in our public school system. School bullies and deranged shooters top the list of potential threats. Furthermore, many schools, both urban and rural, are rife with drug problems and addicted teens. Sexual promiscuity among our youth is also problematic and exacerbated by the public school environment, which facilitates “hook-ups”. A significant fraction of teenage girls becomes pregnant before graduating high school and many of them have also contracted sexually transmitted diseases. Homeschool parents can breathe a sigh of relief each day as they consider how many bullets, both figurative and literal, that their children have dodged by staying at home to learn.

Homeschooling also saves children from losing that most precious non-renewable resource: time. Any public school teacher or student can attest to the great amounts of time lost and wasted during the average school day. Some of this wastage is inevitable due to the format. No one would deny the necessity, given the environment, of taking roll at the beginning of each class and making sure everyone is where they are supposed to be. Certainly, announcements are important to keep the student body informed (though a brief listen to morning announcements at your local school would also surely demonstrate that some of these constitute more wasted time.) Other losses of time are less easily defended: pep rallies or the lackluster, guaranteed-not-to-offend-anyone holiday celebrations. Necessary or not, the end result is that great swaths of your child’s academic day is used for non-academic reasons. Homeschooling not only uses your child’s time more effectively, but it gives time back to the parents and lets them choose how to utilize it. Everything done in seven hours of public school can be done in four hours at home. After lunch, parents can decide on more academics, more family time, or that opportunity longed-for but seldom seen in public schooling: real-life application of skills learned in school.

This essay is not an exhaustive list of the reasons for homeschooling but hopefully underlines some of the more dramatic justifications considered by parents when making the momentous decision as to how their children should be schooled. Certainly, the above demonstrates that the decision is more than just an accommodation for certain books or environments, but truly a determination of a child’s safety, both academic and personal.