I homeschooled one of my kids for a couple of years and have met a few kids who were so educated for most of their lives. They were incredibly mature and well-spoken, in contrast to their public-school-educated peers. This post was motived by this lengthy post on X, which begins thus:
I have a bachelor’s degree in education. I have a master’s degree in music education. I spent 20 years working for the system and taught thousands of students…
And my number one piece of advice to parents is simple:
Homeschool your kids.
If you have any involvement with school-aged children, I recommend reading this article.
While I would prefer my grands be homeschooled, that they are students at a highly conservative Catholic school, where my DIL is a science teacher, isn’t terrible.
(That my DIL is a teacher there discounts their tuition enough to make it possible.)
Homeschooling is an interesting phenomenon – definitely worrisome to the Usual Suspects.
The folks I know who decided to go the homeschooling route (for the standard obvious reasons) soon began to coalesce into small groups. Parents invested time instead of money, and there were no discipline problems because any student who was not interested in learning was dropped.
An engineer father took command of teaching math; the immigrant mother taught Spanish; the lady with a love of literature taught English. They needed a place for a group of about 10 students to meet, and formed a relationship with a local church. These kinds of shared activities formed an important part of what was nominally “home” schooling. And the kids themselves started to form activities such as a drama group and sports.
Obviously, this kind of community-formation is not what our Political Class wants to see.
Bravo to all you homeschoolers, but I’m glad I didn’t have to do it. I could hardly get my daughter to practice piano for ten-fifteen minutes a day. I think it’s difficult to convincingly switch rôles from Mommy to Schoolmarm.No, thank God for Maria Montessori!
But I do like to think I can take credit for her general sophistication about art and life. I read her Bible stories, D’Aulaire’s books on Norse and Greek mythology, I memorized children’s poems by Milne and the great linguist Dr. Seuss so I could say them in the dark.
I think there’s something to be said for the schoolroom, kids seeing their peers studying, seeing everybody develop proficiency, competitiveness about grades, etc. ( I mean, I realize we’re a loooong way now from that system which used to work quite well.)