Just Enough and Nothing More

“To be normal is the ideal aim of the unsuccessful.” C.G. Jung

A blogger who is getting entirely too much attention these days wrote a blog post, “Homeschoolers: Do They Care Too Much?” (Warning, do not click over if you are in a bad mood, easily aggravated, or have a heart condition.)

In response to his rant about why homeschooling is supposed to be so horrible for kids and the world, I started a response. As these things go, it got long, so I’ll post it here.

All this talk about what “should” happen in school and education is fine and dandy. But what ultimately sold me on homeschooling was to actually see the results. I went to homeschooling conferences and park days for a few years before making a final decision about education. I talked with the parents and the teens, primarily. I wanted to see if what everyone said was true. Are homeschool kids at a disadvantage? Here’s what I noticed:

1) The teens and the parents liked each other.
2) The teens all had a pretty clear idea of what they wanted to do with their lives, and most of them were already doing them.
3) The parents and kids were all relaxed, happy, well-spoken. (Even when we disagreed a LOT.)
4) The kids were incredibly interested in life. They were enthusiastic about what they were doing in their lives and in planning for their future. (BTW, so were the parents, about their own lives, not just the kids’.)
5) The teens were not judgmental of each other, were not afraid or wary of adults, and treated the little ones well.

Now, this wasn’t just one or two of the families. This was practically all of them with a very few exceptions. I watched carefully. I was really nervous and scared that maybe I was being blind to something because the idea of homeschooling was so appealing. But over and over, the proof was in the teens. They weren’t perfect. They said mean things from time to time, and they bantered like teens do. They obsessed with their cell phones and huddled together chatting about this and that, arguing and laughing and all the things that teens do to figure themselves out. They weren’t all working to be doctors or lawyers or even trying to be rich (although a few were). But they were all accomplished in one way or another, and fully alive.

They had this way about them that I had never seen before - the geeks, jocks, musicians, brainiacs… they were all cool with each other. There are no gangs, or “us against them” mentality (granted, I chose to only attend inclusive conferences and park days). When someone acted like a jerk, they dealt with it, then moved on and forgave. They liked themselves and each other. Some were gawky and some were attractive, some were buff, others were lanky, yet, they were all cool with each other. There is a ton of social pressure in homeschool groups, and that’s to be cool to one another.

We are highly involved in our community, and I can spot homeschoolers fairly readily. It’s not about this vague lack of social skills that you’re talking about here, or about whether they know this fact or that fact, it’s a general approach to life that just doesn’t compare to what’s normal and expected in school. In that, yes, homeschoolers are weird. Whether you think that being different is good or bad, well, that’s up to you. But what I saw were people engaged in the world around them, friendly, and accepting. Even if I didn’t agree with their philosophy, I can spot homeschoolers because of how they look at life as one big learning opportunity waiting to happen. It’s amazing to see teens who think this way about the world. I wanted that for my kids. For us.

We wanted a close family, and smart kids, but we also wanted to be not stressed. We wanted to have kids who were comfortable in the world around them, non-judgemental, and got along with people even if they weren’t perfect. We were willing to pick the best choice, no matter what it was going to be.

The proof was in the pudding, so to speak. Philosophically I was trained to see how school was supposed to create open-mindedness and allow a truly liberal and accepting education. But when I saw where the rubber hit the road, the proof just wasn’t there that homeschooling didn’t do that, nor was the proof there that school was necessarily the best place to get this kind of life experience and education.

The truth is this: kids and families who go through public school (and even private schools to a certain degree) have to struggle and fight to stay in a good place, and to maintain involved in the world around them. Kids and families who homeschool are naturally in a place to have these things, without fighting. Why choose to fight if we don’t have to? If see two lines at a grocery store, one long and one short, which one would you choose? If you get a job offer and one has a comfortable working environment, and the other requires longer hours and lots of work at home, for the same pay, which would you choose?

We knew we wanted a liberal, open-minded, accepting, and involved life for our kids. In the world around us, not just in school. And we just couldn’t see how we’d have enough time to have all these things without killing ourselves, if they went to public school.

That’s not to say that getting a good, liberal, strong education in school is not doable. Of course it is. Plenty of great kids come out of public school to show that it can happen. But the proof shows that in order for kids to do well in school, parents and famlies have to work their asses off. And I don’t mean in a “good-for-you” growing strong kind of way. I’m talking backbreaking, sleep-depriving, and hitting a wall kind of way. Alternately, in order for kids to do well in life without school, it takes a much lower amount of stress and less time. Homeschoolers can also get enough sleep, have more flexibility, have a lot of fun, and travel whenever they want - and still get the same, if not better, results than they would get in school.

So, whatever the larger social effects are supposed to be, I don’t see it. Even the kids who are “sheltered” and “isolated.” They aren’t any more awkward or confused as high school kids who are suddenly out in the real world of work and college. Where is the proof that homeschooled kids are worse off than that?  I don’t see all the things people say homeschooling does to kids. Homeschoolers have been around for a while, and although there might be a few examples of kids who are “bad off” because of being homeschooled, overall kids are doing great. Where are all the kids who are so bad off because of homeschooling? If homeschooling was so bad, wouldn’t we see more and more homeschooled kids causing trouble? Dragging down our society? Actually doing something to hurt our world? And as for the families who “fail” at homeschooling, and they go back to school or have other problems, I have yet to see a situation where the problem was actually homeschooling related. Every case we see in the news or hear about from our friends, or even see in person - these families have much bigger problems. Homeschooling might have uncovered them by sweeping the dirt away, but they were there before. Homeschooling is not the problem. Something else is.

You may not like how people are living their lives, or how they have made choices that don’t jive with your idea of what a good choice is. But the truth is homeschoolers are doing well. The ones who aren’t, go to school, and then you got them back. You can blame their problems on the fact that they were homeschooled instead of on the fact that schools really can’t handle kids who are “different”, but it doesn’t negate the fact that homeschooling is an amazing way to become an educated and worldly child, teen, and then adult, in today’s post-information age. And there is no proof that parents leaving school to homeschool hinders or harms public school on any level, even if all the logic we can muster points us to the fact that it should have an effect. The empirical evidence just isn’t there to support this argument.

My approach to researching educational options was to focus on what the actual results were, and figure out best way to get the results we wanted. Taking that approach, I was forced to admit homeschooling is simply one of the best ways to achieve a “good” liberal, scientific, worldly education, if that’s truly what a family wants to achieve. Anyone who has an open mind, and looks at the actual evidence will come to this conclusion too, simply because that’s what the facts point to, regardless of what we might want the truth to be.

Related posts:

1. Are Homeschoolers Selfish?
2. Homeschooling On The Rise, and the Media Doesn’t Care
3. Online High School Effects Homeschoolers
4. Pizza Hut Reading Program for Homeschoolers
5. University of California, Riverside, and Homeschoolers