There are some good conversations going on in the comments on the recent post about the "one-room" schooling techniques and in the post about deficits in the homeschool.
I want to talk a little bit about perceived deficits in the homeschool.
What are you comparing your homeschool to, anyway?
If you think you are comparing it to an institutional school, do you have a realistic idea of what goes on in your average institutional school? Sure, many high school students have access to excellent teachers and a great peer group, but even in the good schools there are often mediocre teachers and bad classes. I went to a pretty good high school, and I encountered some really excellent teachers there -- my French teacher was absolutely top-of-the-line, my English literature teacher was memorable and engaging, my chemistry teacher could have taught Bill Nye how not to bore people. I learned a lot in those classes. But I also had some really bad teachers -- substandard ones, or mean ones, or incompetent ones, or lazy ones, or possibly-mentally-ill ones -- whose classes were a waste of time or worse. A lot of it is hit-or-miss. Few schools of any kind excel at everything.
Is the problem that you cannot give enough one-on-one time to each student? How much one-on-one time do you think students get in an institutional school? It is not the equivalent of a full-time tutor every day of the week.
Certainly there are efficiencies in an institutional school that a large-family homeschool cannot match. When one teacher teaches all the English classes and the curriculum is always the same, he just does not have to spend as much time on preparing and planning as we parents do when we are designing our curriculum and schedule to fit a family which forms a new configuration basically every year. When there is a fully stocked chemistry lab available all the time, laboratory prep time is minimized. It's easy to put together group learning experiences, like discussing literature or putting on plays or holding debates or setting up games, when there are many other students at the same level.
But there are different kinds of institutional schools with different strengths -- set up purposely! -- and that's often something we celebrate. Magnet schools! There's a performing-arts K-8 public school up the street from me, and within close walking distance is a small public high school specially organized for students who speak Spanish in their homes. There are language immersion schools and schools designed as interventions for students at risk of dropping out. There are vocational schools which specialize in turning out students who are already prepared to enter the skilled-labor workforce at age eighteen. And yes, there are college-preparatory schools. They all serve different purposes, promise a different educational experience, and turn out young people who are prepared for life in different ways. Even within those broad categories there are wide variations in style.
And this is a good thing. People don't typically complain that their child graduated from a college-prep program without also learning in school how to rebuild an engine (though maybe they ought to). It's not the college placement rate, but the job placement rate and job performance, that we're interested in when we measure whether a vocational-technical high school program is adequately preparing its students.
The homeschool, too, has its own essence, its own reason for being, its own niche in the educational ecosystem.
The essence of homeschooling is not academic excellence (although homeschools can provide that). The essence of homeschooling is not preparation for a job (although homeschools can provide that). The essence of homeschooling is not "special" education for students with particular challenges that make institutional schools a poor fit or a toxic environment (although homeschools can provide that). The essence of homeschooling is not that it can set its own schedule rather than being tied to external ones (although homeschools can provide that). The essence of homeschooling is not its freedom from externally imposed ideological structures (although homeschools can provide that).
The essence of homeschooling is simply that it happens within the family.
That schooling happens as an outgrowth of family life and family work.
That the young person is surrounded by people with whom he has meaningful and permanent relationships: parents, siblings, perhaps grandparents and cousins, friends who are connected to him through a web of relationships between families rather than a single point.
That the "curriculum" and schoolday is designed neither exactly to suit him as an individual with the perfect environment for his own personal success, nor to shove him along in a faceless crowd that on average receives an education adequate enough to keep trouble away... but for the best interests of the family as a whole, the innate natural grouping of the human organism, the grouping in which we can truly be known as human persons and in which we can learn the art of balancing needs and wants of the self and others.
That is the essence of homeschooling. That is its specialty. That is where it shines.
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H. said to me yesterday, "My standard answer, when someone asks me, 'So, how is the homeschooling going for you?' is "Great. I love having my kids with me all day.' It's true, and it's the reason I do it." Even though H. is confident that she is providing a really excellent education to her three children, she said, it isn't the academic excellence that she chooses to emphasize. Because that isn't the primary reason she does it.
I laughed and said, "I could never get away with saying that I love having my kids with me all day. Especially if it had been one of those days. You know I have no poker face." But I went on: "My standard answer doesn't have anything to do with academics either. I mean, if they press me I say so, and sometimes I tell them that I enjoy the work of planning the curriculum and things, which is true.
"But most of the time I tell people, 'What I really love about homeschooling is that my children spend all day surrounded by their siblings, and that they have wonderful relationships with each other.' Which is also true.
"Sometimes I get the response, 'Oh, my kids drive each other crazy if they have to spend ten minutes in the same room.' But it isn't hard for people to understand that if their kids spent lots of time together, they would probably understand each other better. Most people get that."
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Why do homeschoolers judge themselves so poorly, so often? I really think it's because we are constantly judging ourselves based on external standards, sometimes imaginary ones, and often ones in which the homeschooling paradigm doesn't make sense.
We shouldn't judge ourselves against the standards of the urban vo-tech high school, or against the wonderful parish school, or the impressive classical charter school out in the suburbs, or the neighborhood public school.
We definitely shouldn't judge our homeschools against the imaginary standard of an imaginary school that somehow provides the best of all those worlds: immersion in a foreign language, and valuable real-world hands-on job skills, and a broad liberal-arts education, and time to go deep into the subjects that are most loved, and an opportunity to learn to play a musical instrument, and connections with other young people who live in the same neighborhood, and education centered within the family's own system of values and philosophies, and preparation for the best colleges, all at once.
Nor should we judge our homeschools against the imaginary standard made up of all the best things we read on the blogs of other homeschools, and none of their drawbacks, because who wants to write at length about those? (Face it, homeschoolbloggers, we like to brag about our good ideas, not our bad ones, unless we can do it while sounding really Witty and Gritty and Real.) So, please, let's not fret because we are not able to keep nature notebooks from age four through eighteen, and have all of our children in Suzuki lessons, and have a working wood shop, and collect and use all the official Montessori-method practical-life learning materials, and read the entire Ambleside book lists to the children, and co-school twice a week with another family, and have a field trip three times a month to a local museum/theater/zoo, and operate a working family business wherein the children will learn the Real Meaning of Money, and send them all to the National Spelling Bee... because nobody else is doing all that either. We can pick one or two things and do them really well and create massively cool experiences out of them. We can't do it with everything.
We are families. Families! As different as families can be.
We need to set our own standards for ourselves, and meet those.
That's all.
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