by Mary & Michael Leppert

PART 1

More Home Than School

Today’s homeschooling is far more about “home” than “school.” Few Americans today have the close-knit family life that so many Americans once had—before compulsory education pulled the children from their parents’ responsibility, beginning in 1852 in Massachusetts .

Children who attend school are raised by strangers more than by their parents. Family circles are more loose and ephemeral than ever before. In the past 150 years, schools have gained an increasing stranglehold on culture while families have lost more and more influence over their children. Is this a coincidence?

Many modern families consider eating a meal together unusual. And more often than not, they spend their “together” time watching television or a movie rather than looking at each other while discussing and listening to what other family members have to say. Compared to Americans of the early 1800s, modern families in general are strangers to each other.

Regaining Traditional Values

Homeschooling affords the families who value this traditional child-parent relationship a way to regain their own family culture and closeness. Teaching your own children academic subjects as well as your religious, spiritual, cultural, moral, and ethical beliefs is the heart and soul of homeschooling today. Watching a movie or television show is a passive function in which observers view a “third party” rather than relating to one another.

You Are Homeschooling Already
You already know how to homeschool. You knew what your child needed and how he or she should progress before your child was 6 years old. Nothing has changed. If you are talking, seeing, hearing, or playing with your child, you are doing a simplified version of home “schooling.”

Now, add to this interaction a planned activity, such as “playing” with simple addition/subtraction facts using sticks, blocks, or coins; “playing” with the phonetic sounds of English (as the precursor to learning to read); or “playing” with crayons or pencils to develop the early fine-motor skill necessary for much later handwriting. You are now home “schooling” your very young child in the “three R’s,” that foundation of academic knowledge that early Americans learned at home, before mandatory schooling. All you need to do is develop a sense of connectedness with your own past and continue parenting.

Homeschooling is simply a matter of finding out what your “school-age” child (over age 6) needs and then becoming resourceful. This information is readily obtainable in today’s world, due to the growth of homeschooling, the widespread existence of good educational stores, and the phenomenon of the Internet. In most U.S. towns and cities, you can find a series of workbooks for math, reading, and other academic subjects in many large grocery and discount stores. We are not saying that this is the sum total of academics in homeschooling, but it could be that easy.

If you have read this far, you either are interested in “bringing your children home” for any of a variety of reasons or have already done so. You are taking the first step to regaining traditional values in your life. Whether you are a single parent with one child, or married with six or more children, or somewhere in between, homeschooling is the way to make your family circle closer, more authentic, and valuable to all of you. You’ll find that “academic education” is a relatively small part of the entire picture. Often families come to homeschooling because of a negative experience at “school,” only to find that homeschooling affords them not just a wonderful education, but closer relationships, less peer dependency, deeper spiritual or religious values, and a resurgence of their family uniqueness.

Homeschooling Is the Traditional Way of Educating
Homeschooling today is actually a return to the truly traditional method of children being instructed by their parents. In the 1700s and 1800s, members of our society were less diverse than we are today. Most held relatively similar Judeo-Christian religious beliefs and shared more or less the same value system. It was understood that one’s children studied the Bible and learned their basic moral and ethical values at home, along with the elementary subjects necessary for further education. The expected and anticipated way of life was that all elementary aspects of life were taught by the parents. Children had to learn the three R’s before they were accepted into school. Times have changed; we think maybe people have not.

Thirty-year veteran Manhattan junior high school teacher, the late John Taylor Gatto, states in his book Dumbing Us Down, that it takes an average of 120 hours to teach a child to read. He goes on to say that the elongation of this process in America came about as a result of some teachers’ organizations wishing to create job security. Instead of teachers exclusively continuing in their role of imparting higher forms of information, the imparting of the basic information became “complicated,” requiring “specialists” and “experts” trained to do so over a long period of time. Slowly, over a many-year span, each bit of information became smaller and more repetitive.

If Homeschooling Is for Your Family, Then What?
Now that we have hopefully, established that you are “qualified” to teach your own child the academic subjects at the elementary level—and beyond—what next? You have to ascertain whether it is right for your family and yourself. Parents whose children are or have been in a school setting, whether public, private, or parochial, will have different considerations from those whose children have not yet attended school. Let us discuss the decision-making process for each one separately. An effective method frequently recommended for decision-making in general is to list pros and cons of the possible change. Since the whole family is involved, it’s important to consider the pluses and minuses for your child, you and your spouse and your family lifestyle.

If Your Child Is in School
We suggest that you begin thinking about how you and your child feel about his or her school experience. You are probably dissatisfied, or you would not be considering a change to homeschooling. First, track your dissatisfaction to its source(s) before you make any decision, homeschooling or otherwise. The simplest way to sort out your family’s feelings and thoughts on this issue is to take a sheet of notebook paper, draw a line vertically down the center and write “Pros” as the left column heading and “Cons” on the right.

Your Child
Place the subheading “Child” on the next line and list, as honestly as you can, the positive and negative aspects of school from your child’s standpoint. Don’t omit anything. Include sports programs, music programs, anything that has importance to him and his development. Take into consideration who she is and what sort of person you would like to help her grow up to be (from moral, ethical, and personality points of view). If you don’t know how your child feels about school, ask! The process of homeschooling entails lots of talking and listening between parents and child. Just as with all other skills in life, “practice makes perfect” applies to communicating, too.

You and Your Spouse
Next, start a new page using the same format and headings, but make the subheading for the two of you. List positive and negative elements of school from your viewpoints. If your child’s school is rife with drug use, violence, lackadaisical teachers, less-than-acceptable performance on standardized tests, and so forth, the cons list will fill rapidly. If your child’s school experience includes a highly-skilled favorite teacher, a large budget for materials and special programs, and so on, the pros list will contain these. Your good/bad lists may well be equal in length.

Your Family Lifestyle
Next, consider the pros and cons of school in terms of your lifestyle issues. What will life be like if you and your child are home together all day? Think carefully about this, especially if you have been working outside the home for a few years and are now contemplating becoming a stay-at-home parent. Some of the lifestyle changes that happen when you begin homeschooling may be very welcome; others may not be. Now is the time to think carefully about it. As above, list the positive and negative changes that you think will occur if you change your child’s education situation from school to home.

Remember that teaching your child at home, one-on-one, takes only about two to three hours per day—not the six to eight s/he is used to in school. There are many studies showing that up to 80 percent of school time is nonacademic. You can teach children in grades 1 to 8 all they need in only about three hours per day, supplementing here and there for extra subjects you want to delve into, perhaps art history, drawing, or pottery. If you have an unusual work schedule, you can skip two weekdays and teach Saturday and Sunday or teach extra hours for a few days and then reduce the time to two to three hours per day again. It is wonderful to discover how flexible and fun life can be when you’re removed from the constraints of a rigid timetable!

After you’ve listed the positive and negative effects that discontinuing schooling will have on your lifestyle, do the same for your child’s lifestyle. If you and your mate are both working full time outside the home, one of you may have to alter your work schedule or even change jobs to homeschool. If you work days and your mate works second or third shift, homeschooling can easily be accommodated within this schedule. In many instances, the second income is used mostly to finance expenses relating to that extra job and the child’s school attendance, and many expenses can be erased when one parent and the child remain at home.

Although it’s more commonly the mother who stays home, fathers can teach as well as mothers! Also, a professional mom may make substantially more than the dad, or the father may simply welcome the opportunity to stay home with his child for a change. Dads often miss out on enjoyable aspects of child rearing because they are usually the breadwinners throughout the child’s life. In the American colonial period, fathers taught their sons from about the age of 10 or 11 in the ways of the world and commerce as they taught them farming, smithing, or other family business — no matter what the boy eventually chose for an occupation. While modern-day fathers often think of teaching the children as “woman’s work,” that concept did not exist prior to the 1900s.

Your Spouse
If your mate is vitally involved in decisions of this type, have him or her create a separate list of pros and cons—without input from you. Then compare and discuss your separate lists. It’s best that you “sleep” on your lists for a few days and talk again. If time is of the essence, however, you may have to make a tough decision quickly.

Let us assume that each of you filled about two pages with pros and cons from every point of view in your family. Take a good, long look at what is listed before you and answer these questions:

• Is homeschooling necessary in my life?
• Feasible?
• Desirable?
• For all concerned?
• You & your Spouse?
• Your child?

  At this point, the decision has been made. By the time you distill the emotions and logistics down to these bare bones—two or three pages of black and white—you can see the writing on the wall. If your decision is to homeschool, what remains is implementing the necessary changes. If your decision is not to homeschool, then you will proceed to finding the best educational solution for you—private school, different public school, changes within the current school. Sometime in the future you may again consider taking the teaching reins.

If Your Child Has Never Attended School

The situation is completely different for the child and parent who have not yet been involved in school. As we demonstrated above, you have actually begun homeschooling without realizing it. Games you play to keep your baby or toddler content are beginning homeschooling exercises. Counting games, shape-and-color games, and sound games followed by word games build the foundation to what homeschoolers do on a “larger” scale in “grades” 1 to 12. Families who have never been involved with school, seldom think in grade (or age) terminology; they view each child as unique. For example, your child may be a “first-grade reader” but a “third-grade mathematician” and should be taught accordingly.

If your child has never attended school, you have by far, the easier route to take in continuity and adjustment. If you have been at home all during this time, you probably know your child so well by the time s/he is five or six that your home-educating experience is likely to be a seamless transition. You won’t have to quit a job, find another, or work from home. You’ll have no need to adjust to a sun-time day to replace some time-clock world. You won’t have to deal with negative social “issues” often born of schooling, and your child won’t need to take time off from academic work to adjust to the change.

If your child has been cared for by someone else while you were working, you can begin really getting to know her now. Observe her more closely than you had time to before. Interact with your young child and see how she moves from one interesting thing to another all day long. Unless someone stops this flow of curiosity, it will continue on its own. You can take the time to read to her now, play “math” games, and just be involved with her. Try to train yourself to remain interested for long periods of time. Prepare yourself mentally to enjoy your child’s company, and both of you will benefit.

[TO BE CONTINUED]

[Howard Gardner is an American developmental psychologist and a professor at Harvard University. He has held various research positions there since the late 1970s.

Gardner is best known for his theory of multiple intelligences, originally presented in his 1983 book Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences. Gardner retired from teaching in 2019.  He continues his research and writing, including many blogs.

While a parent’s main focus on this topic might be for the benefit of the children, adults gain life skills from knowledge of the multiple intelligences. You can gain career guidance from knowing the main intelligences that you possess. You understand yourself and your spouse more clearly as you analyze your personality and inner self through this prism.

Main Intelligence vs. Main Learning Style
According to Gardner, the difference between the main Intelligence and your main Learning style is that the Intelligence is an intellectual ability and a Learning Style is the way in which an individual approaches a range of tasks.

Original 7 Intelligences
In 1983, the Harvard Developmental Psychologist, Howard Gardner, put forth his theory of 7 multiple intelligences in his book “Frames of Mind”. Here is the list of those 7:

Logical-mathematical intelligence
People with this intelligence as their primary,

• Demonstrate mathematical aptitude   
• Like problem-solving and understanding what makes things tick
• Enjoy puzzles and manipulatives
• Gravitate toward computer technology

Linguistic intelligence (aka Word Smart)

• Creative writing
• Debates & Public Speaking
• Enjoys words and word games
• Likes reading & Spelling

Spatial Intelligence

• Ability to envision objects in the mind’s eye & move them or examine them
• City Planners and architects need this intelligence to perform their work
• Dancers have this intelligence well-developed
• Da Vinci and other painters also possess a high degree of spatial intelligence

Musical Intelligence

• Might have perfect pitch or perfect relative pitch
• Sees rhythmic patterns
• Enjoy the SOUND of language, such as poetry
• Good singing voice. Sensitive to mood and nuance of music

Bodily-kinesthetic Intelligence

• Excels at sports, has good fine-motor skills
• Likes to move; dance, wiggle
• Using a bouncy ball for a chair; hand grippers aid learning
• Has excellent control over his body
• Learns best through movement

Intrapersonal Intelligence (Self Smart)

• Likes to spend time along, thinking
• Prefers working alone
• Good at understanding self
• Learns best through self-exploration, reflection, journaling

Interpersonal Intelligence (People Smart)

• Good communicator
• Diplomatic Empathetic
• Likes group projects
• Good negotiator. Has lots of friends

Later, Gardner added 2 more to the original 7:
Naturalistic Intelligence

• Ability to deal with elements of the environment in detail
• Deep concern for the environment
• Like to be in nature as much as possible
• Excel at identifying plants – natural leaders & authors of foraging books, etc.

Existential Intelligence

• Deep sensitivity & curiosity about the meaning of existence
• One of the most complex Intelligences in Gardner’s research
• Are comfortable discussing serious questions and strive to find answers
• Includes desire to explore & answer what happens after death

by Richard J. Prystowsky

During our college’s first two weeks of a Fall semester a few years ago, I dealt with an incident at our college that caused me to reflect on the relationship between my homeschooling life and my college work life. For years, when our kids were young, I felt that my growth as an educator resulted largely from what homeschooling was teaching me about healthy learning paths and from what my mainstream educational life was teaching me about unhealthy learning paths. I had become, one might say, a radical homeschooler who was nearly one hundred percent committed to following unschooling paths. Slowly, however, my certainty about radical unschooling began to waver. As I’ve grown older and have continued to reflect upon what I think I know, I feel more and more akin to the persona in Bob Dylan’s song “My Back Pages,” who sings, “Ah, but I was so much older then; I’m younger than that now.” Let me explain.

During the first week of classes, a young woman student paid me an office visit. She was, to say the least, irate. She had hoped to take a Calculus I class from us, as well as an engineering class in Statics. The prerequisites for Calc I are college trigonometry and college algebra; the prerequisite for Statics is the first course in a three-course sequence in engineering physics. Last spring, this student had taken a college trigonometry class, in which she had earned a “D.” She had never taken a college algebra class. For some reason, although she clearly had not satisfied the prerequisites for Calc I, she wanted to take that class anyway. Somehow, through an error on someone’s part, she was allowed to enroll in Calc I. Her being a currently enrolled Calc I student helped her successfully challenge the prerequisite for Statics and thus win a seat in that class, too.

Shortly before the semester began, someone at the college who was working on discovering mistakes made with respect to prerequisites not having been met, caught the initial mistake in this student’s registration. Subsequently, the student was dropped from both Calc I and Statics. Enraged at hearing this news, she came to me to appeal the decision.

Throughout our conversation, the student remained adamant that she was right and that we were wrong. She repeatedly told me that she could do the required math. Repeatedly, I tried to explain that, from the college’s point of view, she had yet to demonstrate that such was the case, and that, therefore, we concluded that it was in her best educational interest for her to be dropped from Calc I and Statics, since she stood a good chance of not doing well in them. I explained that we hoped that, instead, she would register for a math class more suited to her level of mathematical proficiency. Remaining intent upon proving to us that we were wrong about her mathematical abilities and that she was right, at one point she said — or, rather, nearly screamed — something to the effect of, “I know what’s best for my education!”

Early in the second week of classes, this student came to see me again. She had retaken the math placement exam in an effort to prove her case, but she had not scored highly enough to place her into Calc I. I sent her to talk with the Math Dept. Chair. I don’t know precisely what he told her, but somehow he seems to have convinced her that we were in fact acting in her best interest by not allowing her to continue on an educational path that she had insisted upon taking but that we felt would most likely lead her to fail. In other words, we had indeed intruded upon her learning path because, contrary to her initial belief, in this instance we, and not she, knew what was best for her education. Accepting our decision, this student registered for a lower-level math class.

But more than that, she now seemed a changed person when she returned to my office after having talked with the Math Dept. Chair. She was calm, and she expressed what I felt was genuine gratitude that someone had taken the time to help her understand why, mathematically, she wasn’t yet prepared to take higher-level math classes. Now enrolled in what for her is a more appropriate math class, this student seems to have moved on.

Although I, too, have moved on, I continue to be struck by the student’s initial claim that, in terms of her own education, she knew best. As I reflected on her statement, I kept thinking about the differentiation that my two homeschooled children (now both in college) make between unschooling and what they call “non-schooling.” In their view, unschooling, like freedom, entails restrictions and structure, however minimal or non-traditional they might be. Non-schooling, like license, connotes an absence of restrictions and structure. In my kids’ view, non-schoolers at best, do little or nothing to enrich their own learning, and their parents act irresponsibly by allowing this state of affairs to persist. We hear about the worst of such cases when a news report about severely neglected children informs us that the children were homeschooled. “No, they weren’t,” my kids would say. “They weren’t homeschooled, and they weren’t even unschooled. They were non-schooled.”

This distinction having been duly noted, I nevertheless wondered about my own previous, more or less rigid position with respect to unschooling, in which I understood unschooling-oriented, child-led learning to mean that we parents and other adults ought to stay out of a child’s way when it comes to the child’s attempts to forge a learning path of her own. As the case of the student with a problematic math course placement reminded me, we need to ask ourselves if we are always necessarily doing our child a favor by staying out of her educational way. Of course, by choosing to homeschool and, in particular, to unschool, we have hardly stayed out of our child’s educational way; in fact, we have placed her on a very particularly directed educational path — one that often lacks clear structure or direction, to be sure, but a distinct and chosen path nonetheless. In short, we parents act from a position of knowing (or thinking that we know) what is best for our child when we decide to homeschool her.

That having been said, I do not mean to imply that we should ever force our child to learn something that he adamantly does not want to learn. In fact, we should never do so (unless our child is in dire straits and needs to learn something in order to be free of danger). Let us remind ourselves of how little desire we have to further our education in a subject matter that we dislike but about which we are forced to endure learning. As an old Jewish ethical teaching instructs us, we should not do to others that which we find hateful if done to us.

Also, despite my recommending that you sometimes get in your child’s educational way, I urge you, my fellow homeschooling parents, to allow your child to pursue learning paths that he finds worthwhile, whether or not you also find them worthwhile, unless he is likely to harm himself or others. For, you don’t want to quash your child’s natural learning proclivities or, as Thomas Armstrong or James Hillman might say, harm the development of your child’s natural genius. Ultimately, even though you might need to intrude upon your child’s learning agenda, you can still trust his inner genius to help guide him into meaningful learning pursuits, whether or not you understand the nature of these pursuits.

Nevertheless, sometimes you will need to step in. With respect to the student registered for inappropriate classes, for us to have allowed this student to remain in classes in which she most likely would not succeed would have been tantamount to your allowing your child to touch a hot stove were she to want to find out what heat feels like on her hand. Surely, you would stop your child and then, in a safe and healthy way, help her reach an understanding of heat. However much our student and your child might be convinced that they always know best when it comes to their own education, we know that we would be acting like cruel non-schoolers were we to allow harm to come to these persons when in advance we knew about the potential harm and were in a position to prevent it.

So, how to proceed on a course of occasional, purposeful, justified educational intrusion? Fortunately, as a homeschooling parent, you have many promising options not available as often or as readily to parents whose children are in mainstream learning environments (public or otherwise). For example, you might be able to arrange for your child to spend extended amounts of time with professionals who are working in fields that have captured your child’s interest; you might be able to take long car journeys in which you and your family can explore different regions and meet all sorts of interesting persons; your child might be able to serve as an apprentice to someone whose work interests her/him; and so on. Getting in your child’s educational way need not mean that you be or become an unwelcome intruder; in the world of teaching and learning, pedagogical trespassers often play a vital role.

If I had the time and freedom at the college that I had at home when we homeschooled our kids, I would have told the student who had come to see me that, before taking any more math classes, she might first want to spend some extended time with engineers, on the job site, not only to see if she really wanted to pursue a career in engineering (she had told me that this is her goal), but also to receive from them some useful educational information and advice—for example, information concerning the kind of math that they use in their work and advice on how she ought to pursue her own studies in math. I have a feeling that this student was a changed person after having talked with the Math Dept. Chair in part because he spoke her language, insofar as he and she talked mathematics, whereas she and I had talked procedures and regulations. Subsequently, the Statics instructor talked with her about the use of math in engineering. I wonder if she now willingly accepts our intrusion into her scheduling plans at least in part because, having spent some quality time with these two instructors — persons in her own fields of study who demonstrated to her a genuine interest in her educational well-being — she has begun to realize that, as did her mentors and models, she, too, needs to follow a particular sequence of courses if she wants to achieve her educational goals.

Taking this limited case as your cue, imagine the possibilities for positive educational intrusion (otherwise known as “responsible parental involvement”) that you could have with your child. Unrestrained by class periods, age segregation, routine situations of humiliation and punishment, and all of the other problematic conditions that mark both public and private forms of traditional schooling, you and your child are free to explore learning in depth, with joy, at your leisure, without pressure. With so much to gain from this mutually healthy learning path, why would you not get in your child’s educational way (or he in yours)?

Of course, one of your key questions will remain, “How will I know when to be in the way and when to stay out of the way?” At this point in my own growth, other than feeling sure that you should step in if you know that your child is about to cause harm or be harmed, I have to say that I’m not sure how to answer this question for you. I’m not even sure how to answer this question for my wife and me. Our son, who is a math major, studied very little math when he homeschooled. Although he has told us that he wishes that he had studied more math, he also acknowledges that, had we tried to force him to have done so, he probably wouldn’t have been happy and the outcome might not have been good. We all agree that we did the best that we could, trusting in each other to look out for our son’s educational well-being; in the final analysis, we simply don’t know what might have been the best course of action for any of us to have taken.

However, we also all agree that, more than anything else, my son’s homeschooling journey prepared him well for college by giving him the freedom to learn subjects deeply, helping him understand how to form and then ask good analytical questions, and, most important, providing him with a nurturing, validating, loving environment within which to pursue his learning desires. It’s likely that his not having studied math while at home and his not having taken tests put him at a disadvantage (even if only slightly) when it came time for him to begin his college math classes. On the other hand, the self-confidence that he developed as a homeschooler and the enduring love of learning that continues to mark him as a student have helped him to become a highly successful math major. Currently, he is taking Linear Algebra and Calc I, and he is working on special projects with two of the Math Department’s most distinguished professors — at their invitation. He hopes to transfer to UC Berkeley in the fall of 2007; there, he plans to continue his studies in theoretical math. He also is a very noble, funny, loveable, mature human being, with a heart of gold. I think that, all things considered, his homeschooling journey has served him well, all of our uncertainties notwithstanding.

Ultimately, I hope that the student with the initial math course misplacement has come to understand that it was because we genuinely wanted to do what was best for her that we dropped her from Calc I and Statistics and helped her register for a math class that will better help her reach her academic goals. A number of individuals at the college spent quite a few hours helping her do the right thing. Intent upon helping her succeed, we weren’t afraid to intrude upon her educational decision-making, to get in her educational way. In fact, we understood that, knowing what we knew about her case, we were responsible for stepping in to help and would have been acting irresponsibly had we done otherwise.

Similarly, I ask that you, my fellow homeschooling/unschooling parents, not be afraid to get in your child’s way if you believe that doing so is in her best educational interest. As did our student, your child might initially become upset and accusatory; in time, though, if you both remain open to discussion and open to changing your minds if the evidence leads you to do so, you and your child should be able to reach some healthy, mutually rewarding common ground. As I’ve suggested throughout this column, I’m not sure that I can pinpoint exactly when (and how) you should step in and when you should stay away. However, I can share with you my sincere belief that it’s okay if we’re not always certain about what to do. Our being uncertain, however, doesn’t mean that we cannot or should not act on behalf of our children; rather, it means that we should act on their behalf with a bit more caution and humility than we might have had when we were younger and more certain of our ideas and ways.

Having realized that, as we grow older and accumulate more life experiences, we know far less than we thought we had known, we come a little closer to understanding what the poet means when he sings,

Yes, my guard stood hard when abstract threats
Too noble to neglect
Deceived me into thinking
I had something to protect
Good and bad, I define these terms
Quite clear, no doubt, somehow.
Ah, but I was so much older then,
I’m younger than that now.

(Bob Dylan, “My Back Pages.” These lyrics are copied from http://www.sing365.com/music/lyric.nsf/My-Back-Pages-lyrics-Bob-Dylan/
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