Why I Homeschool and Why You Should Too

Our education system is broken. Yes, broken. It is probably broken beyond repair. At this point, I think the only way to fix our education system is to completely scrap it and start over. I am an educator, I have been in education for more than ten years, longer than I have been a mother. I am a product of the American school system. And let me tell you: the system is broken. So, now you know the primary answer to why I homeschool, and why you should too. But oh, there’s so much more.

Not So Crazy

First, let me tell you who I am, so that you can erase and repaint the “homeschool mom” image you have probably already formed of me in your mind. I am liberal; I am an atheist; I am highly educated; I live in the San Francisco Bay Area of California, and I have all my life; I am a feminist.

You will be hard pressed to find a lot of homeschoolers that look like me, though we are a growing group. I am not homeschooling to shelter my child; we get outside virtually every day to parks, playgrounds, hikes, museums, indoor play places, and yes, even classes.

And I am not homeschooling to make sure she only learns my way of thinking; she has taken classes without me from several different teachers from all walks of life on a variety of subjects, and she will continue to do so.

Broken Education System

Next, let me explain what broken means because you may misunderstand me. It does not mean that there are not excellent schools that extract excellent grades from excellent students. I am a humanities and test prep tutor in highly affluent areas; I work with the best of the best of the best.

What I mean to say is that what I have described above is not an education; it is schooling. I had decided to homeschool before I saw the depths of what my students really experienced, but watching their development through high school has only confirmed my position.

The joy of learning, of living, of breathing, is gone. Children go from throwing leaves into the air and laughing hysterically to slumped over and exhausted.

My high school students, the ones with 5.0 GPAs for whom “reach schools” are MIT and Harvard and “safety schools” are San Diego State and Cornell, are exhausted. They are joyless; they hate school; they are already bitter. These kids go to bed after midnight every single night and they wake up shortly after dawn. Many of them are taking multiple Advanced Placement courses in addition to swim, lacrosse, baseball, football, cheer, dance, you name it. Their schedules are insane; their lives are insane, and it is only going to get crazier.

We have created a system that can really only be navigated by the extremely fortunate. Every other kid is a cog in a machine that feeds into the industrial workforce. A workforce, might I remind you, that is disappearing.

What School Does Not Do

Schools do not teach children to think critically. Many of my high school students cannot have a conversation on a social topic beyond the basic facts. Most of them are not engaged. They are apathetic, and they will argue adamantly that they have no reason not to be. They want the grade. The A+. They want the resume. And it isn’t that they do not want to think. It is that they genuinely do not have the time to. Plus, grades based schooling teaches them that they don’t need to.

Schools do not teach children to read information closely. This one may not seem like a problem, but it is. A large majority of my students come to me with an inability to decipher a few lines of text on a word level basis. Give them three lines of text from a journal article, and they can’t tell you what it means, break down the language to its most basic level.

They guess, they infer, and they shrug.

Our children are not taught to care. In fact, as John Taylor Gatto says, they are taught to not care. Do not invest too much in anything. They don’t have time. They don’t have the emotional capacity. It is too stressful and too time consuming to really pay close attention and passion to anything on the level required to become an expert or professional in anything. Kids learn in 50 minute blocks of time and then head to the next block. Like cattle.

Imagine if they were given freedom to pick our their own supplies, subjects, explore possibilities of learning.

Finally, kids are not learning empathy in school. This lack of compassion and concern for their peers and others in the world is turning the world into a horrible place to live. And it wouldn’t be such a problem if they were learning those invaluable traits at home, but who has time at home? The six o’clock dinner is gone. The domestic sphere has collapsed. Parents are too busy working as grown up cogs in grown up machines to help their kids adjust to being mini cogs in mini machines in any meaningful way.

And We All Agree

“Yes.” my friends all nod. “I know.” My student commiserate. “It sucks.” Fellow educators sigh. We all agree. The system is broken, but we, most of us, do nothing about it. Why? Because we don’t care? Obviously not. I have not met one parent, student, or educator who doesn’t care about the failed education system.

Diane Ravitch has changed her tune on common core and standardized testing, after decades fighting for them. Barack Obama has given speeches lamenting our school system. We place at the very bottom of the scale among all westernized countries. Our failure is not a mystery. So why haven’t we fixed it?

We feel helpless. What can we do? How can we fix it? Where do we start? We keep adding more rules, more standards, more tests, charter schools, more facets so that our education system now looks like the Weasley house in Harry Potter.

Homeschooling Is Revolutionary

“I have always been a bit of a rebel.” My homeschooling mom friend, Dennie, says to me. “I think to homeschool you have to be a bit of a rebel, so it just made sense for me.”

Dennie is a white woman, a lesbian, married to a black woman, and they have twin boys who are mixed race.  I am a white woman married to an immigrant from Mexico, so our girls are mixed race. Dennie recently had to deal with a homeschool PE class she signed up for essentially refusing her admittance because of her “lifestyle choices.”

It was a “Christian” group.

My husband has been told to his face by friends and strangers alike: “You’re smart. You’re not like most Mexicans.”

We face challenges every day. Our children will face challenges. And in a world where schools are falling apart on a level that goes far beyond just the physical facade, putting our children into that system to get lost, to get bullied, to get institutionalized, or even to be held up as exceptions to their race, as role models for other people of color, is just not something we are willing to do.

Lost

The children of America are lost in the school system. They are nameless, faceless, widgets. They are scores on a test and names on an attendance sheet. They can turn into Columbine killers or Columbine victims. Suicide rates among adolescents are already high because of hormones and other biological factors. They have risen, I would propose, because of the school system.

“Isn’t it funny?” One of my students said to me last year. “Isn’t it funny that at a time when you are supposed to be finding yourself, figuring out who you are, and asserting yourself in the world, you are in a place where you are expected to conform, perform, fit it, and be like everyone else?”

The students get it.

Ask any kid on earth if she would rather learn on her own, at her own pace, subjects she genuinely cares about, or if she would like to be placed in six random classes with kids her own age to learn what someone else chooses for reasons she doesn’t understand. Oh, and if she doesn’t perform well, she will be moved to the “special class,” where the kids “who don’t care” go.

So they perform, they conform, they fit it, they struggle to be like everyone else, and they get lost.

Bullied

My five year old used this word the other day. “Mama, she’s a bully, isn’t she?” She asked me, referring to a girl on the playground.

“No, Celaya. She’s five. She’s not a bully. There are no such things as five year old bullies. She might be a brat. Maybe mean. But she’s not a bully.”

It’s in our everyday language now. Bullying has become so common that we have become inured to it. Children now expect to be picked on, teased, pushed around. And we say, “kids will be kids.” We shrug. What can we do?

I have a student who was so badly picked on for being Persian, dark hair, big nose, dark skin, that she was in therapy by the time she was in middle school. Her grandmother offered her skin bleaching cream. I had a student last year who was half black who went to school to find “niggers” over one set of bathroom stalls, and “whites” on the other set.

Kids are not mean spirited by nature. I believe kids are blank slates, shaped by experiences. Something about the school experience is making them mean, angry, hurtful, and yes, bullies.

Institutionalized

This one is easily the worst for me, and probably the biggest reason I homeschool. I am hard pressed to find a fourth grader that still likes school. It is even more difficult to find an eighth grader who likes to read anymore. Everything, everything has become work. Children have no freedom anymore to discover a love of anything. Once they love something, we turn it into work, we turn it into a project or an assignment, we demand, we exact, and we stifle joy.

I watch five year olds, six year olds, seven year olds, laugh and play, joyful, excited to be alive, in love with books, with learning. But the institution of school is too much to bear after so many years and they finally break. At some point, they all have the same answers to the same questions and their minds are all synced up to the same system.

The leaders of the world attend super elite schools where their joys and curiosities are fostered, they are encouraged to think critically and to engage, to travel, to explore. And you need millions of dollars to provide that education to your child.

Or, you can homeschool.

You Can

And you should. If we are going to change the world, if we have any hope of changing the education system, I believe we must to do it by opting out. We go on strike. I would love to put my daughters in a functioning education system, and this is how I fight for it, by providing it myself until I can help make it a reality on a national level.

Homeschooling is free. It is also freeing. You can homeschool however you like. Every state in the United States allows homeschooling. You can teach your children at their own pace, and you can watch their eyes light up when they make discoveries.

Your children will have freedom. Freedom from bells, freedom to run, freedom to ask and challenge and rise to the occasion. Freedom to live and learn to adapt in a changing world. Your children’s growth will not be stunted or darkened by shadows of gloom. You do not have to worry about bullies or rising suicide rates.

And you can do it while you work. I work, part time from home and part time outside of the home. My husband works full time. You do not have to be a stay at home parent to homeschool.

You just have to be a little bit of a rebel.