The home school is often a world where the student does not evaluate himself based on a grade. ![]() It wasn’t their fault- I had been carefully taught to value time. Growing up I felt, as I’m sure many homeschooled children have, that other kids didn’t care as much about getting the job done. I do not wait, because I do not feel inadequate, and I attribute this to a thriving relationship with my mother, my first and best teacher. This comes from feelings of fear and inadequacy. Rather than risk talking to anyone, they will text on their phones, stick close to the one person they know, and wait for someone else to take the lead. The result: put most kids in America today in a situation where they feel out of place, and you can see the walls go up. Surely to his receptive mind, “regular” people like himself and his parents are not qualified to take the initiative. He learns that curriculum and procedure are handed down by principals and experts. He learns that some people will hurt him. But I’ve now come to the belief that this is normal: that it isn’t the ice-breaking that is taught to a child, but rather the ice-the fear of putting oneself forward, the desire for someone else to speak first-that is taught, subtly and relentlessly, by today’s school environment.įrom the structure of State school, a child learns to associate first and foremost with his grade-level/classroom/clique. This thought made me deeply uncomfortable as a child, and I wondered silently whether the other kids knew something I didn’t.Īs an adult, I am still struck by homeschooled kids’ ability to break the ice in new situations-even those who are quiet when in more familiar settings. It’s because I felt like no one else would. I had as many butterflies as anyone else, and what I said was usually dumb-but it got people talking. I am socially adaptable.Īs a kid in any gathering of State-educated peers who hadn’t seen each other before (Boy Scouts, volunteer workers, new Bible study), I was always the first to extend my hand and break the awkward silence. The home school is an environment where knowledge is to be loved as a parent is to be loved. When a student falls into the habit of looking to his syllabus to see what is required of him (instead of looking at the wide world to see what is available to him) he has ceased to be a learner. Do not underestimate the depth in which this doctrine embeds itself in a child. When knowledge is dispensed by strangers, the student has not learned that knowledge is good for him, only that it is a requirement. On the other hand, when the parents administer knowledge, a child easily grasps that its purpose is the same as the gifts, the spankings, the medicine, the allowance, and the responsibilities also administered by parents-that it is good for him. The system very subtly teaches the student that knowledge is a hurdle. However, in the environment of the State school, knowledge is a thing that is worked through to graduate or get a job. This is because I was instilled with the drive to seek them out.ĭoes a public-schooled child have the time to seek out as much extracurricular reading material as I did? Yes. This is not because I had extra brains for understanding them. I’ve read many more books than would be assigned in typical school courses. Here are some of the homeschooling benefits that twelve years provided me with. I can’t speak to this decision or to the pressures that drive it because I’m not a parent of high-school age children. ![]() I think it has something to do with the accessibility of sports, programs, or even socialization. Many parents feel a pressure to place children in State schools when they approach high-school age. ![]() My high-school years were everything I needed, and I even took the luxury of an extra year before leaving for college. As some of my friends reached high school, their parents put them into the State establishment but not mine. Listen to this article Lessons on Love of Knowledge and Home
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