Wednesday, April 11, 2007

Why You Should Educate Your Own Children

The Case For Home Education

WHY you should educate your own children
Why YOU should educate your own children
Why you SHOULD educate your own children
Why you should EDUCATE your own children
Why you should educate YOUR OWN children
Why you should educate your own CHILDREN

Everywhere homeschoolers gather, one universal topic is ‘why we homeschool’. It’s like therapy for us. We want to tell each other why we are doing this crazy alternative thing, to explain our shared insanity. Why take on such an awesome responsibility of educating another human being when there are adequate, or even not so adequate schools full of trained professionals right down the street asking to take this responsibility off our shoulders? It’s a good question. In fact, it’s THE QUESTION. Why are you homeschooling? Who is it for? Answer that and you’ve got it licked!

Freedom is now our biggest reason to educate our children at home, but we didn’t figure this out for several years. More on this later.

The hardest thing about homeschooling is deciding to do it. The first and most formidable obstacle you must overcome is your own fear. Fear that you’ll miss something. Fear that you’ll do it wrong. Fear that others will consider you incapable (you’re not), incompetent (you’re not), selfish (you’re not) and shortsighted (you’re anything but).

Once you’ve overcome your own fear, here come armies of organized and casual groups and forces, all lined up against your inclination to homeschool which you must defeat. These may include:

Free government schools right down the street
Family financial considerations
The tax structure
Cultural expectations and norms
Your upbringing and education
Your parents, the in-laws, family, friends
Your spouse
Your church

Public schools stink. This is quite possibly your best and most powerful early argument for homeschooling. Even so called ‘good’ schools stink. They’re not ‘good enough’, no matter what others tell you. Things have changed since we parents were in school, and they weren’t that great back then.
Teachers and administrators are unresponsive and have their own agendas, only a small part of which has anything to do with educating other people’s children. Not all are so. Some teachers are wonderful. Some are saints. But the fact remains, the children they teach are other people’s children.

Much of what passes for school policy, district policy, and federal and state educational policy is based on the presumption of parental incompetence. Most of it is based on hard cases, which make bad law and bad policies. But because of the hard cases, education professionals see parents as well-intentioned amateurs incapable of making basic judgments about their own children. We’re tired of being told we are terrible parents, that we have terrible children and that we’re incapable of parenting without government assistance and direction. I’m sure tired of it. Certainly there are bad parents out there, but just as certainly there are many more good ones.

Schools teach things that should be left to parents. Character and ethics, sex education, health care, social services, counseling, pharmaceutical psychological interventions (drugs) and even condoms and birth control are routinely administered at schools without parent’s consent.

Children in public schools are often shallow, trendy, cliquish, disruptive, violent, rude and delinquent. Most aren’t, but enough are to mess up the whole idea of public school. And it’s not even their fault. They are what they have been made into. An example of the type of socialization your child can expect in public schools is to be teased, ostracized, ridiculed, hazed, assaulted, frisked, molested, invited to join a gang, knocked up, taught criminal behavior and offered drugs. Now that’s socialization! And that doesn’t even count what’s in the curriculum.

Schools want to diagnose, label and drug your children. ADD, ADHD, LD, ELL, APD, NDD, MDD, RFD, SID, GIS, OCD, CFS, CFIDS, FAS, AS, PDD, ASD, NIDS, HFA, PDQ, XYZ. The more labels they can hang on your kid, the more money they get. And they often try to talk you into drugging your kids so he’ll behave better while being forced to sit at a little wooden desk all day. Drugged children are much easier to manage.

Government schools aren’t safe. Armed guards, security badges, metal detectors, locker searches, book-bag searches and personal pat-downs, gangs, shootings, drugs, robberies, sexual harassment, hazing and a Lord-of-the-Flies environment create an atmosphere thick with fear. Naked violence is common while insanely, self defense is forbidden.

Government schools aren’t free. In fact, they cost much much more than private education. People who think that they are getting something for nothing by having government provide schooling that they would otherwise have to buy in the private market are not only kidding themselves by ignoring the taxes that government has to take from them, for their entire lives, in order to give them the appearance of something for nothing. They are also ignoring the strings that are going to be attached to their own money when it comes back to them in the form of ‘free government school’. Just because someone else is paying for something doesn’t mean that thing is free.

Zero-tolerance policies strip any last vestiges of discretion and judgment from local school officials. Absurd stories pepper the news of honor students expelled for cough drops, Midol or mouthwash in school, for a plastic butter knife, for wearing crucifix jewelry or a jersey of their favorite sports team. Common sense is voided, while petty offenses and trivial events draw absurdly extreme punishments.

Public schools teach state-mandated politically-correct standards-based nonsense. Learning gets completely lost in the process. They school children but don’t educate them. And forget about an individualized curriculum or taking a child’s interesting into account. Standards demand that you cover Egypt in 3rd grade, state history in 4th grade, South America in 5th grade etc. No regard is given to what the child wants to learn, or to what he already knows. Learning standards are established and set in stone before the students ever show up.

In our wonderful government operated compulsory-attendance factory-style conveyor-belt schools your child can learn such wonderful tidbits as: color within the lines, the policeman is your friend, and the civil war was fought to free slaves. You might learn something in public school as long as you don’t pray, sing the national anthem or pledge allegiance to the flag.


Many schools send hours of homework each night, even for children in first and second grade. Even in Kindergarten! There are also frequently long weekend assignments and even extensive summer homework for the next year. Some schools even mandate ‘volunteer’ hours as a requirement for graduation or advancement. If you’re going to spend that much time with your kids doing homework anyway, why send them in the first place. What takes 6-8 hours in school will only take you 2-3 hours each day (or less) to accomplish at home.

Government hiring and firing rules, tenure and teacher’s unions protect poor performing and mediocre teachers, turning schools into jobs programs for adults rather than educational programs for kids.

You may be able to make a difference in the local public schools as an activist parent, and if this is your chosen cause, go after it with as much fire and zeal as you care to offer, but don’t feel put out if you would just as soon abandon the whole system and put that energy into raising your own children. Most parents consider their first duty as parent is to their own children.

I’ve often said that the biggest problem with public schools is that they are full of kids whose parents expect someone else to teach their children. If every parent volunteered, taught, supported and got involved, the schools might be wonderful places. They’re not.

A better education. Homeschooled children consistently outperform public schooled students, and most private school students. Few schools routinely find the majority of their students in the 80th to 90th percentile where homeschoolers hang out. And it’s no wonder, with all the advantages we have. Give any dedicated teacher only 2 or 3 kids to teach instead of a whole classroom full, and they’ll do wonderful things.

Control. All homeschoolers are control freaks. Send your kids to public school and you don’t control what, when, how, where or with whom they learn. Pay for a private school and you get some choice about what and where they learn, but not about when. As a homeschooler you have complete control over what, when and where and with whom your children learn. Homeschooling is the ultimate in educational choice. This means you don’t have to teach objectionable subjects, and can focus on what you and the child like best. You can dwell on a subject, savor it, and explore its depth and breadth. We’ve never done museums, monuments or zoos the same since we started homeschooling. Now we linger, soaking it in. Complete control over your child’s education is the distinguishing characteristic of home education.

One-on-one attention is one of the very best benefits of home education. Customized education is another. Your home educated children essentially have their own private tutor. You can’t buy a home education because you can’t buy a mom.

Family time. One of the worst things about school’s schedule is that it robs your family of time together. The best environment for children (and adults) isn’t a school, it’s a family. Homeschool and your family will be closer. You will really get to know your children, and they’ll get to know you. There will be real sibling bonding.

Socialization is one of the major benefits of home education. I distinctly recall being told by teachers during my public school upbringing, “We are not here to socialize”, which was really just a highbrow way of saying, “Shut Up!” Looking back though, I realize that they lied to me at the most fundamental level. At least 75% of what happens in public school is social training. Probably much more. Nearly everyone would agree that there is both positive and negative socialization in public school. I’ve already addressed some of the negative socialization school offers, so it’s only fair to acknowledge the positive socialization. There are great teachers that can touch your heart and leave wonderful lasting memories. Most of us who attended public school recall memories of intense friendships. Most schools have social groups, clubs and events that create wonderful opportunities for social learning. Even homeschoolers cannot ignore all the resources and energy in public schools. Yet acknowledging all that, the opportunities for socialization while educating at home are undeniable. By homeschooling we can:
Be in the world meeting people of all ages, rather than only those who were born the same year as us
Bond and socialize with our family to create truly lasting relationships. How many of your old school friends do you socialize with now, as an adult?
Participate in all the same activities outside of school as any other family, such as sports, music, scouts, church, etc.

Vacations. You get to take vacations whenever you want, not whenever the school system lets you. This means you can travel off-season, getting better rates and enjoying touristy things more because the crowds will be smaller. And the off-season crowds are often seniors with wonderful stories to tell, or foreigners with great foreign perspective. (socialization!) We often take vacations in May and September, months when hotels and attractions are very lightly booked. We also enjoy midweek vacations rather than weekend-only outings.

Success breeds success. Once homeschooling starts to work for your family, once it comes together and you have a few moments of dizzying, dazzling rightness, you will grow and become more resolute in your belief that it is right for your family. Experienced homeschoolers can appear to be a bit smug. It’s working out for them. And they’re frequently forceful in their defense and justification of their methods. Similarly though, failure breeds failure. You may be, in fact, succeeding but if you believe you are failing, you can cause yourself to fail.

Character education. They’re actually putting this in the curriculum of some public schools. Gives me the willies, government teaching character.

Labels and diagnoses. Homeschool and your child will be less likely and have less need to be diagnosed, labeled and drugged. My evidence is anecdotal, and I would love to see legitimate studies done comparing rates of learning disabilities and childhood psychiatric disorders between schooled and homeschooled children. I’ve searched for such studies and found nothing. If anyone knows of such a study, please let me know. My experiences talking with many homeschoolers who pulled their kids from government schools is that they didn’t need the drugs anymore because homeschooling allowed them the freedom to be kids, the chance to improve their diets, and the opportunity for the parents to implement discipline. Learning disabilities become irrelevant when a child can work at his own pace, rather than at the same speed as the rest of the class.

Drugs, both prescription psychotropics and illegal narcotics

Rewards: Homeschooling is a lot more work than driving your kids to school or herding them out to the bus stop every morning, but the rewards are well worth it. And while we started homeschooling because of academics, there were unexpected benefits we only realized after we’d done it for a while. After a few years at it we realized that academics are the easy, minor, almost trivial part of homeschooling, and that it’s really about a rich, full family lifestyle.

Time. Homeschooling is a little like retiring. Once you’ve done it for a while, you’ll be so busy you’ll wonder how you ever had time for school.
Time again: You life will no longer be ruled by bells and schedules. You and your children will have long uninterrupted blocks of time to study intensely, play intensely or simply ponder.
Time to read. When I first heard about homeschooling and had it explained to me, I was in awe and totally envious. I thought, “If I’d had this opportunity, I could have easily read my way to a better education than I got in public school.”
And still, time. Time outdoors. Time making cardboard forts or exploring the woods or building tree-houses or playing games with the dog or practicing a musical instrument.
Learning how to learn, how to research, how to ask questions. Not just learning how to be taught, how to regurgitate ‘correct’ answers, how to fill in the correct bubble on a multiple choice exam. Since we’ve been homeschooling my kids have found ways to learn that I never thought of, and have followed interests they could never had followed in school.
Exposure to the world, to lots of adults, lots of ideas, to broadening experiences
Growing up at the correct speed, their own speed, ripening and unfolding into the adults they were meant to be, as opposed to being pressured in schools into pretended maturity and pretended adulthood, while having their childhoods perversely prolonged.
Joy! Joy in learning, in living, in loving, in everything. There’s no joy in public school. It’s discouraged. Home education is full of joy.

When your God commands you to do something, it’s hard to refuse

If you heart is telling you to homeschool, listen to it. It’s probably right.

Freedom. You don’t realize what a slave you were to the school system until you leave it. No more parent-teacher meetings, early release days, teacher-in-service days, snow days, days you must stay home with sick children, waiting for spring break, Christmas break or summer to take vacations. No more back to school sales, lunch boxes, school uniforms, calls from the principal’s office, teacher’s notes, nurse’s notes, medical release slips, permission slips, clueless substitute teachers. No more PTA meetings, school fundraisers, school psychologists, school tests, school begging, school cliques, school fights, school politics. No more school bus. No more assigned homework. You’re freeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

Of course, with freedom comes responsibility. You may choose to duplicate some or all of the above items at home, but the key is choice. You choose. Rather than having Hobson’s choice forced on you by the schools. And choice equals freedom.

I applaud you for reading thus far.

You should homeschool. In case you haven’t figured it out by now, I am an advocate of homeschooling. And so, I advocate. If your children are at school right now you should drive there this instant, pick them up and don’t ever bring them back. Do not send them tomorrow morning. Do not wait until the semester is over, or the school year has ended, or hope that things will get better. They won’t. School is harming your kids and your family. Pull them out now and educate them at home or else YOU ARE BEING A DELINQUENT PARENT, shirking your duty to your kids, to your spouse, to you family and to your God.

Homeschooling is good for kids, and it’s good for families. Even if their parents aren’t doing it perfectly. You would do well to help your children become educated adults without the dubious benefit of school.

HOMESCHOOL YOUR CHILD!

Reasons to Not Homeschool

Reasons Not To Homeschool

I’m not trying to talk you out of it, but there are certainly reasons not to homeschool and I've heard them all. Really. At least I haven't heard a new one in a long while. The three most popular, and most lame excuses to not homeschool are:

1. I'm not organized enough
2. I'm not patient enough, and
3. I'm not smart enough

General fear of inadequacy is the biggest barrier for new homeschoolers. Let me say this about that.

Organization: If you have visited a homeschoolers house and it was clean, then they cleaned it just for you. Martha Stewart could never homeschool. If you wanted you home to be ready at any moment for the photographer from ‘Better Homes and Garden’s’, you shouldn’t have had kids in the first place. Learn to embrace the chaos. When your kids are grown and gone, then you can clean up.

Patience: Every homeschooler I know has had a crying-in-the-closet breakdown where they were ready to send all their kids right back to public school. It passes. Take a break. Call on your support network. A million families are doing this. You can too.

Intelligence: Every homeschool parent I know is blindingly brilliant, but they may not have started that way. You can't teach it without learning it. Everything I've helped my kids learn has given me a new perspective and forced me to deepen my own knowledge and clarify my own thinking on the subject. Home education makes you, the parent, smarter! Think of it as a perk. The more of them I meet and the longer I know them, the more amazing I find the homeschool mom. They are the smartest and wisest people I know.

And seriously, don't even try to make the argument that since you don't have a diploma/degree/certificate of some sort, you're not qualified. Many of the worst teachers I’ve had were highly schooled, certified and degreed. We’re talking about YOUR CHILDREN and YOU ARE QUALIFIED TO TEACH THEM.

If you feel that you absolutely must have a state-issued certificate to home school, frame your child’s birth certificate and hang it on the wall. There! Now you’re more certified than any teacher could ever be because THEY ARE YOUR KIDS and YOU love them. No teacher will ever love them even a tiny fraction as much as you. And as Mark Hegner says, “All you need to homeschool is love and a library card.”

Other, more legitimate reasons not to homeschool include:

Abject Poverty. It's tough to homeschool without a home. And eating trumps even homeschooling. You must have some sort of income, but do you really need that second income? Most likely you could get by on one. What’s more important, your job or your kids? If you have a place to live and a reasonably healthy stay-at-home parent, you can homeschool even on the most modest of incomes. Library cards are free.

Custody issues. You can't homeschool from jail. If both parents aren't on board, whether they live together or not, it's not worth it. Remember, family harmony comes first, even if the family doesn't live together.

Single parenthood. It's been done, especially with older kids or a parent who can work from home. But without major support it's difficult.

Can't stand to be with your kids. Now I don't pretend to understand this, but I've heard it much more than I would ever have imagined. "If I had to be with my kids all day I'd go crazy." This fits into the category of 'not patient enough' but to the extreme. If you would hurt your kids by being around them all day, don't homeschool. But understand that your attention and presence may be exactly what they are after with their troubling behavior. Being with them all day may give you a chance to implement discipline far beyond what you've had a chance to do in the past. Can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard, after a parent has pulled their kids out of school to home educate them, “I finally got my son back.”

Serious illness. If you or someone in the family requires major time and care, sending the kids to public school for a year or two can help a lot.

Abuse or other criminal behavior. If you're running a crack house, a brothel or the local branch of the KKK you might consider the advantage of getting the kids out from underfoot by sending them to school.

And last but certainly not least, you should not homeschool if you do not want to. If you hate the idea of homeschooling, then don't do it. You may or may not give your kids a choice about homeschooling, but you, the parent, have a choice, and no parent should be forced, coerced or guilt-tripped into homeschooling against their will.

Clue-less and Bogus Reasons to Not Homeschool
Here are a few truly bogus reasons I’ve heard why home educations should be banned, and homeschoolers ridiculed, ostracized or jailed. Please excuse my sarcasm.

Socialization. Interrelations with other students and teachers is a crucial part of every child’s development, and the simple social interactions they get at home are clearly not enough. Team building, problem solving, working near those one may not like, creating and following rules and exposure to those from different backgrounds are best done in a school environment. Homeschooled children are not ‘classed’ with others their same age, they never go out into the world, grocery shopping, to the doctor or dentist. They avoid team sports and club activities like scouting. They never participate in musical groups, church events or organized sports. Any child who spends all his time at home, exposed to only his parents and siblings will inevitable becomes an improperly socialized adult.

Isolationism. By cocooning your children at home and sheltering them from all diversity of thought while encasing them in only your biased and narrow minded religious and political world views, you will produce shallow, fragile and gullible adults who are unprepared for the rough and tumble of the real world. They need school so they can learn to handle bosses, bullies, badgering and the daily battering ram that is life. How are they going to learn to say no to drugs unless they’re exposed to them in school?

Racism. Without exposure to the diversity of races and cultures in our fully integrated public schools, your children will become bigots, intolerant hicks, incapable of coexisting with anyone whose accent, skins-tone and eye-shape isn’t exactly the same as theirs.

Sexism. Your chauvinist sons will believe all women are property. Your daughters will learn only how to cook, clean and make house. They need public schooling to learn their proper gender roles.

Elitism. What, you think your kids are special? (yes) You think they’re better than everyone else? (yes) The school down the street just isn’t good enough for them? (that’s right) The nerve! And worse, you are not only harming your child, you are creating a brain-drain, skimming the cream of the public schools (cool!), thus depriving them not only of their best students, (thanks!) but of you, their most involved parents (wow, thanks again) while leaving those who cannot afford to opt out to struggle with worsening conditions (too bad).

Collectivism. Thousands of researchers, experts and education professionals are dedicated to ensuring public schools use the best curriculum and practices. How astoundingly presumptuous to assume you, only a simple parent know better than all that accumulated wisdom. It takes a village to raise a child and you are merely the village idiot. You can’t do it on your own, and you shouldn’t try.

School funding. By homeschooling you are maliciously draining money from the local school district, since they would get more minority, special-ed or per-pupil funding if you enrolled your children. By keeping them home, that money just disappears into vapor, never to be seen again.

Poor citizenship. Home education is bad for democracy. Homeschoolers have too much freedom and not enough professional guidance. Without the civic training and exposure children receive daily at school, and without the balance and diversity of political views represented in schools, your children will become self-absorbed adults disinterested in the public discourse and unaware of their duties as citizens.

Poor education. You know what homeschooling is, really? It’s child abuse by educational neglect. You can’t possibly educate a child at home as well as they do in public school. It’s impossible to make up for lost time or bad practices in a child’s education. Experts agree that home schooling programs cannot provide the student with a comprehensive education experience blah-dee-blah-dee blah blah blah

No Test Scores. If I homeschool I won’t have standardized test scores to wave under the noses of other parents showing how superior my children are to theirs. Any test scores I have would be suspect, since everyone knows that homeschool parents help their children cheat on all those multiple choice exams. How else could they score so high?

Hidden abuse. Everyone knows that the real reason anyone homeschools is to abuse their children in secret. Without the daily monitoring by trained teachers, councilors and child-psychologist that a child receives in school, their abusive parents can continue to starve, beat and exploit their children undetected.

Special needs. Your child has special needs that you, their parent are incapable of providing. They need professional treatment, drugs and counseling. The schools have special classes for your children where they’ll be better off. I know they’re your children, but you’re just not capable of taking care of them. The more meds and needs your child has, the more he needs school.

Personal accomplishment. You, the parent, will not have the personal time you may have been looking forward to since your kids were born. You can not stash them on the big yellow bus, then crawl back into your warm bed on days you’re not feeling well. You will rarely be alone, and you will not have the company and stimulation of other adults and the challenges and bustle of a modern corporate career. These things are important for your personal growth, just as important as your children’s education, so go ahead and send them off to school. Perhaps a boarding school, which would maximize your opportunities for self actualization.

Economics. It is unwise and unfair to you not to take advantage of the public schools, since you have to pay for them anyway. You don’t get a break on your taxes, you know. You’d just be paying twice for your children’s education.

Facilities. How many homes have classrooms, blackboards, wall maps, school busses, libraries, chemistry labs, biology labs, greenhouses, computer labs, football fields, gyms, tennis courts, baseball diamonds, pools, copy machine rooms, wood shops, metal shops, bike racks, and a nurse’s office. Your home will never replace a school.

No diploma. Without a diploma you will never get anywhere in life. That piece of paper is your ticket to success, your ticket into college, to a job, and to better life. Without it your children are destined to dig ditches for a living and smoke crack for the REST OF THEIR LIVES.

College entrance. How will you ever get into any college, much less a good college without proof of high school graduation? You can’t! (yes, you can)

Wannabe Teachers: This is really about you, the parent. Isn’t it! Pretending to be a teacher. Or you’re trying to relive your youth through your children, trying to undo your own failed education. But face it, teaching children is difficult even for experienced professionals. You wannabes have no idea. You think just because you bought a history book or a math or science book that you can automatically teach that book’s content? Just because you had a child doesn’t make you any smarter, or make you qualified to teach children. That takes years of professional training, experience and certification. You may be well-meaning, but really you’re just gullible. Worse yet, if you already are a teacher and have stayed home to teach your own kids, you should be ashamed, depriving the public schools of your knowledge and experience. Government schools may not be perfect, but they’ll only get worse as those who can afford to leave stay away.

If you actually buy into any of these truly counterfeit arguments, I want you to go to the bank. Take some money out of your account. Go to the store and buy a clue.


Please read on.

Thoughts on Homeschooling

How to begin homeschooling

A step by step guide for how to pull your kids out of school and bring their education home. What to buy, what to worry about, and witty responses to critics.

by Chris Mahar

This may sound silly, but if you want to homeschool, (now take a deep breath) you need to let your kids stay home and not go to school anymore. Just let the big yellow bus pass you by. Let the kids sleep-in as long as they like, then lounge around in their pajamas while you read to them until lunch. That’s it. Step off the train and watch it disappear down the tracks. You’re freeeeee!

Get legal. Learn the legal requirements to homeschool in your area and meet them. You’ll sleep better. In Arizona it’s easy. Just fill out a 1 page form, have it notarized and send it to your county superintendent of schools with a photocopy of your child’s birth certificate. That’s it. You’re homeschooling!

Get support. Homeschooling is a do-it-yourself thing, but you don't have to do it alone. By support, I don't mean someone to teach your kids. They have you for that. But who will support you? Who will listen to your problems with a sympathetic ear and without telling you to put your kids back in school? A support group is a good bet, but support can also come from friends, relatives, and even from across the internet. Homeschool critics claim we are educating our children in a vacuum, and if it were true, I would agree with them that it’s potentially destructive. Don’t give them ammunition, and don’t try to do this alone. Connections and relationships are what enable new homeschoolers to succeed. It’s also important to note that you won’t need much support when things are going great. It’s when you’re struggling, when you have a question and can’t see the answer, or when you have a crisis of confidence that you need support the most. If you’re just beginning to think about home education, you should get support before you go public with your intent. Wherever you get it, get support.

Join a state organization. They'll put on a convention every year which is worth supporting, and they will keep you aware of changes in state law and potential threats to your homeschool freedom.

Relax. You’ve been homeschooling since your kids were born. You helped them learn to walk and talk, and you can help them learn to read and do algebra too. Bringing education home is a scary thing. It’s also exciting, empowering and at times, intensely satisfying. It’s easy though to get really wound up about it and stress over every detail. Relax.

Fix your family. Homeschooling will not solve problems within your family, it will only intensify them. Think pressure cooker. Cram you problems together and they only get worse. You’re family is going to be together a lot. Harmony within the family comes first.

Commitment is key. Homeschooling doesn't take an extra room in your house, and it doesn't have to be expensive, but it does take a huge commitment of time and effort. You can not homeschool in moderation. Dive in. It is, and should be a big part of your life and of who you are as a family. If you're doing it right, it dominates your life.

Everything counts. Take credit for everything you and your children do. Whether you know it or not, you are teaching your children all the time, every moment you are with them. It does not have to look like school to be educational. In fact, it’s best when it doesn’t look like school at all.

Choose a method. Unschooling or school at home, unit studies or Charlotte Mason, Waldorf or Montessori, classical or modern, pick a method, or pick several. You already have an educational philosophy, whether you know it or not. Find a name for it. This will give you a guide to go by, which you can then use or ignore as you wish. We use the “unschool/school-at-home/unit studies/Charlotte Mason/Montessori/classical/modern” method in the Mahar home. In other words, the only thing we haven’t tried is Waldorf. In other words, don’t be afraid to mix things up. You can’t avoid it.

Start small. It's easy to buy too much, be too aggressive and imagine you can cover too many subjects too deeply. Less is more.

Give your children as much control of their own education as you and they can handle. If a child can choose what they want to learn, motivation becomes easy.

If you are just starting to homeschool this won’t make any sense, but homeschooling is not schooling at home. If that’s what you try to make it then you’ll miss out on the full benefits. Stop copying what you left behind.

You are qualified to teach your own children. I can not say this often enough or sincerely enough. There are those who will try to talk you out of this. Don’t let them. These are your children, and you are qualified to help them learn.

It’s OK to play hookey from homeschooling, to go fishing, or to the zoo or the park, to do what you must to restore your nature. Homeschooling is like life; you will have good days and awful days. Your progress is not determined by how many lessons or worksheets you completed today, but by how well your family is working and on how well your children are growing into balanced happy adults. A frequent mistake of new homeschoolers is to think and act like it’s all about academics. It’s not.

Try as hard as you can, with every bit of your willpower, to not compare yourself to other homeschool families. You will only get depressed that your children aren't reciting Shakespeare, performing in orchestras and winning spelling bees or national academic contests. You are doing fine, and your children are perfect as they are.

You may feel a need, initially, to compare your homeschool program or method to public school’s program, and this’s fine if you’re planning on putting your kids back into school soon. But understand that while your program will focus on your child’s needs and interests, the school’s program focuses on some generic model child that does not exist. If you have truly abandoned the public school system, stop copying it. Your child may be far ahead in reading but behind his school peers in math. That’s OK and in the grand scheme of things, it matters not. Is it important now that their cousin, as a baby, rolled over first? Or that their brother walked earlier? Not at all. And by the time they’re 20 it won’t matter when they learned speling, which letters to CaPiTaLiZe, and how to not split infinitives.

Homeschooling isn't something you should be trying to save money at. That doesn't mean be wasteful, and it doesn't mean you can't be frugal. Just consider the value that $100 grammar course or $50 computer program might add to your child's learning. There aren't too many higher priorities in our lives.

Homeschooling isn’t magic. It doesn’t happen by itself. You have to make it happen. Even the most child-directed unschooling family must work hard to help their children become educated adults. But occasionally, after you’ve worked and worried, nudged and prodded, listened and lectured, your child will say something or do something that surprises and delights you, and it will seem like magic. These are good moments, so savor them.

Your kids are going to miss out on things in school. They may not be part of the zeitgeist, the spirit of their time, the shared generational experience. But your home educated children will also have abundant opportunities that schooled children will miss out on. No regrets.

On that same vein, if you’re worried about psychologically scarring your children for life, you had better learn to live with that worry. No matter what choices you make for your children, you scar them. It’s part and parcel of the whole parenting gig. You will (and should) leave a lasting mark on your children.

Self-doubt is a natural part of homeschooling. The angst never goes away. It just varies in intensity, and is interspersed with brilliant moments of rightness. Sometimes though, it can be overwhelming. You will feel like you are failing your children, missing something critically important or ruining them and wasting away the best of their youth. Trust me, you’re doing fine. You can do it. When you have a crisis of confidence, call on your support network.

You are a homeschooler, and therefore a self determined, autonomous, free agent. You get to write your own script, your own contract. Freedom defines homeschooling. Choice defines homeschooling. Control defines homeschooling. You are no longer just signing someone else’s contract or acting in someone else’s play. Scared? You should be. It’s all you, baby.

On reluctant homeschoolers: It’s always unfortunate when a negative event triggered your homeschooling. If your child was ejected from school, was threatened or harmed in school, or was simply not being served by their school and your solution was to bail out and homeschool, you’re not alone. Many long-time homeschoolers started out this way. Also unfortunate is that most people who start homeschooling for a negative reason don’t find that reason powerful or durable enough to sustain them through the challenges and hardships of home education. But there is hope. Dive in. Don’t think of homeschooling as a temporary solution but as a long term learning lifestyle. Make friends with veteran home educators and imitate them.

For some of us, homeschooling may be the first thing we actually decided to do all by ourselves. Somehow I managed to live a long while before I realized that my own life was one of those do-it-yourself things. I’d been doing what other people told me for so long that I thought that’s the way my whole life would go. But it’s not like that. When you homeschool, not only do you get to drive, you get to decide on the destination and what path you’ll take to get there. And you can change destinations and routes any time you want. If you never got a chance to grow up, you will now. See what I mean when I say homeschooling is empowering?

Now that I’ve told you what defines homeschooling, I must tell you that only you can define homeschooling for your family. I would have to say that the only situation I can imagine where you can’t legitimately call yourself a homeschooler is when your children are gone all day every day being taught by someone else. Otherwise, you can call yourself a homeschooler whether or not you are a member of a homeschool group, using public school programs or sports, private tutors, or a packaged comprehensive curriculum. You can homeschool whether other homeschoolers sing praises to you or look down their noses at you. The homeschool police are not going to arrive at your door to tell you you’re not doing it right. Don't let anyone else, including your local school district, your state or federal government, your local or national homeschool association, or me define homeschooling for your family. They’ll try. Don’t let them. You're the parent. That's your job.

And now that you have my oh-so-valuable permission to define yourself, here’s my two cents on homeschoolers taking benefits from the government or from public schools. Don’t. TANSTAAFL. There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. In my opinion, ‘free’ government-operated schools are the largest, most widely used and most damaging entitlement program in our nation. Any benefits you get from the government will have strings attached, and those strings will eventually become chains. Anything you get from them erodes your freedom. Anything they give you for free hurts you. At first they’ll give a lot and ask for only a little. The first hit is always free. Just show up. Bring the kids. Have a free computer! Just fill out this form. Just show us his immunization record. Soon you’ll have requirements, rules, tests, mandatory record keeping, meetings, required reports, portfolios and attendance sheets. You’ll become an unpaid worker for the school system and your children will become public school students at home. Remember why you left public schools! Don’t give up an inch of your soul to the government-school bloodsuckers, no matter how much free stuff they offer. Pay your own way. It’s the only way to keep control.

List-making is a perilous endeavor. No matter what I say on this list, someone will take issue with it. They’ll say I left off the most important thing, or that I emphasized the wrong things in the wrong order. Or they’ll say I’m just plain wrong. This list is a guide, one which reflects the ideology of the list-maker (me). If you don’t agree with me, bravo. I applaud you for thinking for yourself. Change this list any way you want, follow parts of it, or ignore it. You don’t need my permission. You also do not need to contact me to say that you disagree with some point on my list. But you’re always welcome to laugh with me about this list, or about anything else. I’ve often considered making this into a list of how not to homeschool. It would be easier and much more reliably correct to say all the things you shouldn’t do than to tell you what you should be doing.

Sometimes the government (whether it’s the school district, a truant officer, the police or the courts, it’s still the government) will request or demand something of a homeschoolers beyond the minimum required by law. They may insist that they are required to review and approve your curriculum, that your child must take a certain test or that it takes their approval to remove your child from public school. They may ask for shot records, test results, portfolios or a transcript. Give them only the minimum required by law. If they insist, be polite but firm, and be ready to show them the law, and how you have complied. Don’t give them anything extra, no matter how proud you are of your child’s work or accomplishments, and no matter how they threaten or scare you. Once you start giving them extra, they expect extra. If you show them more than the minimum, you are creating problems for other homeschoolers who don’t know the law, or who refuse these same ‘reasonable’ requests.

If you are contacted or harassed by a government or school official about homeschooling, immediately get this word out to lots of other home educators. You will get support like you never imagined. It’s best for all of us if we know of impending threats. And it’s best for us if, when government or school officials bother a homeschooling family they end up feeling like they stepped on an ant hill. Sure, they may get the satisfaction of irritating a few ants, but the rest of us ants make it not worth their while.

It is not reasonable to expect that you can pull your child out of public school on Friday and start a full blown curriculum Monday morning next. As a matter of fact, it’s a formula for disaster. Now that you’ve quit school cold-turkey, take time to detox, to recover from your school-addiction. And especially, let your kids recover from their addiction to being spoon-fed their education. They’ve been on the leash of public education for so long that it’s absurd to expect them to know where to go now that the leash has been cut. School withdrawal symptoms include: loss of a love of learning, expecting all learning to be laid out and spoon fed, general disinterest and lack of motivation to learn, and plain boredom. Schooled children are always ‘supposed to be doing something.’ Ding, ding .. do science .. ring the bell .. do math .. ring the bell .. do social studies .. ring the bell .. lunch .. ring the bell .. reading class .. etc. With the bells, assignments and make-work gone, your child will be lost for a time. Let them flounder. Take them to the park, to the library if they want, and read to them a lot. I suggest at least a week for every year your child has been in public schools, and that may not be long enough time. This is time without lessons or assignments, without co-ops or classes, without any planned learning whatsoever. Let your child be bored. Let them stay up late, eat buttered noodles, play video games and watch movies. You, the parent, should take this time to read books and websites about home education and to connect with other homeschoolers. Get your feet under you before trying to implement something new. Then start slowly, one day at a time.

Grades are for eggs, beef, milk, and schools. You grade something to level it, to smooth it, or to separate it according to size, rank or quality. Smoothing and leveling a batch of kids, or separating them into grades according to size, year of birth, or other arbitrary factors is convenient and necessary for factory-style conveyor belt schools that must batch process large groups of children. Real Life and The Real World are not graded. Schools need grades. You don’t. They have no choice. You do have a choice, and you do not need to grade your child. I’m not talking here about being critical of your child’s work, or assigning grades that reflect how well they completed an assignment. You may also designate an artificial grade level for convenience, because people will ask what grade your child is in. That’s fine, since they’re just trying to figure out which mental peg to hang them on. And it’s easier to just say, “Fourth grade”, than struggling to explain, “He’s doing 7th grade math and 6th grade science but we haven’t finished 3rd grade reading yet.” Worse yet, try to explain to a non-homeschooler that you don’t believe in artificially grading and separating your child according to some government criteria. They’ll look at you like you’re from another planet. One answer we use is, “If she were in school she’d be in 8th grade.”

In a field of poppies the blossoms all grow to just about the same height, but a few flowers always grow taller than the rest and poppy farmers simply chop off these taller blooms. This is known as tall poppy syndrome, and it happens in school every day. The schools, of necessity, level down rather than leveling up. If your child is a tall poppy, especially gifted or driven toward some interest, homeschooling may be just the ticket. If you leave them standing head and shoulders above the herd in school and they will get chopped down to the average. Educate them at home and give the musician many more hours to practice, the gymnast many more workouts, the budding naturalist many more field trips. Educate at home and let them bloom tall.

If something is not working, stop. It’s OK to change your mind, no matter how much you spent on all that curriculum you bought. That's the beauty of homeschooling; you can shift on the fly, change directions as often as you need to reach your goals, which will always be moving targets. We have more flexibility than any other form of education.

You are the parent. It’s your house. Sounds silly, right? You wouldn’t believe how many families let the kids run things. Don’t let it happen to you. Tell yourself, “I am the mother.” “I am the father.” Announce it to your family. You’re in charge, so act like you’re in charge. Listen to your children. Take their input. But you make the decisions.

Test if you must. Some states require it. But if you have the option, it truly is your choice. If testing will make you feel better, if it will validate what you are doing or prove the worth to skeptical relatives that you're not just watching soaps and eating Cheetos all day, then test away. Just don't get the idea that the score your child gets on a nationally-standardized norm-referenced mass-produced test based on who-knows-what curriculum really gives anyone a good idea where your child's strengths and weaknesses are.

Homeschoolers often hit a critical decision at the end of 8th grade; do we continue to homeschool or put them in high school. If you don’t enroll them for their freshman year, they may not be eligible to graduate with their class, get scholarships, play sports or go to the prom. It’s an important decision and must be made thoughtfully and with care. Sorry, I can’t help you with this one except to say that I’ve known plenty of families whose kids graduated, got scholarships, played sports and went to the prom while homeschooling through high school. Typically these kids continued and did very well in college.

It takes time. Don't expect instant results from homeschooling. Constantly evaluate and refine your process, but don't be depressed if the first year doesn't go as you expected. It never does.

Trust yourself. You are doing the right thing. You can do this. A million families around the country are already doing it, and so can you. You don't need a degree, a certificate from the state, or an expert to look over your shoulder and second guess you. These are your children, and your instincts about them are better than a thousand expert’s opinions. You will be told you are gambling with their future, or with their education, as if it’s not a gamble sending them to public schools with their 30-50% failure rates. Find a way to trust yourself.

Talk. Talk all the time, whenever you’re together. Talk about books, current events, movies, cartoons, stories, politics, religious beliefs, food, family, everything. Talk with your kids, with your spouse, with others. Talk to yourself. Think out loud. The way your child learns to think is by modeling the thinking of others, so show him your thinking.

Homeschooling is but a season of your life, and it will pass. Our children are born, learn, grow, and finally become adults to go on with their own lives and seasons. And at that point, you must go on with yours. This is true whether you homeschool or not. Helping them become educated at home permits you to spend more time with them, to have more influence on them, and hopefully to become closer to them. Enjoy the season. It will pass.

You will have stressful moments while homeschooling. Stress will come from your children, from your spouse, and from others around you, and that’s a perfect time to take a few moments to remember and contemplate why you are doing this, and who it’s for. The greatest stress fighter is a sense of purpose. Refresh yourself by going to a conference or reading a book on home education to help you focus on the big picture.

You don't have to set up a classroom in your home, complete with blackboards, a bell, overhead projectors and a line of little wooden desks. Unless that's what you want to do. Most don't, and the few who do usually end up laughing at themselves later. As Mary Hood says, “It’s a family, not a school. You’re a dad, not a principal. You’re a mom, not a teacher.” Stop trying to duplicate what you left behind.

Have dad help. Homeschooling is not just mom's thing. Dad's involvement will bring him closer to his children and will promote family harmony. More on dad’s role later.

Bashing public school is fun and easy, but not productive and it does not help you solve the day to day challenges of homeschooling. It may, however, help you to keep your commitment level high and as such, is not without value.

Socialization is important for people of all ages. It's important for children, and for adults. Decide what level and type of social contact you and your children want. Then create it.

There is nothing glamorous about home education. You won’t win a ‘Home Educator of the Year’ award, because there is none. There is no instant gratification, and you can’t rely on your children’s achievements for your rewards, because they may not achieve what you want of them. You can, however, watch them grow into happy adults. You can help this happen. And you can be happy with them, enjoying the process. We do a lot of trivial things in our lives, but homeschooling isn’t one of them. In fact, there’s nothing trivial about it. As parents we are overwhelmingly aware of the profound consequences and deep significance of our choices in raising our children into adults. And in case you were wondering what successful homeschooling looks like, it’s nearly identical to successful parenting.

Curriculum is everywhere, whether you imitate public school or roll your own from library books. We homeschoolers have now achieved major market status and there are hundreds of vendors targeting their curriculum marketing at us. If you can’t afford it, get it from the library. Googling for ‘homeschool curriculum’ I turned up 532,000 hits. Some of the more popular homeschool curricula are: A Beka, Saxon, BJU, Singapore, SOS, Apologia, Calvert, Five In A Row, Seton, Greenleaf, IEW, Math-U-See, Power Glide, Robinson, Sonlight, School of Tomorrow, TWTM, Strands, ...

I cannot tell you what curriculum to use, and I encourage you to be wary of others who say they can. I’m not an expert on your family or your children. You are. Anyone who tells you that you should use this or that curriculum is probably selling something. Be wary. Decide for yourself. And be ready to pitch it if it doesn’t work.

You don't have to homeschool all your children. You are the best person to make decisions about what is best for your children. Some children simply do better in school, and it's OK to send them there.

You’ve made it to item number 50 on this list. That’s pretty good. It’s time to reconsider why you’re doing this, and it had better not be as shallow a reason as school violence, bad teachers, bad administrators or other such trivial reasons. What do you think an education is? Attending school? In truth, everyone is homeschooled to some degree. It’s just a matter of how much the parents farm out. In the early days of the modern home education movement, parents had to be desperately convinced that this was the right choice for them because nearly everyone was against it. Now that homeschooling has gained fame, parents are coming in with far fewer convictions and many more expectations, and it’s not been good for the overall movement. Commitment is key!

You don't have to teach every subject in every grade from kindergarten through senior high school. Tap into your network to find experts, friends or relatives or tutors to teach specific topics. Kids of high-school age can go to community college for some courses. And there is nothing wrong with paying someone to teach a subject you can not teach. Take music, for example. How many parents can teach that?

Warning; Don’t suggest co-ops, shared teaching or anything about other parents teaching your kids when you first start homeschooling. Many homeschool rookies imagine that there must be structured associations and organized networks where parents cooperate to group-teach each other’s children. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Get your feet wet, become friends with a few other homeschool families, and then ease into the co-op experience. You will find it is much more work than simply teaching your own.

If you are a reluctant homeschooler, if you’ve been forced into homeschooling because your child is injured or ill, has misbehaved and been ejected from school or for any other reason that includes a plan to send them back to school as quickly as you can, then here are my suggestion for you. Contact the school you plan to return to. Tell them of your intention to return. Ask them what curriculum you should use and where you can get it. They may give it or lend it to you if you ask, or they may sell it to you. You may need to actually visit the school and get a list of textbooks. Use them to prepare your child for his return to school. If the school is uncooperative, contact the county or state education organization for similar ideas for curriculum. Internet searches will turn up any textbook available to the schools. And while you’re temporarily dropping in on home education, take a look around. You might decide to stay for longer than you intended.

Get the whole family involved in setting family goals and homeschooling goals. Any goals you arbitrarily or unilaterally set for your children are yours, not theirs.

The perfect is the enemy of the good. Perfect costs too much and takes too much time. If you say, “We’re going to do every page of this book if it kills us!”, then it probably will kill you. If you try to be perfect, to cover every topic, work every problem, answer every question or do every project in the book you will only end up feeling guilt and failure. That’s the opposite of how you should feel. You are giving yourself to your children. Feel good! And anyway, it will be hard to do worse than the public schools. You aren’t doing yourself or your children any good by trying to hold yourself to an unachievable standard of perfection. Homeschooling is a messy, disorganized, non-linear endeavor, much like parenting, much like life. Set reasonable goals, be ready to adjust them, and avoid perfection at all costs!

And speaking of costs, how much should homeschooling cost? Many homeschool rookies are worried about the costs of curriculum, books, equipment, etc. As I noted above, it’s not something you should be trying to save money at. As with many things in life, you can’t judge the value by weighing only the costs. It can cost nearly nothing, but be more precious than gold, or cost a great deal and be worthless. In homeschooling, you don’t get what you pay for. You get what you put into it. You, mom and dad, are the value-adders. The more time and energy you add to your child’s education, the move valuable that education will be. Mark Hegner says that love and a library card is all it takes to do an excellent job. Or you can spend thousands each year. But since you will want hard numbers, here are our costs; each year I figure we spend about $1000 to $1500 to homeschool our three kids. This does not count music lessons which comes to much more than homeschool costs. Nor does it count extra-curriculars like Scouts, orchestra, travel, etc.

Most states have published educational standards, which they do not meet. They’re on the internet, and I recommend that you read them for their entertainment value, and then ignore them. We’re homeschoolers. We have your own standards, thank you. They’re based on our families, and on each child, individually.

One-on-one instruction works regardless of style. Or perhaps it works because it’s personalized. Think about it. Group instruction must be generic in style. Using a generic style in one-on-one instruction is absurd on its face because when you do it, you are face to face with the student. Customize! Personalize!

Latin and ancient Greek are great languages to learn, if you are so inclined. If you're doing classical method they will be an important part. They help with spelling and understanding our language. But they're both dead languages, so if you can't see the need to study them, it's probably not there. If someone else can convince you they're important, then go for it. I won't try. (that said, we've done a bit of Latin around the Mahar house)

On reading and discussing the classics. There is no better way to an education than to read timeless classic books, then discuss them. You can do this no matter what curriculum or method you use for home education. And you should. One great method is to read them out-loud together. Try this sometime by candlelight.

On minivans. Just get over it and buy one.

On babysitters and daycare. Many homeschool parents never ever ever put their kids in daycare or hire a babysitter outside of those they've known for years. When something comes up sans kids, they just don't go. Big mistake in my book. Your overprotective paranoid schizophrenia fed by media horror stories is not going to help your kids. We've hired high-school aged homeschooled babysitters, done babysitting co-ops and used group babysitting for 'parent's night out' and always had great experiences. What's good for your marriage is good for your family and good for your kids.

On Jury Duty. You will be called, sooner or later. Everyone gets called. It's your civic duty and being a homeschool parent is not an excuse. (and yes, I admit, raising your kids is also your civic duty.) If you weasel out because you're a SAHM or SAHD then you get the justice you deserve. Find a sitter. Co-op with another homeschool family. Get out and engage in the system. It's important, and maybe you can even use it in your homeschooling. Remember, everything counts.

On schooling in the car. Don't miss this great opportunity. You'll be in the car/van a lot. Stock up and be prepared. Some of our most memorable conversations and educational moments have been while rolling down the road. There are websites and books dedicated to this, and the word ‘Carschooling’ has even been copyrighted by a homeschool mom.

What the research says on home education. Homeschoolers are fiercely independent, are jealous guards of their privacy, and are severely idiosyncratic making the researcher’s job extremely difficult. Many, but not all academic and social science research into homeschooling are paid for by homeschool advocacy groups like HSLDA, which calls their credibility into question. Any research conducted or funded by an organization whose mission statement explicitly states that they exist to promote home education immediately suggests self-serving biased. Frequently study participants are self-selected which generally calls into question the validity of any conclusions from a social science point of view. And given that every group, every lobby, and every industry twists science and scientific studies to prove their point or to make money, and that social science is the most easily twisted, a healthy skepticism is the only way to approach every sort of social study.

Don’t automatically trust the experts on anything, especially something so deeply intimate and personal as homeschooling. Trust yourself, your own observations and your own instincts. Your heart knows things your mind never will.

The preponderance of research and a huge body of anecdotal evidence support the validity and effectiveness of home education. A small minority of research and some anecdotal evidence calls its worth into question. Oddly enough, what independent research there is shows much the same as the ‘biased’ research; homeschoolers excel academically, socially and civically.

Naysayers point out that homeschooled kids come mostly from white, middle to upper class families in good neighborhoods and suburbs, and the same group of children would test higher than the average no matter where they were educated. I would also point out that most homeschool research isn’t done for academic review and to be published in refereed journals, but for parents trying to decide whether or not to bring the education of their children home. As such, those people are the best ones to ask if the research is reliable, because they’re the ones relying on it. It has also been suggested that if we were more regulated it would be easier to study us. But whenever anyone suggests more regulations on home education, the earth breaks open and we pour out like enraged ants looking for a fight.

As a home educator parent I must say that the research I’ve looked at appears valid and reliable and despite their clearly biased origin, the conclusions drawn from homeschool studies bear out very well in my own family and among our homeschooled friends.

On what the experts say: If someone tells you they are a homeschooling expert, don’t walk away. Run away. There’s no such thing. Especially you will get professional teachers who say they’re homeschool experts. Run!

On Television: I’d take an axe to ours if the rest of the family didn’t like it so much. I know several families who don’t own one. Others have only a TV connected to a VCR or DVD player so they can watch movies, documentaries etc. I can’t stand the thing, and consider it a time-wasting brain-rotting idiot-making machine. But it certainly has uses; history channel, discovery channel, special interest, news, and as a window to the culture. And when you load up those Disney videos it’s a great babysitter.

On using computers in home education: Don’t know what we’d do without our computers. We have three networked plus a laptop. We use them intensely every day, and the bulk of our curriculum is computer based. But again, I know families who treat the computer the same as the TV and get along without either. So it can be done. I just wouldn’t want to try.

On reading aloud, a primary duty of all parents. There is no such thing as too much out-loud reading. Three or four hours a day is not too much. Once you have provided food, clothing and shelter for your children, your next responsibility is to read out loud to them. Read aloud to your children, no matter their age. All my kids love to be read to. And read great books with rich language. There are thousands of wonderful books dripping with wonderful words just waiting for you to cuddle on the couch with your family and read. If you want your child to be skilled with language, if you want great written and spoken language to come out of them, you must put it into them. You do this by reading great books to them out loud.

On academic contests and competitions. We’ve made fine use of these around the Mahar home. They motivate our kids to perform and grow beyond anything they’d otherwise do. Don’t miss out on these wonderful opportunities to energize your child to compete. And who knows, you might win something cool. We have.

On dealing with skeptical relatives and friends. It’s disconcerting when someone you’re related to, someone you love and respect, or someone you’ve know a long time looks down their nose at you or asks questions that suggest they think you’re crazy or criminal for staying home with your kids. Here are some ideas.

These are your children, not theirs. This is your trump card. Keep it front and center in your mind and in your replies.

Consider the motives of the questioner before responding. Sometimes they’re genuinely curious or interested in how homeschooling works. They may be considering it with their own kids. This dictates a friendly informative answer.

Sometimes they’re truly concerned about the education and upbringing of their grandchild, niece, nephew, neighbor or what-not. Not only do they not understand homeschooling, they can’t even imagine what motivates a person to do what you’re doing, and they’re genuinely concerned that you are crazy and your poor dear children will grow up to be social deviants, hermits or outcasts. This dictates another sort of response if they are receptive. Reassurances, citing research and using the kids as evidence is often effective. Show them that your kids have loads of friends. If you test, this may be a good time to whip out the kid’s test scores. When you do this, try to act as if test scores are really a big deal and that they really mean something. Also, letting them spend time with the kids can help reduce fears that they, or you are in some way strange.

They may simply not trust you, not like you, or feel that you are not qualified to teach these or any children. If their questions and concerns reflect more on the quality of the teaching than on learning, use your trump card. See letter ‘a.’ above. These people bring nothing to the table, and only criticize and impede you in your efforts to help your children become educated. And by the way, don’t let them get you down, and don’t buy into their false ideas. By homeschooling you are doing the right thing, and by trying to undercut you, they are doing the wrong thing. You can do this.

Some relatives (especially skeptical in-laws and teachers or ex-teachers) can be quite forceful in their resistance to the notion of home education. Choose your battles. Is this hill worth dying for? You will likely not change their mind.

One tactic is to refuse to discuss your choice to homeschool until they have become informed on the topic by reading this and that book on home education. Stick to your guns and don’t get drawn into an argument until they’ve actually read the books. You might even lend them the books. You might just change the subject. Or you might be forced to limit your time with certain people who insist on arguing with you about a decision that is 100% yours and 0% theirs. You can not control the people around you, but you can control who you are around. You need support for your decision, not anti-support. Whatever you decide, don’t let them frame the debate, especially when they know nothing about homeschooling and are working only from their own faulty assumptions and misconceptions.

If you decide to get into a full scale debate about home education, which can be a lot of fun, get your arguments lined up and organized. It’s fairly simple because critics of homeschooling nearly always use the same old tired arguments. Defending your decision to homeschool can be very therapeutic because, while you’re trying to convince someone else, you’re bolstering your own beliefs. Having your ideas constantly challenged forces you to clarify your own thinking, decide what ideas are first and most important, then defend them bravely. Read books on homeschooling. Subscribe to a home education magazine or two. Get on a few mailing lists. See my comments on bogus reasons not to homeschool (below).

The most frequent question about homeschooling has to do with socialization, and it’s based on misconceptions and media mis-portrayals of the home educated. They think we’re sitting around playing solitaire and studying spelling words all day, or that if a child doesn’t have a ‘normal’ schooled childhood, that he won’t be able to get into college, get a job, be good company, mix, mingle, get married or be happy later in adult life. It’s the easiest argument to respond to.

Some people will deal with you in a condescending way, treating you with contempt, or as a gullible fool for even considering home education. These sophisticated, nuanced, worldly people have great thoughts, ideas and plans to change the world through their religion of universal schooling. Be brave enough to have your wisdom thought of as foolishness and to have your traditional beliefs ridiculed. And be consoled. By homeschooling, you are changing the world more directly, more intimately and more effectively than any critic of home education.

On Dad’s roles and dilemmas in home education; Hate to break it to you, dad, but there’s more to homeschooling than going off to work, then coming home to find your wife really tired. If you treat home education as just your wife’s thing, you are shortchanging her, cheating your children and missing out on one of the greatest journeys of your life. You have to support her or it’s not going to work. But certainly some dads have very legitimate issues with homeschooling;

No matter how good or bad the homeschooling day was, in the back of dad’s mind he knows that mom and kids were together all day and he was absent. This is not a great feeling. Breadwinning so you can afford a home for the homeschool is not as satisfying as being intimately involved on an hour by hour, a minute by minute, a concept by concept basis with your child’s education. Moms get this. Dads don’t. Mom, keep this in mind. Few homeschool dads get the thrill that comes when a child finally ‘gets’ a difficult concept, because we’re usually off at work. We don’t get to share the same type of intimacy with our children, or share those brilliant moments of rightness that come with home education.

After 8 or 10 or 12 or 16 hours of work, we dads come home and we’re tired. We dads have needs. These needs are not always consistent with home education, with reading aloud, solving the latest problem or reviewing today’s work. As much as we’d like to take advantage of our children’s energy, sometimes we just need some dead time.

It’s hard to be supportive when we don’t know what happened today. Sometimes it doesn’t look like much happened at all. Keeping track of a child’s progress is a fair amount of work all by itself. To complicate things, homeschooling is not a product. It’s a process. And we dads can be very product oriented. What got done today? What got written? How many math sheets were completed? What books were read? Is that it? Show me! Dads, we need to learn to ease up.

Dad, you have a unique energy you can add to the homeschool experience if you so choose. It’s a completely different flavor and style from ‘mom energy’. Hang out with some other homeschool dads and you’ll hear about great trips, plays, building projects or skills that dads have done with their kids. Just because you work all day doesn’t mean you can’t get involved in your child’s education.

On math, science, chemistry and other subjects that make homeschool moms quake with fear. Keep in mind that you can obtain everything they have in schools. OK, let's take these one at a time.

Math – Quick! How much is one item when it’s priced 3 for $5? I'm a big advocate of advanced math, but must admit, it's of little use in most of our daily lives. Consumer math, on the other hand, is a critical skill in the modern world. Don't skimp on math because it's hard. But once a person can add, subtract, multiply and divide whole numbers, fractions and decimals and convert this knowledge into real world practical problems, such as deciphering deceptive pricing in the grocery store, more advanced math is only important for someone going into technical trades or careers, or for the child who really enjoys the beauty of math. (Answer to above question, one dollar and sixty seven cents.)

Science: again, I'm a big advocate of science education. But let's remember what it's for; a basic understanding of the world around us. You do not need to understand subatomic physics, meta-cosmology or the intricacies of gene sequencing to understand the world around you. You do need to know a bit about physics, chemistry, and biology, most of which you can learn by critically observing our world.

On Biology, Chemistry, dissection (with scalpels and frogs and fetal pigs and such) and ‘test tube’ subjects: You don’t have to smell formaldehyde or tolerate odors from chemistry experiments gone wrong. There are other ways. But if you would like to do these subjects, several online and catalog companies sell everything you will need to do chemistry and biology at home. Or you can find a co-op or sign up for a class at your local community college. You can even do nice clean odor-free dissection online.

On the HSLDA: I agree with them on about 90% of their issues, but I don’t belong because I don’t feel I need their services, can’t abide their overreactions, hyperbole, scare tactics, or protestant exclusivism and I don’t feel it’s a good value for my money. On the other hand, they’re a lightning rod for homeschooling issues at the national level, and I check their website regularly. And they sell some cool books on American history at their convention tables. If you’re already paranoid, go ahead and spend the $100 a year.

Glorious amateurism. Your child’s education is much too important to leave to paid professionals. As with all labors of love, homeschooling is an all-amateur endeavor. If anyone tells you they’re a professional homeschooler, beware. They’re probably trying to sell you something. Being an amateur means you don’t get paid for it. It does not mean you’re not serious about it, that you’re not really good at it, or that you don’t really care about it. Most of the advancements in history and technology were brought about by amateurs playing around with ideas. Be proud to be an amateur!

On Social Studies: Teach history, and begin at the beginning. Teach government and begin at the beginning. Teach geography and begin at the beginning. Never teach ‘social studies’, a schoolish subject that begins at the end of history, government and geography, and goes nowhere from there.

On history: Nearly anything you do in history is going to beat what they’re doing in school. I favor a chronological world history approach starting in the earliest years. I also like historical novels and movies because they make learning history a breeze. Timelines are fun to create and are visible evidence of what you have learned. Also, a grand timeline of human history gives you a sense of how small you are, and of how many came before you.

On discipline within the family; this isn’t really a homeschool issue. It’s a family issue. But it has direct bearing on homeschooling. In nearly every case I know where homeschooling has ‘failed’ and the student has had to drop out of homeschooling and drop into public schools, family discipline was the major factor. If life has become a daily power struggle, if your children are co-parenting themselves, if their normal method of communication is to whine and bicker, or if you imagine that your children will perform better for a teacher than they do for you, the parent, then you have a discipline problem. And ugly as it might sound, you have only yourself to blame and only one thing to do. Parent! (that’s a verb)

On the difference between training and education. Again, not a homeschooling issue, but related. People educate themselves, but they do not train themselves. Imagine a dog or a dolphin training itself. Wouldn’t happen. Education is something you do to yourself, but training is something someone else does to you. We all want our children to be educated, but first they must be trained. In fact, they must be trained in order to become educated. And that’s your job so don’t be scared of it. Train your children so they can educate themselves.

On legislative lobbying and writing your representatives. Must homeschooling be political? Sorry but yes, it must. Sending your kids off to public school is not a political act. Homeschooling them is. The homeschool movement has enemies who are union-funded, well-connected and politically powerful, and whose interests are threatened by parent’s teaching their own. They actively introduce legislation each year to take away your freedom, to legislate out of existence your right to educate your children without schooling. Whether you eat, drink and dream politics or would rather never have to hear another politician as long as you live, you need to be aware of how politics affects homeschooling and be ready to defend it. And your options are simple. You can fight now, or fight later. You can respond vigorously when they attack our homeschool freedoms, or you can fight them after they’ve passed their oppressive homeschooling legislation. Or you can just ignore them, pull the curtains and hope they won’t notice you. I believe that it’s less work overall to fight them up front. It’s either that, or be ready to surrender when they come to your home to force your children into government school. That is not hyperbole. They’ve done it, and they will again.

On homeschooling as a movement. Homeschooling is self-promoting. There are no banners or billboards, television or radio ads, door-fliers or internet pop-up ads telling you to homeschool. Yet it’s growing at 15 to 25% per year. It is truly a groundswell and completely grass-roots. And very few people are doing it to ‘jump on the bandwagon’. No one starts homeschooling to be part of a movement, and some homeschoolers actively resist the idea that they are a part of a movement. They simply see themselves as advocates for their own children and their own families. Be that as it may, don’t disregard the ‘movement’ aspect of homeschooling. Being a part of a movement offers you moral and philosophical support. We are social beings. It’s nice to be able to say, “Look at all the other people who are doing this. It must be OK.” Also, once you begin homeschooling you become part of the movement whether you like it or not, and how you present yourself will impact other’s perception of home education. You don’t have to be a cheerleader (like me) but you do make an impression, and you should pay at least minimal attention to making it a good impression both for yourself, for fellow home educators and for those who will come after you.

On homeschool burnout; Burnout is like kryptonite to the homeschooling super-mom. It’s what happens when a parent on fire with the zeal for homeschooling runs out of fuel. Homeschool burnout is an insidious state of mind and body resulting from cumulative unreleased stress, over-commitment, and excessive reliance on your own abilities. It’s a crisis of determination, a tiredness born of under-support and over-commitment, and most of all, a failure of vision. You burn out after you’ve been on fire with enthusiasm. But your unrealistic expectations for yourself and your children eventually slam head-on into the real world. You can’t take every class, do every co-op, attend every field trip and finish every lesson in the book. Nor should you try. That’s not what it’s about anyway. LISTEN TO ME. Homeschooling is about living naturally. As a family. Raising kids into adults naturally. So chill. Take a long hot bath. Go for a bike ride or a jog. Let the laundry lay and go fishing. Rent a good comedy. Go out with the girls. Take off your Supermom cape off every now and then and revert to your mild mannered alter-ego.

Here are other topics I’ll add or expand in the future, as time allows and I think of stuff to say. All are issues of concern for home educators.

On organizing all that homeschool stuff in your house: Truth be told, I don’t have a clue what I could say about this except, Thank God for big plastic storage tubs. I’m no example to follow because I’ve always got dozens of projects going, with bits and pieces scattered around the house. But if you’d like to do as I say and not as I do, then here are a few ideas.

If you don’t need or love a thing, throw it away or donate it. Don’t even let it into your home unless you need it or love it. As a young family, and especially a new homeschooling family, you get everybody’s junk. Space is something you need, so don’t fill yours up with junk you don’t need.

If you bought something you thought you would use but haven’t in a year, sell it or toss it.

On homeschooling AND getting dinner on the table, getting the laundry done, and generally making a home. Hmmm. Good luck with this one.

On the ‘real world’: In the single digit days of my elementary school experience, adults kept telling me about ‘the real world’, usually hinting that I wasn’t ready for it.. They told me that this wasn’t like High School where I’d have to be responsible for my own work. Then, upon reaching high school, all the teachers talked about was college, how hard it would be and how unprepared we were. Someday, they said, we would be in the real world and things would be different. Wherever the real world was, it didn’t sound like a very nice place. But I was led to believe that someday I’d have to live there, so I had better prepare. And so my childhood was spent learning things I would need in ‘the real world. Helpful friends or strangers would usually use the term, “When you get to the real world…”, then tell me how bad it was going to be. They would also allude, or say outright that I was not currently in the real world, but rather in school. Later, during more than 2 years of training in the navy I was told about ‘the real navy’ where someday I would work. After training I reported to a fairly old submarine where others on the crew promptly told me that it wasn’t a real submarine because real submarines do this mission and have that equipment and don’t have to put up with all the lame missions we did. During my entire time in the military I was constantly reminded about ‘the real world’ outside the military, how hard it was and how nobody out there cared or took care of you. After leaving the military I want to work at a modern nuclear power plant where I was promptly told by workers from other power plants that this wasn’t a real power stations. At real power stations they don’t have all the minutia, procedures and requirements…

It seems, no matter where I go that I’m not in the real world.

Seriously, we’re all in the real world all the time. Looking back on my life, I realize that the most artificial world I experienced was school. We homeschoolers are out in the world with our children, not waiting to join the human race some day. Homeschooled kids are an active and important part of their parents lives, wholly engaged in their social responsibilities. Homeschool and let your children live and learn in the real world.

On chores (for the kids, a family issue really, not a homeschool issue)

On the new breed of homeschoolers who seem, to veteran home educators to be less committed, more dependent and generally just don’t seem to ‘get it’. Don’t worry. They’ll get the vision. Most of us didn’t have it when we started either.

On the ‘pioneer versus settler’ analogy as it relates to homeschoolers. This has to do with the history of home education. We have good laws because of those who came before us, and we should thank them for it. Thanks to them, we don’t have to pioneer the homeschool frontiers. We’re settlers, and we have new battles to fight, new cities to plan.

On preschool and kindergarten, the best years to homeschool.

On middle school/puberty/the hormone club: going through it right now. Maybe I’ll have perspective in a few years

On teaching reading. It’s not that hard. Any kid who wants to learn to read can learn.

On teaching reading to babies and toddlers

On home birth, attachment parenting, family bed, La Leche League, etc. (also not really a homeschool issue, but there’s a lot of crossover with other families living close to the root)

On homeschooling as a women’s movement

On delaying formal teaching; ala better late than early

On returning to traditional schooling. Many teachers have a bad impression of homeschooled children because those they get in their classrooms are the homeschool failures, not the homeschool successes. This especially goes for elementary school teachers.

On religion and religious instruction

On spelling

On character education

On volunteering/community service

On college entrance; Regardless of whether you are homeschooled or not, here’s the rule for college: if you have money, you get to go. If you don’t have money, you have to kiss-up to somebody to get them to pay. And this may mean you have to fill out their forms, jump through their hoops and do what it takes to satisfy them rather than doing whatever you might have done otherwise. Homeschoolers are getting into colleges nearly everywhere. Often they are prized and sought after students. But remember what college is; adult education. Educating children is different than educating adults and home education typically has dealt with the education of children. For college the rules change.

On learning/teaching foreign languages

On the internet

On family income, thriving on one income, living high-on-the-hog while still being frugal.

On starting a home business

On home-economics

On homeschool conventions

On homeschooling trends and gimmicks

On special needs children

On Attention Deficit Disorder, ADHD and other diagnosable problems. If your child doesn’t pay attention when you want him to, there’s likely nothing wrong with him. You’re just boring. If your child can’t pay attention when he wants to, there may be something wrong. The first thing you need to ask yourself is, what were you asking him to pay attention to? Next ask; Is it reasonable to expect that to interest him?

On handwriting, penmanship, cursive, etc

On teaching writing, a distinctly different subject than handwriting and penmanship.

On co-ops

On support groups, their organization, rules and bylaws, their statements of faith and other so very significant details. Do they arrange their chairs in rows or in a circle? Are they spontaneously self organizing or do they fall under the umbrella of some other chartering organization.

On sports and PE. Ever notice that nobody ever argues that homeschooled kids don’t get enough PE.

On typing

On denim jumpers and baby slings (I like denim. Really!)

On joining the military

On homeschooling an only

On homeschooling with toddlers

On homeschooling your grandchildren, or other people’s children

On math drill: we used it and thought it was helpful for increasing speed. Others disdain it as rote learning devoid of thought.

On teaching multiple ages

On portfolios and transcripts

On unschooling

On music lessons

On Child Protective Services, anonymous tips, ‘the battle for the front door’.

On using the library: (also on using the internet): Knowing how to find the answer is the same as knowing the answer.

On mainstream homeschooling, as opposed to homeschooling being a fringe thing. In other words, on acting as if what you’re doing is normal. Some of us would just as soon be thought of as a bunch of fringe wackos. We’re less threatening, hence less threatened that way.

On parents rights, children’s rights, and other philosophical trivia.

On ex-teachers, one of the biggest populations among homeschooling parents. I read an article suggesting that fully a third of homeschool families had at least one parent who is, or was a trained or paid teacher.

On the perennial question, “Why do I have to learn this?” It’s a perfectly good question, and it’s just possible that if you can’t explain to your child why they should learn something, that they really don’t need to learn it. If they can’t see what math is for, I can’t imagine why they would want to do the work to learn it. That’s a hint. Let them see you doing math. The same goes for every other subject.

Most of us parents went to public schools. Our education paradigms come from our experiences, and it’s hard doing something with (and to) your children dramatically different than what was done to you. We’re often stuck in the mental quagmires of grades and classes, authority, helplessness, irrelevancy and disconnectedness that is public education. Homeschooling can help you, the parent recover from and undo your public school education. But you can not ever completely undo your education.

And finally; Don’t wait for things to bet better. They won’t. You have to make them good now. Homeschooling isn’t easy. Kids don’t always feel like doing lessons. Teaching very young children is time intensive. Teaching middle schoolers with all their energy and hormones is taxing. Planning lessons is a lot of work. Unschooling is even harder, because you have to be ready to support whatever whims and whiles your child may follow. As a parent, it can be frustrating to watch your child struggle with difficult concepts. Your house will be even more cluttered once you add all that homeschool stuff. You will always be ‘on’, always looking for that teachable moment, that perfect opportunity to deeply discuss the latest great idea. And it never gets better. You might think, “It will be so much better when they learn to walk; talk; read; do math; use the computer; drive on their own; etc” It never gets better. Only different. So make it good now.