Reasons To Choose Home Education

Lisa Nielsen, a public school administrator and teacher, has compiled a list entitled "The 12 Most Compelling Reasons to Homeschool Your Child" and you can read it here. The list contains many valid reasons for choosing this educational method for your children and many that I hear about in my conversations with home educators. What was missing from the list, in my opinion, are some of the opportunities to make education less self-centered and more intuitive. And so, to Nielsen's very good list, I would add the following:

1. The ability make education a family affair:
The modern educational system divides students arbitrarily, according to age or talent. The decision to homeschool breaks down these boundaries as education becomes an endeavor undertaken by the entire family. It's much easier to create an atmosphere of learning when parents see education as part of their responsibility. This is different from making sure that children do their homework. When a family homeschools everyone contributing to education. Older siblings can teach younger siblings. Parents learn along side their children. Learning together builds strong relationships as each person sees himself as an integral part of the family, and a contributor to the education of others.


2. The ability to take learning out of the classroom:
When you homeschool, I think that a switch is flipped and you begin to see that education is not something that just happens in a classroom. It's a lifestyle. Think of all that your child learned before she was formally enrolled in school. Even if she began attending preschool, there was an incredible amount of learning that happened before then, major accomplishments like speech! Children learn by observation and doing. When we take these inquisitive minds and send them to a school, telling them that this is where they will learn, we begin to divide learning from living. Of course, many students flourish within a classroom, and many families do a wonderful job of continuing to educate their children outside the classroom. But for those who find classrooms stifling and uninspiring, it can be a short leap from "I hate school" to "I hate learning". Homeschooling does not create artificial boundaries around the learning process.

3. The ability to see outside one's world:
When children are enrolled in schools according to zip code, there is a high likelihood that he or she will be attending school with other children from the same socio-economic circle and racial background. While there is comfort in this, there is also a lot of danger. As our nation becomes more and more segregated by factors such as income, we are losing our ability to empathize with people different from ourselves. While neighborhoods used to be much more integrated in terms of economic class, a startling trend of self-segregation has taken place across the US, resulting in homogenized neighborhoods. It used to be that bankers, doctors, school teachers, auto mechanics, and people working minimum wage jobs could all be found in the same neighborhoods. Now it's rare to live next to someone who is from a decidedly different economic background. This distance has allowed for an increasingly calloused view of the poor and an antagonistic view of the well-off. When you choose to homeschool, you can make a conscious effort to show your children how other people live. Whether that means volunteering in a homeless shelter, visiting the elderly at an affluent retirement home, or giving your time to a cause you believe in, you will be giving your children the ability to understand the world beyond their own neighborhood.

4. The ability to relax:
While school systems are being crushed by constant reforms, increased paperwork demands, and constant evaluations, you have a lot more freedom. Yes, your state may require testing or a submission of lesson plans, but you can set up your own schedule. You can work with your student's own learning style. When you sense that your children are fed up and you're at your wit's end, you can call it a day and go to the pool. While you may feel a lot of pressure, it's so important to remember that your children are constantly learning. It's important to have fun together, to read together, to play together. And when you're homeschooling you have so much more time to do those things.

I would love to hear your thoughts on homeschooling. Why did you decide to make this educational choice? What benefits have you discovered and found surprising? What about drawbacks?

And if you're ordering curriculum for this coming school year, now's the time to do it! Ordering now will ensure that your books are delivered in time to start your school year. And remember, all orders over $200.00 ship for free! Check out our history curriculums and study guides at bfbooks.com.

Don't forget to check out our Facebook and Pinterest pages. And if you've enjoyed this, please feel free to share using the buttons below!

Stories that keep families together

This past weekend I read a wonderful article in the New York Times. Entitled, "The Stories that Bind Us" it spoke about the human need to know where we come from. Within families researchers have found that young children who know the most about their family stories are more assured, bounce back from setbacks more easily, and are better equipped to handle challenges! 

Here we often extol the power of story to educate, develop character, encourage, etc. Yet the research cited in the article clearly shows that developing a "strong family narrative" is one of the best things you can do for your family. Dr. Marshall Duke, a psychologist at Emory University has researched families for decades and honed in on one aspect of his work to try to discover what kept families together. In an era where divorce and family dissolution is rampant, he was interested in finding out what families could do to counteract this trend. In a fortunate twist, his wife works with children with learning disabilities and she was noticing that the students who were the most successful in navigating the challenges their disability posed were those who seemed to know a lot about their families. So Dr. Duke decided to dig deeper. Read the article here for the whole story as it's definitely worthwhile. 

Points that stuck out to me were that in numerous tests the results were always the same: "The more children knew about their family’s history, the stronger their sense of control over their lives, the higher their self-esteem and the more successfully they believed their families functioned. The “Do You Know?” scale turned out to be the best single predictor of children’s emotional health and happiness."

This finding was tested in an extreme way when the September 11 attack happened. And the results held. The children who had a sense of who they were in relationship to a family history were better equipped and more emotionally resilient.

As a child I loved hearing the stories of my parent's childhoods. My dad had hilarious stories about his friends, who he gave nicknames like Meat Man and Bean Bun. My mom would tell us about how she and her seven siblings once thought their neighbor was hanging his wife, only to discover she had a bad back and was being suspended by her feet to get some relief from her chronic pain. We would laugh over the bullies who stole my dad's lunch and smashed bananas on his head. Both of my parents are consummate story tellers and I doubt that they were intentionally trying to create a "family narrative" but that is what they were doing. I also spent hours reading through a collection of stories recorded by a great aunt about her father, my great grandfather, growing up in North Dakota when it was still pretty wild. There were funny stories, boring stories, stories of adventure, stories of failure, and stories of success. And that brings me to a very important point. In the research, the psychologists found that there are three types of family narrative:

"First, the ascending family narrative: 'Son, when we came to this country, we had nothing. Our family worked. We opened a store. Your grandfather went to high school. Your father went to college. And now you....'
Second is the descending narrative: 'Sweetheart, we used to have it all. Then we lost everything.'”
'The most healthful narrative,' Dr. Duke continued, 'is the third one. It’s called the oscillating family narrative: "Dear, let me tell you, we’ve had ups and downs in our family. We built a family business. Your grandfather was a pillar of the community. Your mother was on the board of the hospital. But we also had setbacks. You had an uncle who was once arrested. We had a house burn down. Your father lost a job. But no matter what happened, we always stuck together as a family." ' ”

It is essential that the family story not be whitewashed, nor ought it to be all doom and gloom. Of course, waiting until a child is of an appropriate age to reveal more mature details is wise, but children need a realistic and accurate understanding of their roots.

And I think this can be extrapolated out to a broader level. Could it be that one of the reasons our nation is so fractured is because we have failed to maintain a national narrative? History is taught not as a story but as facts to memorize and forget after a test. Both on a national level and a wider human level the loss of our story has very sad consequences. If knowing the stories of our families makes us want to work harder to keep them together and gives us a strong sense of belong and identity, wouldn't the same be true about a national narrative? Wouldn't it be helpful if our elected officials had a historical perspective and knew that our country has been deeply fractured in the past but pulled together for a greater good? Might it be better to have a fully colored history taught in our schools that recognized our nations strengths as well as her failures? And is it possible that greater human narrative may show us that we're not so different from everyone else? It may be a simplistic to think that but perhaps if we instill a strong sense of our family story within our children, they will go on to think more broadly and see the benefits of working together to preserve the things we love.

So if you don't already, start telling your children the stories of your childhood. Tell them how their grandparents met, if their marriage was a happy one or maybe a strained one. Tell them about that strange uncle who was always off doing his own thing, or that gossipy sister, or the caring aunt who was a second mother. You'll be surprised by how much your children absorb and take with them. And to broaden your children's understanding of the national narrative, check out our new book, A Child's First Book of American History, now on sale for a limited time.

You may also enjoy reading:

Are books just magic? 

Using fiction to teach history, or how to educate the soul.

The Power of Story

Don't forget to check out our Facebook and Pinterest pages. And if you've enjoyed this, please feel free to share using the buttons below!