Is Homeschooling Contagious?

We home schoolers are a pretty diffident bunch of folks. We’re happy enough to tell you about homeschooling if you ask us, but we wouldn’t dream of pushing our educational approach on you. “This is what works for us,” we say. “You might find some of these ideas useful for your family, but not everyone is cut out to be an unschooler.”

This reluctance to evangelize homeschooling has a number of causes. Art of it is sensitivity to conventional skepticism or even hostility ward home schooling in general; if the general public doesn’t approve of parents teaching their own children at home using conventional methods, what are they likely to think of homeschooling? Partly it’s simple courtesy; we don’t want to imply criticism of your own educational choices by bragging about our own. Partly, though, our reserve is simply false modesty.

Scratch the surface a bit, probe a little more into our ideas and beliefs about how our kids learn, and you’re likely to get a lengthy discourse on the reasons for and the advantages of homeschooling for any child. Beneath the surface of that unpretentious practitioner of a somewhat unconventional educational alternative, you’re likely to find a fierce advocate for homeschooling.

What effects do you think homeschooling will have on the adults your kids become? How will they be different from more conventionally educated people?” (There was also another part to this question; we’ll get to that a bit later.) It seems that the effects of homeschooling on kids, on parents, and on families go far beyond what anyone expected when they first began to consider what they thought was just a simple little educational idea.

For me, unschooling has meant a very different relationship with Andrea. I no longer find myself having to find ways to coerce her into doing what I think she should be doing academically. Instead, I look for the learning that happens on its own, and marvel at how well it happens. I worried that she would not make use of her talents if I didn’t “do something,” Being a teacher was something that came naturally to me, so having a daughter who didn’t really want to be taught has taken some adjustment. Now I feel more like a resource, and I do more suggesting than anything else. I’ve also come to see how much of the school stuff is really just busy- I work. With a lot of effort put into substantiating the learning. For years. I’d known that my success in school had more to do with my ability to play the game of school very well, memorizing easily for tests without any effort to really learn the material. In many ways, watching Andrea actually learn for herself, without all the external carrots and sticks, has been a confirmation of my feelings about my own education.

For Andrea, unschooling has meant that she could concentrate on the things she enjoys without Interruption. She has always been good at keeping herself busy, and my early efforts to “teach” her were, more often than not, seen as an infringement on her freedom. Now when we do take a few minutes to try something “schoolish” (and this doesn’t happen often!), it’s more of a novelty. When she’s had enough, we stop.

It has also meant that she can be herself without L being labeled in one way or another by the school system. She is so unbelievably “normal” now, although there are still scars from her battles at school. I hope that because I’m learning to give her enough freedom to learn in her own way, she will grow up feeling good about who she is. She already has a very clear sense of that, and I suspect will be as full of righteous indignation about whatever she chooses to fight for as an adult as she is now. I think the whole concept of learning for your own reasons is applicable to all of life. People usually find out at some point that it’s easier to learn when it’s something you wont to do, but growing up in this environment should produce people with a genuine love of learning.

I think that we, as unschoolers, learn to trust our children, and that is also an important concept. By and large, society tends to underestimate kids, and by giving them the freedom to explore possibilities, we have an opportunity to demonstrate how much more many kids could be doing. My big gripe with our local school was that they didn’t value Andrea’s strengths, which-from my perspective-were strengths that a learning institution should have valued. I always wonder how many other bright children are being crammed into those round holes, and remind myself that Andrea wouldn’t let herself be.