An old friend contacted me recently and in the catching up process wondered about my reasons for homeschooling. I hadn't contemplated the question in a while. Obviously I could write a long laundry list about the benefits, objective ones and subjective ones. There are many out there for the googling. I enjoy many of those benefits
But they aren't all my reasons, the ones I really own.
Let's just take this one for example. "Homeschooling is a way to provide excellent academic preparation, and I believe I am likely to do a better job of teaching my particular child than other schools I might choose, public or private."
Am I confident this is true? In my current situation, yes.
Am I confident it's always going to be true at all times and everywhere? Actually, no. Academically excellent schools exist, and children's academic needs evolve. I know of a couple private schools around here where I think Oscar, kid that he is, would likely get an excellent education. Maybe at some point I'd become convinced that one of them might be able to match my abilities to teach Oscar specifically.
By itself, would that be enough to make me switch? I don't think so (although it would play into the decision, of course). Because academic excellence, though I'm glad to have it, isn't the primary reason I homeschool.
How about this one? "Homeschooling my kids is rewarding. I enjoy it."
True? Yes. Absolutely. Even when it's frustrating, I am grateful for the experience. It is shaping me in a way that I truly value.
Will it always be true? Maybe not. I could definitely imagine a time when I wasn't enjoying it, or when there were things I would enjoy more, or value more, that I would be sacrificing for homeschooling. I might, for instance, warm up to the idea of returning to some semblance of a career, or begin to desire to go back to school. Or as the children age out of the primary school years I might discover that homeschooling older kids isn't as rewarding as I expect it to be. Or I might just get tired of it. Who knows?
Still, I don't think I would conclude I ought to stop. It's not the primary reason I do it.
There are lots of possible reasons. It costs me less than private school would (more than public school would, of course). It frees our whole family from planning around the school's clock and the school's calendar. It allows my kids to be outside more than they might if they were in school (although I'm not sure we actually ARE outside as much as we should be). Any of those or a host of other reasons might be some family's primary reason to homeschool. We're all different.
But this is mine: Homeschooling allows my children to spend most of their time in an environment rich in real relationships.
At this age, this mainly means: Each child is together with siblings all the time. My children are each other's most significant playmates, and they have close and loving relationships that have never been disturbed by long periods of time in enforced age segregation.
This is the most important reason I homeschool. It didn't develop until I noticed it happening, but the rewards are unspeakably huge.
I have noticed something about that, when I mention it to other people. It rings true to almost everyone. You know — skeptical family members, random other moms at the playground ("You homeschool? Wow, more power to you. I could NEVER do that"), and other homeschoolers too, of course. (I've never tried it on a professional K-12 educator before and one of these days I mean to because I'm really curious about the response I would get.)
It doesn't even matter if the person you're talking to is really committed to the necessity of early "socialization" to large numbers of one's age cohort, which is basically the thing that steps in and displaces the sibling relationship I'm speaking of. The reaction to this simple statement:
"What I really love about homeschooling is that my children spend so much time together, they are each other's best friends and playmates, and they have really close, loving relationships"
is always, always, always, a positive one. Sometimes the expression you will see on your interlocutor's face will break your heart. Try it and see.
But what I'm getting at is that I really mean this, I really believe it. I have learned to leave it at that (unless I am pressed with more questions, which I am happy to answer). I am confident that this is reason enough. I don't go on and on about academic excellence or individual attention or personal satisfaction or any other sort of thing. I enjoy all that stuff, but they aren't my REASON. So I probably wouldn't be all that convincing, frankly.
As the children age, the world expands to include more relationships. We already see several relationships with people outside our family that are nearly as important as the sibling ones. Maybe some of the children's sibling relationships will, in time, decrease in importance. I think, however, that homeschooling saturates the student in relationships that have a chance to be more than superficial, because with homeschooling we have a chance to arrange our lives to focus on what's important for the growth and development of each individual child, or at least to balance it pretty well among the needs and desires of all the members of our family. It's much like the way we can make sure that the one who shows an aptitude for music gets to spend extra time and money on music lessons, that the one who's obsessed with birds gets to do a lot of nature study, that the one who loves to read has a well-stocked library of the kinds of stories she likes best.
Fewer connections may be made, true. I think we can hope that fewer may be broken, too.
Anyway. If I thought that homeschooling were preventing a particular child from forming or preserving strong and important relationships, that might be, for me, my reason to stop, if the other benefits don't seem to outweigh it at the time. I'll make no claims about whether that's likely or not. I can't predict the future.
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