Four Moms Get Out of the Kitchen And Talk Homeschooling

 Four Moms:  Kim @ Raising Olives
Connie @ Smockity Frocks
KimC @ Life in a Shoe
and ME

Welcome to another Thursday post in the Four Moms, 35 kids series (37 if we count Blynken and Nod, who were here from Wednesday thru Tuesday, and are back again today).  We wanted a break from the kitchen, and mine is in a state of chaos, anyway (no sink or stove top.  No counter!), as it's being repaired after a fire last fall.  We're going to talk about homeschooling, but I think what I have to say applies to just about any situation where you find yourself going against the flow, doing something out of the mainstream.  And if you have never done anything outside the mainstream, well, it's high time you started!

Our oldest girl went to preschool (two days a week), and then public school kindergarten.  Our second girl was in preschool for two months while her big sister was in kindergarten- that was a huge mistake.  The Equuschick loathed preschool and simply boycotted any involvement to the point that the teacher thought my early talking, verbally gifted chatterbox was mute and did not even understand most of what was said to her.  She's always been stubborn, the Equuschick.

We officially started hsing in 1988.  We would have started sooner, because kindergarten just was not working out for us, but I thought the HG should finish what she started.  It was probably years later when it dawned on me that kindergarten was not something the HG started, it was something we had started for her.

  When we started our reasons and our vision for what we were doing could be summed up in about one word- reactionary. We had no vision for where we were going or who we were as a family- we simply knew where we were not going and what we were not doing. That's a start, and in important one- but it's not enough to get you down the finish line.

So much of the process of becoming free in my country, it seems, is in withdrawing from all the awful things we've been deliberately and systematically taught to need—everything from additives in the food to a car for every really "independent" person; so that a good deal of our manner and program must be negative rather than positive.


We are the folks who do not do all those corrupt things, etc. etc. But the positive, new, and forward aspects of the life are coming on strong now, and will exonerate us in the long run, I'm sure, from any accusation that we merely drew back without pushing upward as well.

From Total Loss Farm, A Year in the Life by Ray Mungo

This tension between the need to draw away from, to reject, and the need to have a positive goal, something to embrace, the reactive versus the proactive, exists in any counter-cultural push, and homeschooling is one of the most counter-cultural pushes you'll ever make- especially if you resist the urge to conform in tiny little schoolish groups as we have.

The waking awareness that something is wrong, that the popular direction, the cultural flow, is not somewhere we want to go, that we're drifting in a current that flows counter to what we really believe and value in life is an important first step.

You cannot counter that current, decide to escape it, swim in a different direction, take charge of your own life and purposefully, deliberately, and thoughtfully examine the popular assumptions of the day without first noticing what's happening and in some degree rejecting to it- reacting to it.

Homeschooling is this way. Most of us begin by reacting.  We might be reacting to the popular assumption that kids are a pain in the neck and we can't wait to see the backs of them come September.  Perhaps the reaction was more specific and local-  something specific in our local school.  Perhaps it is a principled political reaction developed out of some growing awareness of the inherent immorality of picking other people's pockets for our pet social causes, or some other cause that pushed you to consider homeschooling.

Those and other similar reasons are all good reasons to start homeschooling, but few people are able to continue homeschooling encouraged only by the bread of reacting. .

At some point you have to replace fighting the current in which our culture swims with deliberately setting out with some positive goal in mind. Otherwise, you're just flailing in the water without any purpose, and you burn out.


You can begin by being reactive, by rejecting one option, but if you want to stay in any counter cultural direction for the long haul, you have to become proactive. You need to develop a strong philosophy about what you're in favor of, not just what you're 'agin.

I speak of homeschooling, but this is true of any rejection of common culture. When your reasons and decisions are all reactive, you're still letting the common culture control what you do and why- you're still being pushed by that current and you're expending a lot of energy pushing back. That's exhausting, and in the end all you have to show for it is all the things you disagree about, and you sound disagreeable.

Our family began homeschooling as reactive people, and planned to homeschool each of the kids for merely the first two or three at most years, and then put them in public school for the remainder. I couldn't decide when would be the best time to enter them in ps. I think my eldest was fifth grade before I realized that homeschooling for us was now a way of life, not just something we did in the mornings because the alternative was so bad.  At some point homeschooling had become not just a reactionary response, but something I embraced for its own sake and I did not want to give it up.

It has now been many years since we realized that we homeschool because it's a beautiful way of life, a lovely creation in its own right, a delightful way to live as a family. We don't plan to ever quit until there are no more children left at home to be educated..

 Two important things we learned along the way:

What about socialization?:
Not since leaving school myself to join the 'real world' have I been limited to spending most of my days Monday thru Friday with 25 other people the same age who have all been chosen to be my associates on the basis that they live within the narrow limits of an assigned school district, and who are all doing exactly the same thing as me at precisely the same time. In the real world we spend time with people from a variety of age, social, and community backgrounds doing a variety of different activities. Depending on the work you do, even people working for the same business in the same room are often doing different things. At the grocery store, for instance, some people might be stocking shelves, some are cashiering, some are cutting meat, some are running clean-up on aisle five. At the library some are helping clients find books, some are helping to check them out, pages are stocking books, some are in the back transcribing old documents and genealogical material. You get the picture. There are a few types of employment that are the equivalent of "Everybody pull out your books and turn to page 239..."

2. Don't try to duplicate school at home.  This is trading away your strengths as a homeschooling mom for the weaknesses of public school.  It's not that schoolish methods are weak in schoolish settings, though.

You're not a school. You're a family. Many of the tools for school (worksheets, multiple choice tests, true/false tests) are effective ways of working with a large group of unrelated people within a constrained amount of time to get them through the same amount of material that was imposed from the top down and needs to be crammed into in nine months or less. Using their tools to homeschool is like using a chainsaw to butter your bread or an institutional kitchen and cafeteria to feed your family of five.  Public schools are dealing with kids whose parents didn't come home last night, kids who got off to school with a smack and a curse, kids who have been brought up in an environment as stimulating as a piece of white bread. They are dealing with 20-30 kids with varying interests, abilities, and background and a limited calendar and clock. They are dealing with a climate of suspicion making it impossible for them to kiss a child, give out an tylenol, or defuse a tense moment with a group prayer.
You don't have most of these issues to deal with. Even those of us with adopted children from difficult backgrounds have fewer than 20 of them, and we have them 24 and 7. You can curl up on the couch with a good history book and your sweet children and read together and talk about it and you will have covered as much ground in literature, critical thinking, vocabulary, and history in half an hour as a public schooled child does in a week. You may not have pen and paper work to show for it, but the work of the mind happens in the mind, and it is what happens in the mind and heart that constitutes education.

So what about you?  If you have kids, how did you choose where to educate them?  Was it an active decision or the default?  What are some other ways you go against the flow? 

See what the rest of the Four Moms have to say:
Kim @ Raising Olives
Connie @ Smockity Frocks
KimC @ Life in a Shoe

Over the next few Thursdays, the Four Moms will be talking further about homeschooling:
May 6 - Picking a curriculum, method or tactics that work for a large family.
May 13 - Teaching little kids
May 20 - Teaching big kids. what changes? what do they need that little ones don't and where do you need to give more freedom. How do you make the transition.
May 27 - Putting it together. How does it work?
June 3 - Husbands and homeschooling
June 10 - Keeping house while homeschooling

More about socialization here

I wrote further about why we homeschool here.

Seven tips for highly effective homeschooling- I think these are a bit different than those you'll find elsewhere.


Nuts and Bolts tools for homeschooling

The day I did a public school at home day on purpose and to most excellent effect.  Yeah!

The cost of homeschooling

A little bit more about how we do what we do, specifically about books and literature.

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