Home-schooling
October 18, 2007, 6:07 pm
Posted by Joseph A. Komonchak
Two very bright and very balanced graduate students at my university (one a former columnist for “Commonweal”) have told me that they are home-schooling their children, which leads me to wonder what information is available about this phenomenon, which, I think, is now some twenty or thirty years old–who are choosing to home-school? why they choose to do it? what have been the results? the effects? what state-regulations govern it, if any? Etc., etc.
Has “Commonweal” published anything on it?
Home Education Magazine online is a good source of info for pro-home schoolers. States handle home schooling in different ways. Home Ed has lots of links on the Michigan page:
http://www.homeedmag.com/lawregs/michigan.html
The people I know who home-school fall into two camps:
1. Those who do so because they feel public school curriculum is at odds with and is a corrosive influence on their faith and morals.
2. Those whose kids have special needs (disabilities or gifts) that the public school teachers are not trained/equipped/smart enough to deal with.
With two exceptions, the families I know who home school are plugged into groups of other home-schoolers, and they pool resources, take kids on field trips and provide social interaction, though the religious groups tend to keep interaction within their faith groups.
One of the priest columnists in our diocesan magazine counseled parents to home-school or us parochial schools to ensure proper faith formation. The public schools were clearly damned by their omission from his list of options.
I found this sad, because I have a good relationship with my public school.
Hello All,
One reason Jean doesn’t mention that with the resources available to homeschoolers, combined with the tutorial nature of the home education, it is hard to beat the academic outcomes that are possible. For the most part “away-schools” just can’t compete with the results afforded by the dynamic, tutorial nature of home education. Even average kids can achieve at very high levels when given this kind of individualized instruction.
Nationwide, there are about 1million learners being homeschooled. This is equivalent to the public school population of several states.
In, 1997, (now Arch)Bishop Wuerl of Pittsburgh published the first pastoral letter in the country on homeschooling, Faith Education in the Home. It was very favorable and made recommendations for families, pastors, and other professionals. It is available here.
http://www.diopitt.org/education/faith.htm
Psychologically speaking, successful homeschooling families have more in common with 2 career families than they do with traditional SAHM families. As such, couples in successful homeschooling families need to adopt more egalitarian attitidues toward home management than to traditional SAHM households.
Also, homeschooling tends to turn up the volume on the famliy dynamic whether that is for good or ill. Families who enjoy each other will find more things to enjoy about each other. Families who have issues they have been avoiding will suddenly find that they can no longer afford to ignore those issues because they become magnified, affording them an opportunity to grow–or not.
Greg
The “Boston Pilot”, which is the paper of the Archdiocese of Boston, had an interesting article on homeschooling back last spring.
While in the ’80′s and early ’90′s homeschoolers were predominantly either Evangelical Protestant or secular “hippies”, it has exploded in popularity among Catholics over the past decade.
In our area, the parochial schools are both very expensive ($6.5k per child for elementary and $10k+ for high school) and only nominally Catholic. More than half the students are non-Catholics and the schools have really downplayed the teaching of the Faith. I’m no super-traditionalist but Catholicism is very important to me and I want it to be central to my children’s education.
How do these kids do getting into college?
Re College
I only have anecdotal, and I only know one home schooled kid: He got his AB from Clark University and now is getting a PhD from Oxford.
Ask your students, Cathleen!
Cathleen, the kids I know who were home-schooled did extremely well in college academically. They took the SAT like everyone else, and scored very high. So I think Greg’s points are certainly on the mark.
It never occurred to me to home-school until some relatives chided me for not doing so. They felt I was a lazy parent, given that I had teaching experience (in college) and an advanced degree.
However, the home schooling parents I know are self-confident, have talent with school aged kids, young, energetic, self-confident, outgoing and are in accord with their spouses that this is the route they want to pursue. Not everybody fits the bill. I don’t.
Home schools and charter schools have forced public schools to do better. Competition in Michigan under “schools of choice” have also improved public education.
I think the ability of home school students to get into good colleges is at least as good as the general population. Some homeschool families value higher education more than others (just like “away” school students’ families). My son, who was home schooled through 12th grade, is a sophomore at ND on a full tuition scholarship. My daugher, who was homeschooled in 4-8 and 11-12 got a substantial scholarship to Marquette. My brother-in-law, who teaches economics at St. Olaf, says he prefers home schooled students because they are self-motivators. Some schools, such as Notre Dame, used to make it harder for home schoolers to get in. I think Notre Dame has changed it tune on that recently, although they still require home schooled kids to take some SAT IIs that other students aren’t required to take.
In our home schooled group, a large number of kids go to the local state schools. Another percentage go to Marquette and another go to one of the schools that caters to more tradition minded Catholics, such as Thomas Aquinas College or Christendom. Notre Dame seems to be becoming more popular recently. My son would have gone to CUA had they offered him as much financial aid as ND.
Another anecdotal case study might be Tim Tebow, star quarterback for the University of Florida. Home-schooled all the way. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Tebow
How do you do the high-school science?
Cathleen:
Many public schools work with home-school co-ops, allowing students to use their facilities, join in their labs, play on their sports teams, and sing in their choirs. The parents still pay taxes, after all, so they should not be shut out.
I’m not too familiar with this trend as my kids are away-schooled, but a few friends have had good success in working with their local public schools this way.
Admittedly, the more the home-schooled kids avail themselves of away-school events and resources, the farther from true home-schooling you get. It all depends on what you’re looking for–or what you’re trying to avoid. I know of some groups of home-schooling families that act more like charter schools without a building. They pool their resources and hire teachers to give instruction for them, meeting at different parents’ homes for different subjects or on different days of the week.
There’s also Patrick Henry College, which was created especially to serve Christian home-schooled students. http://www.phc.edu/
Clicking around on their Web site gives a good snapshot of what must be one significant demographic of home-schooled kids and their families.
I wonder how different these kids are from the ones Fr. Komonchak and Jean have described–if they’re different at all, both in terms of outlook and academic ability. Anybody here have any insights?
Some years back, I was speaking with the academic dean of a small college that seemed to attract such students and their families. She reported that except for science and math they did fine academically, but that their social skills and ability to get along with others needed attention–at least at the college.
As other comments suggest, this is now a sufficiently large population that generalizations based on anecdotes are probably not very accurate.
Our one experience of home schooling was during the NYC teacher’s strike way back there. About ten families got together and pooled talent and resources and ran a younger and an older school for kids 5-9. It was fun but exhausting. No surprise, our little school closed when the public schools reopened.
Moving away from the anecdotal, here’s an exhaustive study with lots of historical background and statistics that appeared in Education, 2001.
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3673/is_200110/ai_n8989311/pg_1
I think Mark rasises an interesting point about what home-schooling actually is.
The religious home-schoolers here are Baptists and Amish. I’m pretty sure the Amish aren’t plugged into PHC, but the Baptists may be.
An acquaintance is a museum curator, and she occasionally deals with a pretty hotsy-totsy group of home schoolers who hired their own teacher and essentially started their own private school for gifted kids. They went to NYC to a MOMA exhibit for one field trip. Sadly, they’re not taking 54-year-old students …
There was also a story in our diocesan paper a few years ago about a Catholic lady in Ann Arbor expecting her 18th child who has single-handedly homeschooled all her kids. This almost sounded like a Ripley’s Believe It Or Not story, but there were pictures of her and the kids and everything. Talk about a story that gives you nightmares about your own unworthiness!
In an honors class in Theology for first term sophomores I have two students, a male and a female, who were home schooled. They both do well, are reasonably articulate, and better informed on general matters than a lot of the others. The one thing that takes a little getting used to is having their work assessed aginst others. Since all of these honors students were high achievers in high school the present task is to find out who are the real “A” students and who do “A-” work. I have had home schooled students many times before and welcome them for one of the reasons alleged above: they can work on their own. I have yet to find an academically deficient student among the ones I have taught.
I don’t think any Catholic homeschoolers would go on to attend Patrick Henry College as their required statement of faith includes references to sola fides and sola scriptura. The most popular colleges for Catholic homeschoolers I know are St. Thomas Aquinas in SoCal, University of Dallas in Texas, and Franciscan University Steubenville in Ohio.
As for high school science, most families I know have their children take those courses at the local community college.
Joe,
the question I have is are these graduates students married to each other? Or does each have a wife who stays home to home-school?
I wonder to what extent home-schooling is connected with a defined sense of gender roles, at least for married women with children?
It would be pretty hard to homeschool if you yourself were on tenure track, or a young lawyer.
Cathy
Cathleen asked: I wonder to what extent home-schooling is connected with a defined sense of gender roles, at least for married women with children?
Jean says: I’ve wondered that, too.
The article I cited above doesn’t say who actually does the home schooling, but I don’t know any working women who home-school, and I wonder how they’d find the time.
However, if you have a flexible work schedule, you can trade off with other mothers.
The Amish, who have a teacher, also do a fair amount of home training (canning, sewing, farming), and both parents take an active role in that.
Despite rigid gender roles, raising the kids is seen as an equally shared job, though, sadly, that is changing as farming and farm-based businesses are no longer able to support the large Amish families as they once were.
Finding the time is easy. It is on a clock. The question to ask is, “Where are your priorities?” Which matters more to you, your law career or tenure track or your children?
I think it’s a question of vocation. I believe some mothers have dual vocations–to be a wife and mother, and to be present somewhere else as well.
And that’s an interesting question. . .What do you do when worlds collide.
I have colleagues at Notre Dame who have been told by some conservative Catholic students that they ought not to be professors, because they were mothers, and ought to be at home with their kids.
I wonder if there are any married women with kids on the faculty at Steubenville or Thomas Aquinas..
Career vocations aside, there are any number of reasons women work and feel they don’t have time for home-schooling.
I worked part-tme when my kid develop health and learning disabilities so I could rid herd on the school, monitor his breathing and keep him out of the hospital. But work I did so I could plug into partially paid health benefits from my employer because my husband’s didn’t pay any.
I’ve also got a father-in-law with dementia, a mother with macular degeneration and a father with terminal emphysema.
I’m pretty darn exhausted by the end of my days, emotionally and physically (I’m 54, and had an unexpected pregnancy at 41).
But the answer was alll right there in front of me like Paul Richardson said! Quit whining and lookit the clock! There’s your time!
My gosh, no wonder men are running the Church! We women are just making mountains out of life’s little molehills, when they can be solved by these EZ, snappy answers!
Jean, I have no idea how you do all you do. You must be tired! You need more cucumber soup!
But I think the problem has to be addressed straight on. Do some women–because of their talents, temperament, etc. –have a vocation outside the family as well as to their families, in a way analogous although not identical to men? Not a selfish “career”, not an inability to handle their own kids, but a real call from God?
I think there are a wide range of vocations for women, including married women with kids.
I think Catholic homeschooler Danielle Bean is clearly living her vocation.
http://www.daniellebean.com/
But I think one of my friends at Notre Dame, a brilliant patristics scholar who raised five kids while doing scholarship and teaching, is also living hers.
And I think people whose lives look on the surface less remarkable than either of theirs do are also living their vocations.
It’s not a competition. It’s different gifts but the same spirit.
I know I’m chiming in with my .02 a little late in the thread, but…
There are many different types of homeschooling. Some apparent assumptions here so far: it is all “schooling at home”-type instruction, that it takes a lot of time, and that it is something only conservatives and mothers do.
(A good general intro for the curious might be _Teach Your Own_ by John Holt & Pat Farenga. Two excellent first-hand accounts by “unschooling” parents are _Homeschooling Our Children, Unschooling Ourselves_ by Alison McKee and _And The Skylark Sings With Me_ by David H. Albert.)
Craig, I think the notion that home schooling can cover a fair range of arrangements has been covered above.
While I know women whose kids are plugged into a kind of co-op, shared teaching arrangement, these things don’t run themselves; they still require a fair amount of time to administer and coordinate.
Thanks for the book leads, though. I do worry about life for my kid in the upper grades, where there is less socialization, teachers aren’t as on track with the kids, and peer pressure threatens values inculcated at home.
Though home-schooling, I think, would still be a pretty hard sell with my husband.
Cathleen, wasn’t trying to duck your question, merely point out that not all women really have the option of pursuing two vocations, or at least pursuing them equally.
I was accepted years ago into a prestigious paleography program as a Ph.D. candidate, but life’s exigencies intervened, and I feel that whatever sacrifices I made to my academic vocation have been the right thing to do.
That doesn’t mean I don’t get awfully low and sad at times (even with vast quantities of cold cucumber soup and perpetual novena to St. Martha, patron saint of worry warts). Or that comments like Father Richardson’s above don’t make me pretty tetchy.
Jean, you’re right.
I’ve really enjoyed this thread. I am a Catholic attorney-turned-stay-at-home mom, who homeschools two of our three young children. I was excited to see this topic come up at Commonweal, because it is such a great opportunity to point out that homeschooling is NOT the province of only religious conservatives or hippies. Recently, there have been profiles of homeschooled kids in Business Week (http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_08/b3972108.htm), the NYT (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/05/education/05homeschool.html )
and the LA Wave – where a single African-American mom in a low-income development decided to homeschool her daughter and a niece for summer school to great effect.
http://tinyurl.com/2mr8sv
We live in an excellent public school district (and both my husband and I attended public school), but we nevertheless choose to homeschool.
For us, although a real benefit of our choice to homeschool is the opportunity to practice our faith freely and include it in the course of our school day, we did not choose to homeschool primarily for religious reasons.
We enjoy the freedom that homeschooling affords our family – to travel in the off season, to allow our children the down time that is so lacking in the childhood of so many, to have the opportunity for siblings to learn the important lessons about how to get along with people of all ages, and not just 30 other people their own age.
We love that when our son (age 9) says, “Mom, I’d like to do another page of Greek – can I do more Greek today and do double math tomorrow?” that we can allow him the time to spend on the subjects in which he is especially interested right now. There is no rush to get through the 45 minute period – we can have a ‘math day” some other time.
We love that the formal schooling is accomplished efficiently and that we can mix materials so that in those subjects in which our child is “ahead” of his grade, we can move him ahead, and where he is “behind” he doesn’t feel any stigma about working below his “grade level.”
We love that by the end of the day when it is time to go to soccer practice, swimming at the Y, Boy Scouts, parish religious education or some other activity, our son has had time to do school, play outside with the public-schooled neighbor kids, rest, read books, and have free play and down time. He is energized and ready to go. We spend summers participating in various camps and activities for recreation and more peer-oriented social time.
Our nine-year-old just told me last week how much he enjoys “family time”.
His friends are of many different races and ethnicities, and all ages – including several his own age. We also have friends of different faiths and no faith. We find that there is no difficulty in ensuring that our sons have plenty of diversity in their lives.
Our families and friends have commented at how “normal” our children seem. (They’re shocked, shocked! ;)) They are not especially sheltered, though I do notice that they are somewhat less acquainted with sexual inuendo and bad language than their schooled mates – but the neighborhood kids bring them up to speed on that (I’m sometimes sorry to say.)
In making our decision to homeschool, we were most influenced by the writings of public school teachers who choose to homeschool their own children – my favorite is the book Family Matters: Why Homeschooling Makes Sense by David Guterson. I also love the article 10 Reasons to Homeschool by a homeschooling father and education scholar , Greg Sherman, Ph.D., (who took some heat from his education colleagues about his own decision) -
http://www.nhen.org/dads/default.asp?id=383.
Also, a great resource for the media about non-sectarian homeschooling is the National Home Education Network – http://www.nhen.org/.
Of course, for Catholic families, there is great justification for providing an authentically Catholic education at home. We find a lot of support from the Catholic home educator community as well – it’s just that there are lots of great reasons in addition to the Faith to choose homeschooling.
We do have a traditional division of labor in my family, but my husband takes on a much more equal share of the housework and child care after work hours than might be considered “traditional”, as Greg Popcak mentioned above. Also, he makes sure that I have time to be professionally engaged, if only on a volunteer basis to support and promote causes I care about. The balance is important – I couldn’t do it without a supportive equal partner.
I am interested by Cathleen Caveny’s comments above about the gender roles of homeschooling. As a homeschooler for almost a dozen years, I have occasionally witnessed what I would call unhealthy gender role modeing going on, where the wife is working like a dog and the hubby is largely absent or uninvolved. Understandably, the homeschooling community wants to be supportive, and thus there is a weird undercurrent of both lauding her sacrifices and bad-mouthing the husbands together.
As Greg Popcak wisely mentions above, there are some troubled families homeschooling for whom the sacrifices might be detrimental in some ways to their full freedom in Christ. However, I don’t see that this would be any different if the kids were in school. The parents would still be out of synch with the fullness of Love that God wants to give them, and thus troubled…
Sometimes, sacrifices are also painful suffering inflicted by others.
But this scenario is really not different than the working mother who is also sleeping about 4-5 hours a night so that she can keep all the balls in the air, and blaming her husband for not helping enough.
I want to believe there are more and more solid marriages out there now that embody the term, “Helpmates”. It’s my opinion that homeschooling provides added impetus to couples working together to make sure that the talents of both parents are being made manifest in the world. The kids are the glue and the center.
When my husband comes home, he jumps right in and helps, whatever is needed: teaching, housework, discipline, a hug for mom. He puts his family first – and his colleagues at work know it.
We don’t do high school at home, partly so I can keep a writing career on the side simmering while the kids are home, and partly because we have 8 kids and it was too overwhelming for me.
So, I think Cathleen has an important thing to say about gender roles, and I hope she might get to know more women in the homeschooling community, many of whom I have found to be deeply inspiring and intelligent.
By the way, thanks to the support of my helpmate, I have started a newsletter, Secretum Meum Mihi, that is exploring some of the very questions we are discussing here. What does it mean to place your talents on the altar, and see what God does with them? How can we better help women to do that creatively?
The current issue is accessible at http://www.MySecretisMine.com. The user name and passwords are Peter and Magdalen, to access the subscriber only portion of the site.
Dear PHP and Kristen,
Thanks for the thoughtful comments –and the link, Kristen. It sounds as if there are many more options–and much more plurality in the homeschooling community than I previously thought.
Best,
Cathleen